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: Most striking to me in recent sociological studies about interracial dating and marriage, is that on every measure, African American women seem to come out at the bottom of the pile. Black people as a whole intermarry with whites less frequently than other people of color do; and black women intermarry far less than black men. This is due in part to the unsettling evidence that many groups of men do not prefer black women. According to data released by the online dating site OkCupid, black women (perhaps due to politeness; perhaps due to the recognition of their less desirable status) respond to more initial overtures than other groups; at the same time, black women’s initial contacts are ignored most often. In today’s dating market black women are less preferred — and here is the kicker — sometimes even by black men. Social science researchers posit that black men’s attraction to white women as evidenced by dating behavior and growing intermarriage rates is in part historically rooted. Because white women were taboo for black men for centuries in this country to the extent that black men could be lynched for the appearance of involvement with white women, access to white women may be more alluring for black men now.