90% of Married bm marry bw YET only 30% of us are Married! Who’s fooling who here?

Only about 30 percent of black women are living with a spouse, according to the Census Bureau, compared with about 49 percent of Hispanic women, 55 percent of non-Hispanic white women and more than 60 percent of Asian women."

I think I need to do some work clarifying all the stats that have been flying around lately. BW we cannot afford to be put back to sleep over the idea of opening up to a diversity of men and not packing our eggs in one basket! Those who want to derail us or get us to suspend action are now using a variety of tricks to either get us into believing that things are not as dire around the marriage situation in the black community, or get us to feeling we have been running with the wrong picture.

First of all they deny the authenticity of the statistics compiled around marriage and relationships in our community. They question the method of its collection, they point out this and that issue as meaning the stats are unreliable. But you must keep in mind that the same conditions and standards used to arrive at the picture for us bw, was used across all races of women. Just recently someone in a bid to discredit the stats of 70% singleness among black women, argued that it was ridiculous to include 16 year olds as ‘of marriageable age’ and so this makes the conclusions questionable.

On the face of it, it might seem like they have a point, and it is ridiculous for those doing the study to include a group of women as young as 16 years, because who wants to marry at 16 right? But the truth is that the statisticians did not single out black women. They applied 16 as marriageable age to every race; to Asian, white and Latina. Note that if bw had had a slow uptake and decided that 29 was a better age for marriage, this would still reflect in the study and the surge at any particular age would bump up the overall numbers for bw, but there is no such surge. Bw’s rate of marriage doesn’t suddenly jump to an all time high at some specific age, their marriage rates continue to be the lowest across all ages. So the point is moot.

Another trick the ‘high rate of black female singleness-apologists’ come up with is saying 90% of bm marry bw. Wow wee! Wonderful! And that gives us what, 90% of bw married right? Wrong!

Don’t be fooled, 90% might seem like a promising large number, but when you look at the reality of the 90%, they are just saying 90% of the few black men who think marriage is important. Say a million bm decide that marriage is for them, then that means 900,000 of them are married to bw, but that doesn’t in anyway make bw situation any better, particularly if 4 million bw are desiring to get married!

If I tell you that I give 90% of my spare time to charity, you would say, “That’s wonderful”. But if I qualify that ‘spare time’ by saying that it is actually only 1 hour on Monday mornings, you will realise that I don’t necessarily give that much time to charity after all. This same principle applies with the 90% of bm marry bw they keep quoting. Don’t take your eyes off the bottom line here, and that is that less than 30% of bw end up married as a result of this 90% of bm. Yep I said less than 30 (it keeps dropping doesn’t it?), because as Evia rightly pointed out, we have to account for the fact that in that 30% of married bw, some are married to white men and latinos etc!

As my maths teacher would say, “Always define your boundaries”. Don’t let anyone play on your intelligence and distort your growing understanding of the situation as it stands. It is not a pretty sight in the black community and it is not set to get any better because we have allowed the problem to reach unprecedented levels. At this point all bw can do is save themselves individually by grabbing hold of their wider dating options with two hands! Any in-house salvation (if this will ever be possible) will come long after most of you in child bearing age would have passed it, so do yourself a big favour and seriously prospect your out-of-race options!

Indeed what does this 90% of married bm marry bw statistic suggest to us, is it that bw are no longer interested in marriage, they are too independent maybe? I am unconvinced that bw do not want commitment from men and even those who are put off by disappointing behaviour in men would have a rethink if they found men who didn’t disappoint. The statistics suggests a number of key things. An abysmal number of bm are at present interested in getting married. Marriage-resistant bm are at an all time high in the black community leaving a significant section of bw no choice but to look outwards. Anti-marriage attitudes are also very self-sustaining in the community particularly towards bw due to racio-misogynic reinforcement. The situation is further complicated by the surplus of bw available to bm. Bw cannot hope to change such unfavourable in-house odds facing us as a whole (even a million women's march wouldnt begin to redress the problem) which would require a culture shift and a few generations to begin to change.

In conclussion, it is fascinating to note that white men could potentially marry more bw than bm seem willing to take to the altar!