Author Dianne M. Stewart, along with podcasters/activists Jill Cox-Cordova and Tony Cordova, provide their profound insight about instersectionality and Black love
By: Aaleah Naomi McConnell
The 2014 OKCupid study was infamous in a few ways. Not only was this one of the first comprehensive studies showing the trends of online dating, but it also brought to the public discourse a notion that many Black women have always felt but have not always been able to contend with prior to the study.
Eight years later, the issue of Black women and dating is a constant topic of discourse within the Black community. However, this news is not particularly “new.”
Marriage in the Black community has seen a decline since the mid-20th century. The 2010 Census showed that 71% of Black women across all age groups were unmarried, and Black women did not fare any better in the 2020 Census.
Many reports point to the issue of mass incarceration of Black men as a leading cause for fewer potential male partners; the notion that Black women are the least desirable in terms of dating; or the image of the strong Black women deteriorates their need for romantic companionship.
Despite the hyper-attention that is placed on middle and upper-class Black women in studies addressing marriage disparity, Black women across every social class are affected by these disparate numbers.
And chances of settling down significantly diminish once Black women reach their 30s and 40s. This delay in marriage plays into other existing social inequities for Black women, such as low quality of health care.
A number of studies report that Black women face higher risk of maternal death and infant mortality rates in America, but delaying child-birth increases these risks more.
Though marriage may not hold the same idealistic veneer as it once did, especially for millennial women, but none the less it is important to those Black women who wish to be married or partnered and are finding it increasingly hard to do so. Emory University Professor and author of Black Women, Black Love: The War on African American Marriage, Dianne M. Stewart, argues that marriage is a civil right and explains how we got here.
The underpinnings of marriage disparities for Black women
Like many issues facing the Black community, the marriage gap engulfing the attention of Black women across the diaspora can be traced back to slavery.
Stewart coined the phrase forbidden Black love to explain the complex socioeconomical and emotional symptoms, caused by American chattel slavery, plaguing Black marriages today.
“Forbidden black Love is a phenomenon that black women, black people, have been contending with since the slave trade all the way to the era of social media,” Stewart says.
In Black Women, Black Love, Stewart dissects this phenomenon into four pillars:
Pillar 1: Separation of families
Pillar 2: Racist-sexist policymaking
Pillar 3: Sexual violence of Black bodies
Pillar 4: Phenotypic stratification
In her book, Stewart is careful to not create the sense that these factors draw a linear causal relationship from slavery to where we are now. She instead emphasizes the repetition of these patterns intergenerationally.
“There might be different contributing factors, how they appear in each period, depending on socio economic conditions, or historical conditions. My point is that they keep appearing and keep breaking the heart of black America,” Stewart says.
Once slavery was abolished, government-sanctioned marriage became a way for white supremacists to regulate Black people’s sexuality. Specifically, to alleviate the fear of the defiling of white women by Black men.
The compulsory effort to push Western Christian ideals of monogamous, heterosexual unions on formerly enslaved populations further strained the validity of Black families from 1865 to 1965. Stewart refers to this historical period as the reign of terror. Coming out of slavery, many Blacks had more than one spouse. Since Black people married during enslavement, spouses were sold and the one left behind would remarry Stewart says.
For spouses returning post-enslavement, hoping to resume their relationships, they ran the risk of facing state persecution for engaging in polygamous familial arrangements.
This is one of many precursors to many Black couple’s inability to sustain healthy and long-lasting marriages that persists today. A more salient disadvantage toward the sustainability of Black love is the lack of generational wealth.
“We cannot overestimate the importance of not just having a decent salary, but not having wealth, resources to fall back on for emergencies, for crises … to cushion us from the blows of the rising cost of everything out there,” Stewart says “We need wealth resources. And those have been stolen from black people.”
Many Black women, who invested in the creation of these wealth sources by investing in their educations and careers, rarely reap the benefits of marrying a Black male partner of the same class.
A 1990 survey reported that 21.57% of black women with college degrees, 20.94% of black women with some college, 21.59% of black women with a high school or General Equivalency Diploma and black women with less than a high school diploma, only 15.29% … were married at the time of survey.
Comparatively, for those who were never married, black women with college degrees account for 66.17%, those with some college ranked at 66.36%, 64.57% for those with a high school or GED degree and 73.7% for those with less than a high school diploma.
