Interracial Dating 101: the Basics

Do black women consider all men as possible mates?

With regards dating and relationships most black women don’t start out favouring all men equally, as being possible partners. In other words, black women do not start from a point, ‘Any man will do be they black, white or other’, the average black woman ONLY sees black men as ‘the’ relationship option for black women.

How do black women then get into the idea of ‘other men’?

Black women see black men as the only option till such a point as they experience an ‘awakening’ to the idea that other men and white men in particular can serve.

So why are black women so strongly bound to this idea that it has to be a black man?

This is a very complex and layered situation which I will try to simplify as much as possible. The first layer is the normalcy of dating black; black women date black men, that’s what they do, this is seen as standard and logical. Upon this layer of normalcy is deliberately built a political one.

It is important to realise that the historical and present reality of being black in this society has given rise to a strong and widely held doctrine of black resistance with resulting rules for black preservation and upliftment. The black resistance doctrine is unwritten and complex, it has behaviour codes particularly for those areas seen as key to black continuity (read more about this doctrine in the IR Dating E-Book).

How does it discourage interracial dating?

One of the core elements of the doctrine of resistance is its anti-interracial relationships stance and to sustain this idea, there is a reversal on white superiority, thus black men are built up while white men are diminished and made unappealing. This is a very key point.

Discouragement also comes from the fact that black woman who marry white are targeted for denouncement within this doctrine, and some very distasteful and a serious accusation are levelled against her including the fact that she hates her blackness, is a mercenary etc.

Scare tactics do indeed form part of the ways of 'corralling' black women. Because the preservation of blackness (and at all costs), is central to the ‘resistance doctrine', it is ok to play on black women’s fears and insecurities for instance those about their wider feminine appeal, to ensure that white men continue to ‘not’ be an option.

And how do black women respond to this ‘resistance’ doctrine?
Well black women are actually reared to take it to heart, to take hold of the rules and feel it is their moral duty to abide by them and thus prove their devotion and love for their community. They become strongly emotionally bound to this philosophy and feel compelled to be ‘good soldiers’ of their race particularly in the face of a black male slack or lack of commitment to these same goals. Some black women say to themselves, “If I just keep faith and keep believing, it will happen.” It gets to a point where they do not see an equal participation of black men as critical to the realisation of black goals as spelt out by the resistance doctrine.

The power of the community doctrine over an individual has a lot to do with ones upbringing. If you were raised in the tenets of ‘black Resistance’ or have come to cleave to it as a sacred article of the black group, it is very likely that the right strings can be pulled to get you reacting as you are meant to.

African women are less likely to cleave to and believe in the segregation aspects of the resistance doctrines in fact the doctrine in total.

What else puts a barrier up to interracial dating?

We have the hostility coming the other way that is from the the wider community. Black women believe they are not accepted and will be treated negatively by whites and white men. They have real fears and doubts which are reinforced by their experiences with white people, and with all these negative messages about black females beauty and femininity floating around.

However even if there were no doctrines to influence black women’s decisions, we still have segregation (and the resulting unfamiliarity with white men), as a structural block to interracial awakening.


Why are black women dependent on their community so?

In a world that is hostile to black people, they turn to their community for succour, acceptance and understanding. It can be very scary thought that you might loose all of this backup, because of your choices and have where else to turn to.

In recent years black women are waking up to the fact that their communities have turned out to be rather dangerous for them as black women and they work and toil for a community with deep rooted sexism and for little or no rewards. Thus some black women believe the black community is a myth.

I will pick up and expand on an aspect of the 'resistance' doctrine because it is important to really breakdown what really secures black women 'away' from interracial dating and thus the nature of the solution.

Interracial Marriage:Fight Racism With Love

My take is that interracial marriage is a good indicator of integration and social distance. Baring strong religious objections people do intermarry when living in close proximity, history shows this.

According to USA Today, in America 6% of marriages are interracial; in 1970, it was less than 1%. A Gallup Poll on interracial dating in June 2005 reported that 95% of 18- to 29-year-olds approve of blacks and whites dating. About 60% of that age group said they have dated someone of a different race.

22 percent of Asian-American women have a non-Asian husband. A mere nine percent of Asian husbands have non-Asian wives
snip

Currently, six percent of black husbands are in an interracial marriage, compared to only two percent of black wives. Fourteen percent of black men who are cohabiting without marriage have a white woman living with them,


Slightly less than 18 percent of Hispanic wives are wed to non-Hispanics husbands, and a little over 15 percent of Hispanic husbands have non-Hispanic wives.


