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: Sociologists also find that because white Americans as a whole are still the most powerful racial group in this country (politically, economically, and socially), non-whites seek to marry into that group in order to increase their own social status. As UC Berkeley sociologist Gerald Mendelsohn put it in an interview: “ One theory is that blacks are acting like other minority populations in the history of this country . . . They are interested in moving up in the power structure, and one way you do that is through intermarriage with the dominant group.” These racial and gender preferences and the reasons behind them may not be conscious to people in the dating world, who, by and large, would probably decry bias against black women. Nevertheless, these preferences have real effects. While more black men date and marry white women than ever before, more black women cannot even get a first “chat” on Internet dating sites. African American women are plagued by persistent, age-old stereotypes that represent them as too strong, argumentative and unfeminine. And as wonderful as they are, African American women can never measure up to the narrowly defined beauty ideals based on Euro-American aesthetics that are so firmly entrenched in this culture. Even after the Black is Beautiful seventies, it is still the case that when African American women are upheld as beautiful in popular media, they usually have lighter skin, longer hair, and thinner body types that adhere more closely to those dominant standards.