This Sunday’s Outlook section of the WPost carried a commentary by black female attorney Sophia A. Nelson, pictured here, who also heads an organization for African American professional women. Pointing to recent travails undergone by Michelle Obama, Nelson writes:

Welcome to our world.

We’ve watched with a mixture of pride and trepidation as the wife of the first serious African American presidential contender has weathered recent campaign travails — being called unpatriotic for a single offhand remark, dubbed a black radical because of something she wrote more than 20 years ago and plastered with the crowning stereotype: “angry black woman.” And then being forced to undergo a politically mandated “makeover” to soften her image and make her more palatable to mainstream America.

In some ways, writes Nelson, black professional women have it rougher than the men:

A 2007 American Bar Association report titled “Visible Invisibility” describes how black women in the legal profession face the “double burden” of being both black and female, meaning that they enjoy none of the advantages that black men gain from being male, or that white women gain from being white.

Interesting argument. But near the end of the piece, Nelson trips over her own logic:

For all our success in the professional world, we have paid a significant price in our private and emotional lives. A life of preordained singleness (by chance, not by choice) is fast becoming the plight of alarming numbers of professional black women in America. The fact is that the more money and education a black woman has, the less likely she is to marry and have a family.

Consider these stunning statistics: As of 2007, according to the New York Times, 70 percent of professional black women were unmarried. Black women are five times more likely than white women to be single at age 40. In 2003, Newsweek reported that there are more black women than black men (24 percent to 17 percent) in the professional-managerial class. According to Department of Education statistics cited by the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, black women earn 67 percent of all bachelor’s degrees awarded to blacks, as well as 71 percent of all master’s degrees and 65 percent of all doctoral degrees.

 Please do consider those stunning statistics. What those numbers reveal is that when compared to black men, black women are hugely successful, which is why so many find themselves single — they have no “marriageable mate,” someone of comparable education and career attainment to marry.

In my previous post, I wrote about the sometimes-twisted social relationships at a (mostly white) university where the gender imbalances had pushed past 60% female. To date, the evidence of a marriageable mate issue among white women is anecdotal, but given the rising gender imbalances in college there’s every reason to assume that at some point the marriageable mate dilemma — exactly what Nelson and other black professional women know all too well – will reach measurable levels among whites.

For more on this issue, visit the “social consequences” category in the library on the right column.

 

Tags: marriageable mate

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