Acting White: Black Women Series, Introduction – The Mating Plight

Black women have a hard way to go – no rocket science here. This is especially true in the mating, beauty, and romance arena. As a demographic, they are least likely to marry, and most likely to bear children, minus a committed male partner and supporter. The negative implications of this are obvious and significant. Black women also present a tough exterior, physically and emotionally, perhaps as a result of their difficult circumstances. But what could be driving this disparity between male attraction to black women vs. women in general? Is it biological? Is it social?

I will begin this blog-series with a personal note that my mother, sister, and former spouse of twenty years are all black. I have always found black women attractive from my earliest remembrance, but also see beauty in all ethnicities. Of overarching note, black women suffer attractiveness to all men, but most specifically to black men, who should otherwise be pre-disposed by ethnicity to lead the demand for them. The attention black men give black women can be summed up as predictably voluminous, but superficial and fleeting. At the end of the day, black men are not there for black women.

Along with greater mating disenfranchisement for black women as individuals, blacks as a group suffer this fleeting and lower male attraction, and the resulting social and economic disintegration. The loss to blacks, and society as a whole, via the failure-to-launch of the black nuclear family, is undeniable. School performance is off, unemployment soars, and crime and prison populations flourish.

As part of the series, over the coming weeks I will consider factors of attractiveness that include hair length, hair color, hip-to-waist ratio (width), body fat percentage, and education/professional attainment, as key drivers to the behavior of men, especially black men, toward black women. The goal is to close a little bit of the gap in our understanding of why black women take it on the chin, when it comes to partnering, both intra and inter-racial, and what might need to happen for a shift of results in the other direction.

I am open to initial thoughts on the topic.

James C. Collier

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