Posted on 04/13/2010 11:51:43 AM PDT by unclebankster
How the mass incarceration of black men hurts black women
IMAGINE that the world consists of 20 men and 20 women, all of them heterosexual and in search of a mate. Since the numbers are even, everyone can find a partner. But what happens if you take away one man? You might not think this would make much difference. You would be wrong, argues Tim Harford, a British economist, in a book called “The Logic of Life”. With 20 women pursuing 19 men, one woman faces the prospect of spinsterhood. So she ups her game. Perhaps she dresses more seductively. Perhaps she makes an extra effort to be obliging. Somehow or other, she “steals” a man from one of her fellow women. That newly single woman then ups her game, too, to steal a man from someone else. A chain reaction ensues. Before long, every woman has to try harder, and every man can relax a little.
Real life is more complicated, of course, but this simple model illustrates an important truth. In the marriage market, numbers matter. And among African-Americans, the disparity is much worse than in Mr Harford’s imaginary example. Between the ages of 20 and 29, one black man in nine is behind bars. For black women of the same age, the figure is about one in 150. For obvious reasons, convicts are excluded from the dating pool. And many women also steer clear of ex-cons, which makes a big difference when one young black man in three can expect to be locked up at some point.
Removing so many men from the marriage market has profound consequences. As incarceration rates exploded between 1970 and 2007, the proportion of US-born black women aged 30-44 who were married plunged from 62% to 33%. Why this happened is complex and furiously debated. The era of mass imprisonment began as traditional mores were already crumbling, following the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the invention of the contraceptive pill. It also coincided with greater opportunities for women in the workplace. These factors must surely have had something to do with the decline of marriage.
But jail is a big part of the problem, argue Kerwin Kofi Charles, now at the University of Chicago, and Ming Ching Luoh of National Taiwan University. They divided America up into geographical and racial “marriage markets”, to take account of the fact that most people marry someone of the same race who lives relatively close to them. Then, after crunching the census numbers, they found that a one percentage point increase in the male incarceration rate was associated with a 2.4-point reduction in the proportion of women who ever marry. Could it be, however, that mass incarceration is a symptom of increasing social dysfunction, and that it was this social dysfunction that caused marriage to wither? Probably not. For similar crimes, America imposes much harsher penalties than other rich countries. Mr Charles and Mr Luoh controlled for crime rates, as a proxy for social dysfunction, and found that it made no difference to their results. They concluded that “higher male imprisonment has lowered the likelihood that women marry…and caused a shift in the gains from marriage away from women and towards men.” Learning and earning
Similar problems afflict working-class whites, but they are more concentrated among blacks. Some 70% of black babies are born out of wedlock. The collapse of the traditional family has made black Americans far poorer and lonelier than they would otherwise have been. The least-educated black women suffer the most. In 2007 only 11% of US-born black women aged 30-44 without a high school diploma had a working spouse, according to the Pew Research Centre. Their college-educated sisters fare better, but are still affected by the sex imbalance. Because most seek husbands of the same race—96% of married black women are married to black men—they are ultimately fishing in the same pool.
Black women tend to stay in school longer than black men. Looking only at the non-incarcerated population, black women are 40% more likely to go to college. They are also more likely than white women to seek work. One reason why so many black women strive so hard is because they do not expect to split the household bills with a male provider. And the educational disparity creates its own tensions. If you are a college-educated black woman with a good job and you wish to marry a black man who is your socioeconomic equal, the odds are not good.
“I thought I was a catch,” sighs an attractive black female doctor at a hospital in Washington, DC. Black men with good jobs know they are “a hot commodity”, she observes. When there are six women chasing one man, “It’s like, what are you going to do extra, to get his attention?” Some women offer sex on the first date, she says, which makes life harder for those who prefer to combine romance with commitment. She complains about a recent boyfriend, an electrician whom she had been dating for about six months, whose phone started ringing late at night. It turned out to be his other girlfriend. Pressed, he said he didn’t realise the relationship was meant to be exclusive.
