考研阅读精选：未婚黑人女性：下嫁还是外嫁？

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『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

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  AT SOME events on his book tour, black men have accused Ralph Richard  Banks of advocating genocide. In fact, the Stanford professor of family  law has merely written a book called “Is Marriage for White People? How  the African-American Marriage Decline Affects Everyone”. But abuse is  what you get for suggesting, as Mr Banks does, that black women—not only  the “most unmarried” group in American society but also the one that  least intermarries with other races—should look to white, Latino or  Asian men as potential mates. After all, the alternative is often no  marriage or relationship at all.
The collapse of marriage  among blacks is well documented, but not the sexual, psychological,  emotional and social toll this has taken on black women. Seven out of  ten 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 early  thirties are in prison. As a group, black men have also fallen behind in  education and income, just as black women have surged ahead. Two black  women graduate from college for every black man. As these women rise  into the middle class, the men stay in the lower class, becoming less  compatible.
Many black women respond by “marrying down, but  not out,” as Mr Banks puts it. But that makes bad marriages. Two out of  every three black marriages fail, about twice the rate of white  marriages.
The real problem is the behaviour of those few  black men who are considered good catches. They often stay unmarried for  the opposite reason: they have too many options. As one man told Mr  Banks: “If you have four quality women you’re dating and they’re in a  rotation, who’s going to rush into a marriage?” Even black men who  nominally commit to one woman are five times as likely as their white  counterparts to have others on the side.
One way or another,  many black women thus become, or stay, single (as two of Mr Banks’s  three sisters are). As one woman tells him: “We focus on our careers,  our friends, go back to school, whatever. We fill our lives with other  things.” But in the hundreds of interviews Mr Banks conducted, he found  pervasive 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 their  race—more than one in five does. But fewer than one in ten black women  intermarries.
For some black women, a white husband brings  bad memories of slavery and Jim Crow. Others have conditioned themselves  to find non-black men unattractive. Still others fear that men of other  races find black women unattractive, or that their children might be  “not black enough”. But by far the most common reason seems to be that  black women still regard intermarriage as tantamount to betraying the  race. “My black heart,” says one black woman as she contemplates  marrying 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