Blog Assignment #4

In the article What’s Love Got to Do with It?, Paul Offner discusses the current financial and educational gap between black men and women that has grown over the past decade. He offers explanations such as black women greater pursuing careers to avoid having to take on all of the domestic responsibilities in the household, the “demonization” of young black males and strict policies due to their antisocial behavior. Other reasons include employers hiring black women instead of men because they are less threatening, and black mother’s receiving welfare to go to college while men do not. I believe that these are all valid and plausible explanations for the large discrepancies between men and women, but I believe that it has also become somewhat of a cultural norm for black men to not pursue education. It seems that there is less of an expectation for black males to go to college because the rates are so low, and if people don’t expect them to pursue successful careers then that is what they may be internalizing and come to expect from themselves. 

In the editorial “Successful women who are childless” twenty-nine percent of African American women between 28-55 years old and earning over $55,000 a year are married. According to Cornel West, in 1970 the black female/male ratio was close to even and today the ratio is 9-1 female. In the article "African American Families," John Hope Franklin informs us that up until the 1960s 75% of black families included the the husband and wife, but due to rapid urbanization and ghettoization, black males have had an increasingly difficult time finding work and government policies have negatively effected family strength. 

Over the past two decades the plight has deepened for black men due to decreases in employment, an increase in incarceration rates, and a lack of black males finishing high school. Holzer and colleagues believe that the two factors that have kept black employment rates down are the high rate of incarceration and attendant flood of former offenders into neighborhoods, and the stricter enforcement of child support. 

According to Gwendolyn Goldsby Grant, "Annihilation through integration" means a weakening of the culture and economic resources of the black community, which can be caused if black men and women marry people outside of their race or don't get married at all. This relates to the marriageability index today because as less and less black people are getting married, and there is is an increase in black men marrying outside of their race the marriageability index will continue to be low or even decrease. In the McLarin and Evans articles they discuss the ways in which positive media and politics could influence and increase the marriageability index among African Americans because currently African American men and women do not see the opposite sex as high on the marriageability index. 

After reading the required articles and reflecting on the current state of African American marriages, I believe that in order to increase marriages African Americans will be required to fully acknowledge the problem at hand and take action to address it. Due to the multiple factors that play into the low marriage rates it will not be an easy issue to address, but I believe that it will improve even if that means it gets worse before it gets better.