考研阅读精选：未婚黑人女性：下嫁还是外嫁？
『很多未婚黑人女性宁愿下嫁本族男，也不愿外嫁其他种族的男性。』Unmarried black women：Down or out
未婚黑人女性：下嫁还是外嫁？
Oct 15, 2011 | From The Economist
AT SOME events on his book tour, black men have accused Ralph RichardBanks of advocating genocide. In fact, the Stanford professor of familylaw has merely written a book called “Is Marriage for White People? Howthe African-American Marriage Decline Affects Everyone”. But abuse iswhat you get for suggesting, as Mr Banks does, that black women—not onlythe “most unmarried” group in American society but also the one thatleast intermarries with other races—should look to white, Latino orAsian men as potential mates. After all, the alternative is often nomarriage or relationship at all.
The collapse of marriageamong blacks is well documented, but not the sexual, psychological,emotional and social toll this has taken on black women. Seven out often are single. Of the others, many are forced into “man-sharing”.
This crisis in the black “relationship market”, as Mr Banks calls it,starts with a “man shortage”. About one in ten black men in their earlythirties are in prison. As a group, black men have also fallen behind ineducation and income, just as black women have surged ahead. Two blackwomen graduate from college for every black man. As these women riseinto the middle class, the men stay in the lower class, becoming lesscompatible.
Many black women respond by “marrying down, butnot out,” as Mr Banks puts it. But that makes bad marriages. Two out ofevery three black marriages fail, about twice the rate of whitemarriages.
The real problem is the behaviour of those fewblack men who are considered good catches. They often stay unmarried forthe opposite reason: they have too many options. As one man told MrBanks: “If you have four quality women you’re dating and they’re in arotation, who’s going to rush into a marriage?” Even black men whonominally commit to one woman are five times as likely as their whitecounterparts to have others on the side.
One way or another,many black women thus become, or stay, single (as two of Mr Banks’sthree sisters are). As one woman tells him: “We focus on our careers,our friends, go back to school, whatever. We fill our lives with otherthings.” But in the hundreds of interviews Mr Banks conducted, he foundpervasive sadness.
The most obvious solution, he discovered,also runs into the greatest taboo: intermarriage. This is ironic,because black men are statistically very open to marrying outside theirrace—more than one in five does. But fewer than one in ten black womenintermarries.
For some black women, a white husband bringsbad memories of slavery and Jim Crow. Others have conditioned themselvesto find non-black men unattractive. Still others fear that men of otherraces find black women unattractive, or that their children might be“not black enough”. But by far the most common reason seems to be thatblack women still regard intermarriage as tantamount to betraying therace. “My black heart,” says one black woman as she contemplatesmarrying out, “I would need to turn it in.” “We know it’s a struggle,”says another, “but we women got to stand by the black man. If we don’t,who will?” (538 words)
文章地址：http://www.economist.com.hk/node/21532296
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