Are Black women the problem?
Controlled images, a term coined by Patricia Hill Collins, describes the pervasive stereotypical images attributed to Black women such as the mammy and jezebel. These harmful ideas of Black women do well in dehumanizing an entire population of people on a macro scale.
Aside from the degradation of Black women and Black people, these images were created by the white patriarchy to reinforce white womanhood and purity.
These images are so engrained in American society that they are perpetuated within the community they aimed to belittle.
Host of the podcast, or “vodcast” I’m Right. I’m Right! Jill Cox-Cordova and Anthony Cordova weigh in on the topic of dating while Black and female.
Many Black men, in particular, refer to these stereotypes to harp on Black women’s lack of martial status; and to point to Black women’s inability to perform femininity, respectability and accountability as the reason for them remaining single.
That is not to disregard many Black men who think highly of Black women – men like Tony Cordova, who appreciates the intellect of all people, and intentionally respects that of Black women.
Yet misogynoir is a constant purveyor in the mass devaluation of Black women, and it presents itself in the form of colorism and phenotypical stratification.
To recall, these terms were mentioned as one of the four pillars of forbidden Black love. Wherein Stewart defined colorism. The accompanying term phenotypical stratification identifies the subsets of colorism.
Statistics show that marriage rates favor Black women with fair skin over those with darker complexions.
Additionally, Black men are twice as likely to be in interracial marriages as Black women. Within this group, upper- and middle-class Black men are three times more likely to marry outside their race, Stewart says.
The advancment of technology has changed and benfited the lives of nearly everyone, yet the benefits of technology are hardly seen in the online dating lives of Black women.
Despite the icky feeling that online dating conjures up, Stewart advocates for the use of dating apps for Black women, and suggest investing in a matchmaker service such as Dottie.com.
“I think we need to be exploring them extensively. extensively. I mean, I think we need to pour resources into them. And I mean, do it safely. Do it carefully. And if we can afford it, do it exclusively,” says Stewart.
Dating services, like Dottie, that put inclusivity at the forefront of finding love are much needed.
“They are trying to create networks and relationships among 20 Somethings and 30 Somethings,” Stewart says, “so we can forge deep, profound connections. That could be also romantic connections.”
The infamous OkCupid scores published in 2014, observed dating patterns based on race and gender from 2009 and 2014, which isolated the racist undertones that sully the dating experience for many Black women.
Though the data may be helpful to the extent of knowing who is interested in dating who, this was the double-edged sword for those who were significantly discounted.
It is also worth mentioning that proximity to European beauty standards profoundly determines how dark skinned women are viewed as attractive, especially in the media. “… the point of differentiation of delusion, the point of the negative value for whiteness has been the dark skinned black woman with her natural hair,” Stewart says, “And until that woman is part of the group of black women that are equally being established, … I’m not convinced that we’ve moved the needle.”
Black men vs. the patriarchy
The placement into the white patriarchal structure as the head of household, in Black communities post-slavery, poses an emotional burden on Black men.
Many Black men bybass the discussion of the mental-emotional affects of these systemic pressure – which often times manifests in their romantic relationships.
They don’t want to be with us. So I’m not gonna sit around waiting for them
Many debates sparked online on this tug-of-war between Black women’s preference to marry someone who looks like them and some Black men’s exploitation of that fact.
Situationship, after situationship, creates the sense for many Black women that they are settling for noncommittal partnerships. But many are divesting from the idea being with a Black partner, or being married at all.
“I’ve heard many black women talk about the fact that they don’t value us, they don’t think we’re beautiful. They don’t want to be with us. So I’m not gonna sit around waiting for them …” Stewart says, “There is a lot of concern and dismay among black women as a result of that, and rightly so.”
However, Stewart acknowledges fault in this logic if sustained long-term.
In fact, Stewart says that coming to common ground about the effects of the patriarchy on the Black community, and “owning the conversation of patriarchy together” is one solution for healing generational trauma, and potentially the marriage gap.
Jill and Tony Cordova say that this form of empathetic communication has helped them greatly in their marriage, and they stress that communication is the key.
Dr. Stewart and the Cordova’s idea about the foundation of Black love fall somewhere in the middle – that it is that Black love is simply love, and it starts from within.