blackerThan "facts" ...

Recently a friend pointed me to a story... it basically suggests that black women have no one to date since all the black men are incarcerated. Nonsense! What about me?! ;)

Besides that, my friend (we'll call her Ms W for now), is "super suspicious of this new interest in black women's dating prospects"...as it "seems like a way to subconsciously make black women feel bad about pursuing an education and career."
Needless to say Ms W is a well-educated black woman.

She also pointed me to another, perhaps more insightful article in the Atlantic that was actually written in response to this seemingly innocent (but dangerously naive) post on the OKCupid Blog.

The OKCupid post basically suggests, among other things, that black women have an uphill battle in the dating game, as their site data shows black women getting snubbed. This data is dangerously naive as it was a very popular post, and the bleak "facts" it "revealed" about black women became the central focus of a a Freakonomics blog post in the NY Times, and that was sourced by a TIME study which basically concluded the same thing.

Coates, in his Atlantic article, astutely points out, first of all, that "when black folks date online they don't go to OKcupid. They go to blacksingles. They go to soulsingles. Or if they're truly high post, they go to EliteNoire....Black people who are going to a site like OKcupid are generally black people who, with some exceptions, are open to interracial dating. But the same isn't true of white people on OKcupid." The bottom line is well put there: "I think that people passing this data around need to be really careful about using this study to draw inferences about the dating world of black women."

And Miss W wonders, "why so much focus on black women's dating prospects? Why did these articles come around so much after the obamas became our first family? Let's not let society see a happy middle-class married couple and think that's the norm. Let's paint black women as bitter, lonely shrews..."

Whatever the case may be, we just need to remember to be really careful about how quickly we digest the vast amounts of information which is constantly bombarding us. Just because it's printed (and just because you believe it) doesn't mean it's TRUE!