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: 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. 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.