The skewed sex ratio “puts black women in an awful spot,” says Audrey Chapman, a relationship counsellor and the author of several books with titles such as “Getting Good Loving”. Her advice to single black women is pragmatic: love yourself, communicate better and so on. She says that many black men and women, having been brought up by single mothers, are unsure what role a man should play in the home. The women expect to be in charge; the men sometimes resent this. Nisa Muhammad of the Wedded Bliss Foundation, a pro-marriage group, urges her college-educated sisters to consider marrying honourable blue-collar workers, such as the postman. But the simplest way to help the black family would be to lock up fewer black men for non-violent offences.
Given the volume of laws promulgated even before the present Congress’s madness, and regulations implementing them, many of which carry criminal sanctions, are you absolutely sure *you* aren’t a felon?
People break laws because they do things the laws prohibit, not necessarily because they chose to break laws.
In ancient Israel, where were 613 laws, and studying them was popular form of piety, one could reasonably hold that law-breakers chose to break the law. Not so in modern America: every four years Congress passes more laws than God gave the Israelites in the entire Torah. They change all the time, and instead of running one sentence each like His did, they give us multiple-thousand-page “laws”, and that doesn’t include state laws and city ordinances.
The best thing for blacks is to end the Thug culture and start to revere education and hard work. Make it a social no-no for females to dress and act like whores and hookers and for males to wear their pants around their knees and be held in high esteem for being jailed.
I can dream, can't I?
I dated a black woman two decades ago, and I had no issues. There is a base canard in the black community that white men are deficient in — ahem! — certain areas. I proved to her satisfaction that this was not the case.
Permit bigamy. I’m serious.
Sharing one good husband is better than having a non-husband in jail.
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To a large degree, this is already happening. Not bigamy, per se. But in many circumstances, it is expected that the man will step out and have children with other women.
And, sadly, it is not with a good man. Just any man will do.
The era of mass imprisonment began as traditional mores were already crumbling,
Coincidence or cause-and-effect?
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Deliberate and intentional.
Thanks to LBJ.
Maybe, just maybe, at the great risk of sounding like a racist, if all those black men are being locked up for violent crimes, then perhaps they’re not the sort of men those black women would want for a lifelong partner anyway.
And many women also steer clear of ex-cons, which makes a big difference when one young black man in three can expect to be locked up at some point.
For obvious reasons, convicts are excluded from the dating pool.
For similar crimes, America imposes much harsher penalties than other rich countries.
But jail is a big part of the problem, argue Kerwin Kofi Charles, now at the University of Chicago, and Ming Ching Luoh of National Taiwan University.
Well, it is very clear to me that the problem is America!. /s
I am so fed up with idiots who write drivel like this. Did these sphincters actually get paid to do this research? For what purpose? They already state that convicts are out of the dating pool, and then go on to spout that these poor unfortunates are put in jai for too long! We are sooooo evil.
The removal of black men from “circulation” certainly can’t have anything to do with them being criminals could it? What a bunch of crap.
Totally agree. I have similar experience and would never imply (certainly hope it didnt’ seem so) any less. As so many others have pointed out the issue is far more complex than the author of this piece wants to deal with.
Stop dating exclusively black men... problem solved.
lol
I know, huh? "Would you like Bachelor number one, Mr. Breaking & Entering, Bachelor number two, Mr. Drug Dealer, or Bachelor number three, Sir Embezzlement?"
There have got to be a few thousand Yao Mings that haven’t been found and/or can’t play basketball. Just saying.
Black families were intact with Mother , Father and kids up until Johnson's great society.
When Uncle Sam became the sugar daddy... Marriage as an institution became uncoupled from having kids.
Women became parents at younger ages and the children sired were half siblings to one another.
Without a male figure and with an often illiterate mother.. Kids were raised in the streets with the gang culture insuring they would be future inmates of prison.
Ultimately it comes down once again to the government caused the problem and the government sustains the problem.
I myself find Chinese men attractive: http://www.cheekopek.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/Jet-Li.jpg
He loves me, he just doesn’t know it yet!
How would we know without pictures :-/ ?
Asian men seem to be at the bottom of the totem pole of inter racial dating. The stereotype of their dorkiness is shared by their own women. I married a Korean woman and hoped for girls. Thank God I got them.
I don’t think so. I would prefer a dorky guy to a high strung jerk.
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