Title: Black Women, Interracial Dating, and Marriage: What's Love Got to Do With It? | HuffPost
Headings: Black Women, Interracial Dating, and Marriage: What’s Love Got to Do With It?
Black Women, Interracial Dating, and Marriage: What’s Love Got to Do With It?
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Content: I recognize that many people form loving relationships across the black-white color line. Some of the people I admire and respect most in my professional life are black men married to white women and white women married to black men. These relationships are caring and genuine, and surely bring happiness to the individuals involved in them. I have even dated outside of my racial group, and I married someone who isn’t black — a Native American man (with, I must add, distant French and African ancestry). But this collection of happily ever after stories does not mean that love is blind. Romantic attraction is subject to the larger social forces of racial prestige and stigma that swirl all around us, and in this environment, black women are losing out. Despite the steamy scenes on ABC’s hit show, Scandal (and yes, I am a fan), most single black women are not dating white men (and certainly not hunky white men who hold high government offices and are willing to risk all they have achieved for illicit love). Many single black women are instead finding themselves ignored in today’s dating scene. While interracial marriage rates in this country have grown remarkably to 8.4 percent in 2010, Americans still marry within their own racial group the majority of the time. And when people do venture across the color line to date, they do so in ways that continue to affirm a social hierarchy based on race in which whiteness is prized.