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: 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. White men are the most sought after dates by women of all groups (except for African American women, who, researchers speculate, may rule out white men due to the fear of being stereotyped). White men can therefore afford to be the pickiest group in the online dating market; they respond to fewer overtures than other men on dating websites, and they have a strong preference for white women. White women are less willing than white men to date outside of their racial group, but heavier-set white women are more willing to date black men, because, researchers Cynthia Feliciano, Belinda Robnett, and Golnaz Komaie of UC Irvine posit, of “racial-beauty exchange theory” — the notion that a white woman who is less attractive by the measure of dominant Euro-American beauty standards is willing to “trade down” on the racial hierarchy by dating a black man. By the same token, black men who date white women are “trading up” on the American racial hierarchy.