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Black Women, Black Love: America's War on African American
Marriage
by Dianne M. Stewart
c.2020, Seal Press $30.00 / $38.00 Canada 336 pages
By Terri Schlichenmeyer
The Truth Contributor
You can't stand to watch another happily-ever-after movie
again.
You're done with all those romancy novels, tender songs of love,
and dreams of flowers every Valentine's Day. Statistically
speaking – and being realistic – that stuff isn't in the
cards for you, and in Black Women, Black Love by
Dianne M. Stewart, you'll see how this might have
happened.
About a decade ago, the Census Bureau released a sobering fact:
nearly three out of four Black women in America were not
married. More than half of those women had never even
been to the altar and, says Stewart, it wasn't really their
fault. |
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"The trouble is not with Black women failing to value marriage,"
she says, "it is the shrinking demographic of those whom
Black women want to marry."
The issue, she says, goes back to the time of slavery.
By the very act of being brought to America on slave ships, African
women were separated from husbands, families, and cultures
and, once here, were shuffled from place to place. For young
enslaved women, then, finding a new partner often meant
looking elsewhere, "on different estates," leading to more
separation. Sometimes, slave women had no choice in
partners, period: they were told who they were going to
marry and procreate with.
Post-war, it was discovered that some of the unions created or
forced during slavery weren't always recorded,
leaving former slaves with multiple spouses, scattered
families, invalidated marriages, and war-widows who couldn't
prove their status.
By the early 1900s, Black women began losing their husbands – and
their own lives – to attacks and lynching. In the 1930s, Aid
to Dependent Children (later, AFDC) was created; by the
1960s, such programs "punished Black love"
through programs that essentially sent Black men away from
their families. And in this century, the astronomical rates
of incarceration of Black men of marriageable age mean
fewer Black men on the "marriage market."
So "will Black women ever have it all?"
It'll take some adjustment, as author Dianne M. Stewart indicates,
and the solution may be controversial and absolutely will
require change in government, in our collective attitudes,
and within an individual woman's mindset.
To be clear, this isn't a How-To guide. It's not even a
relationship book, really. Instead, Black Women, Black
Love lays out an eye-opening, painful, provocative
history lesson that points solidly back to, and underscores,
Stewart's point: that Black Americans – men and women – have
been manipulated for centuries toward a dearth of romantic
options, through no fault of their own.
And yet, before offering a number of ideas for change within the
Black community, Stewart reserves some blame for Black
Americans themselves. She points, for instance, at perceived
"value" that allows unmarried Black men to "develop
simultaneous relationships" and delay settling down, and she
examines Black attitudes toward dark and light skin
and perceptions of marriageability.
This leaves readers with thought-provokers, things to reflect upon,
and reasons to roll up their sleeves. There's work to do,
and Black Women, Black Love could finally get you that
happily-ever-after, after all.
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