HomeOld_PostsInter-racial dating and marriages....solution or problem?

Inter-racial dating and marriages….solution or problem?

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ABOUT a month ago, tennis superstar Serena Williams announced that she and her fiancé, Alexis Ohanian, a businessman and the co-founder of Reddit, were expecting their first born child.
This was just a few months after their December 2016 engagement announcement.
The news of these two developments in Serena’s life has not been met with joy and congratulations in some quarters of the black community.
Serena, as I wrote a while back, has had to endure humiliation both on and off the court from critics whose harsh bigoted language is sprinkled with undertones that have been intended to demean her accomplishments.
Here is a black, independent and successful woman in the US, who has excelled more than her female counterparts and this leaves a sour taste in the mouths of prejudiced people.
The more common term is ‘haters’.
Reactions to the news that Serena is not only engaged to a whiteman, but is expecting his child has again stirred debate among African-Americans on interracial relationships and their effects on our community.
Some applauded Serena for venturing outside her race, because to them, ‘blackmen’ do not cut the grade.
Some attacked Serena, claiming she had betrayed the African-American community by supping with a ‘white devil’.
Others claimed Serena could not ‘keep’ a blackman and had to make do with a whiteman.
This debate then degenerated to blackmen vs black women when it comes to dating, as some pointed out that for so long, male black athletes have been dating and marrying outside their race and as such the brothers should not cry foul when the sisters follow suit.
Relationships between blacks and whites in the US actually go back to the history of slavery in the country when white landowners and masters would take black slave women for their sexual partners or mistresses.
In recent times this type of inter-racial relationship has been traced to the feeling among single black women that there are fewer dating options from their black community.
Among the conventional reasons put forward are that a large percentage of adult black male population is in prisons, as well as lower educational and professional qualifications of black men as compared to white or Asian men.
A news report in the New York Times titled, ‘Black women see fewer black men at the altar’ traces the limited availability of single and eligible black men to an increasing number of them marrying women of other races.
The report mentions the results of a study according to which around 22 percent of black male singles — that is at least one in five – who married in 2008, chose female partners from among whites, Asians or Hispanics.
This represents a significant increase from previous rates like 15,7 percent in 2000 and 7,9 percent in 1980.
Not only that, the rate of black men marrying outside their race is also higher than the nine percent rate of Afro-American women who were marrying non-black men.
Sociologists believe that the trend of black men marrying from outside their race further shrinks an already limited pool of potential partners for single black women seeking marriage within their own race.
June 12 2017 marks the 50th anniversary of the 1967 US Supreme Court decision, Loving vs Virginia, which struck down all anti-miscegenation laws remaining in 16 states.
Inter-racial marriages have increased steadily since then.
In 2013, a record-high 12 percent of newlyweds married someone of a different race, according to a Pew Research Centre analysis of census data.
Among blacks, men are much more likely than women to marry someone of a different race.
Fully, a quarter of black men who got married in 2013 married someone who was not black.
Only 12 percent of black women married outside of their race.
In all of this, the greatest loser is the African-American community. However, this loathing of self is not limited to black vs white, but even among the black community we are prejudiced against some of our own.
This past week, I spoke to a Nigerian man who sorrowfully recounted how his father threatened to disown him because he wanted to marry a woman from a different tribe.
This prejudice and hate goes even further, among some African immigrants living in the US, marrying an African from certain countries leads to you being excommunicated from your home country’s social group.
Again the biggest loser in all of this is the African community. Interestingly, I have noticed that among the younger generation, the saying: ‘Family is not about blood, but about who is there when you need them’, has taken root.
One wonders if this is not a result of our youngsters’ revulsion to the prejudice, hate and intolerance that we as adults are displaying.
In the end, instead of building our communities, we are teaching our children that the only way to get out of this cycle of intolerance is to create new families that eventually forgo our values, beliefs and norms.

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