This gender discrepancy has grown larger over time; in 1960, white husbands were found in 50% of black/white marriages, and in 62% of Asian/white marriages. The social result of this imbalance is a lack of marital opportunities for black women and Asian men.
I can get stats if you want from the census but about 1/3 of Hispanics marry out (primarily with whites) and about 40-50% of Asians (that stats above only include “American” Asians but almost half of Asians are foreign born and may not be citizens so the stats vary quite a bit.

Black-asian marriages, such as the one that produced golf legend Tiger Woods, are still rare, but here the gender imbalance is even more pronounced than interracial pairings involving whites. 86 percent of black-asian couples consisted of a black husband and an Asian wife. This means that there were 6.15 times more couples where the husband was black and the wife was asian than where the husband was asian and the wife black.

According to this black-white interracial marriages increase with income…which will be no surprise to black women I’m sure:

This all makes sense because, in this society the more money you have the more white people you will come into contact with on a daily basis.

My point is to make clear the people who are most isolated in America from the rest of America are black and it is primarily an issue of income/education (class) still.

As far as black women the reality (as painful as it is) is black women are upset by the greater interracial marriage of black men because black women are the least desirable (based on stats) to marry for other races of men for various reasons. The higher the social status of the black woman the less likely she is to every marry. This is because most women (black or otherwise) will marry at the same social level or up, but not down. Men usually marry the same or down. Therefore the most disadvantaged black woman is one with very high social status because there are not many black men at their level and the one’s who are, a high percentage are marrying/dating out.

My answer is black women deserve to be happy to and need to drop their racialism and take men of other races seriously, because God did not guarantee them a black man, sorry to say. Get in where you fit in. Dating is a market of sorts and they need to be more competitive. Most of the really attractive black women I know have men and I have a good friend who dates out, she got over the “lack of black man” thing years ago. She knows in her social circle there just aren’t many and being lonely sucks. I say more power to her.

To conclude: How far have we come? Well if interracial dating/marriage is a metric to judge black integration into mainstream society we have come quite far, but still are the “bottom” in regard to the integration of Asians and Hispanics into the mainstream.

Well the black out marriage rate there is far higher than here.

www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=1090

Black Caribbean
male - 29%
female - 20%

Black African
male - 18%
female - 15%

Other Black
male - 48%
female - 34%

That is amazingly high by American standards, more similar (or higher) than Asians/White marriages in America.
It might be useful to make a post about how the one-drop rule and its recent decline (since the 1990’s) has effected whites wanting to marry blacks. I find that a lot of people supporting the multiracial/biracial movement (besides the children of these marriages) are white spouses who do not want their kids stigmatized with “blackness” or considered “just black” I can imagine (as whites are not stupid about racism in this country) that this would be a turn off.

From NY Times

“The researchers found that most women speed daters said yes (meaning they’d like to see a man again after the four-minute speed date) less often to men of another race than they did to men of their own race. Here’s how much less interested they were in the other races, as compared with their enthusiasm for men of their own race:

African-American women said yes about 30 percent less often to Hispanic men; about 45 percent less often to white men; about 65 percent less often to Asian men.

White women said yes about 30 percent less often to black or Hispanic men, and about 65 percent less often to Asian men.

Hispanic women said yes about 20 percent less often to black or white men, and 50 percent less often to Asian men.

Asian women didn’t discriminate much by race (except for showing a very slight preference

SNIP

For equal success with an African-American woman, a Hispanic man needs to earn an extra $184,000; a white man needs to earn an additional $220,000.
For equal success with a white woman, an African-American needs to earn an additional $154,000; a Hispanic man needs $77,000; an Asian needs $247,000.
For equal success with a Hispanic woman, an African-American man needs to earn an additional $30,000; a white man needs to earn an additional $59,000.
For equal success with an Asian woman, an African-American needs no additional income; a white man needs $24,000 less than average; a Hispanic man needs $28,000 more than average.”

http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/04/13/single-female-seeking-same-race-male/

Black women are the most prejudice women when it comes to dating out. I find that amazing. Asians women the least prejudice. Asian men the least likely to get a date. White men the most likely. This clearly parallels the interracial marriage stats above.

The only issue I have with the article is “what type of Asians and Hispanics”

I bet this was in NY or the NE and most of the Asians were Chinese and the Hispanics were Carribean.

The reason I say that is because in my experience Chinese people and Filipinos will marry out faster than Koreans for example.

Caribbean Hispanics will not marry whites as quickly as Mexicans or other continental Hispanics.

I saw very little out-marriage between blacks and Mexicans in Texas, but a lot with whites and Mexicans, this is opposite what I have seen with Caribbean Hispanics in the Northeast.

From what I have read…the Asians that marry out the most are Filipinos, followed by Chinese, then Japanese (which there are few of). Koreans and Vietnamese marry out the least (but in absolute numbers are the minority of Asians in this country). My own personal experience with Asians in America seems to confirm this.