What's love got to do with it? Why Oprah's still single - society and opportunities for African American people - Brief Article

Washington Monthly, March, 2002 by Paul Offner

TAMA MATTOCKS IS A LIVELY, ARTICulate 42-year-old African-American woman who lobbies for a healthcare association in Washington, D.C. A native of Detroit, she attended Wayne State University before pursuing a doctorate in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Stopping just short of getting her degree, she went to work for a state assemblyman, whom she accompanied to Washington in 1992 when he was elected to Congress.

Madison was home to few blacks, so social opportunities were limited. Washington would be different, Mattocks thought, with its sizable black professional class, but it hasn't worked out that way. Interesting, eligible men have been few and far between. Some of the men she's met have little interest in working, preferring to seek out women who will support them--"a rag-head on your couch," she calls them, conjuring up images of the lead character in Baby Boy, John Singletons story of a seductive predator who lives off his girlfriends. On one occasion, the congressman even arranged a blind date, but nothing became of it. "Maybe you should join a bowling club," one friend suggested half-jokingly. "The pain of being alone is so great that you go into denial," says Mattocks, "so you can get up and go to work the next day" Most of her friends have given up thoughts of marriage.

Mattocks's experience is not unusual. Just look at any African-American publication. "Are professional black women losing in the dating game?" asks Jet, the popular African-American news magazine. "Within their own ethnic group, sisters find slim pickings," reports the San Francisco Sun Reporter. "Most of us don't even come in contact with single, middle-class males," laments a professional woman in the Memphis Tri-State Defender. This struggle was captured in Terry McMillan's bestselling novel, Waiting to Exhale, which later became a movie starring Whitney Houston and Angela Bassett. Its success came as no surprise to its target audience. "It is so popular," Sherry Smith told the Philadelphia Tribune, "because there are so many single females out there trying to find a good male."

This is something new within the African-American community. Over the last generation, most of the problems taking center stage involved such matters as single-parent families, welfare dependency, and the feminization of poverty. But here's a problem affecting relatively successful African Americans. The number of well-educated, professional women is multiplying rapidly; but the number of similarly situated black men is not. In fact, as black women advance, black men are falling further and further behind. It's not a subject that black leaders like to address, but it's a hot topic in African-American periodicals, where professional women complain bitterly about the difficulty of finding suitable mates.

Lonely At The Top

African Americans have made great strides in the area of education over the last 20 years. The percentage graduating from high school has increased by more than one quarter, and the percentage enrolling in college is up 44 percent. African Americans still trail whites in both areas, but at least the numbers are moving, in the right direction.

Unfortunately, nearly all the improvement in college enrollment has been among black women, who now receive twice as many college degrees as black men. The number of black men graduating from college today has barely budged from where it was 20 years ago.

Nationally, college women outnumber men among all racial groups. But the imbalance is much greater among African Americans. Black women earn twice as many master's degrees, 50 percent more PhDs, and 50 percent more degrees in law, medicine, and dentistry. What's more, the gap is widening. If current trends continue, 20 years from now black women attending college will outnumber their male counterparts by three to one.

Already, black women are getting most of the good jobs. A half-century ago, women filled about a quarter of the management and administrative positions held by blacks; today, they fill just under 60 percent. According to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the imbalance is even greater in larger firms, where black professional women outnumber men by two to one. Of course, African-American women are not alone in terms of professional advancement. Happily, women of all races have increased their share of college enrollments and management jobs over the last 40 years. But there is one important difference: Among whites and Hispanics, men are still far ahead.

Currently, these changes affect a relatively small number of people--most black female workers are still concentrated in low-paying jobs and are paid, on average, less than either white women or black men. But the assessment of Harvard sociology professor Orlando Patterson seems apt: African-American women are now "poised to assume leadership in almost all areas of the Afro-American community and to outperform Afro-American men at middle-and upper-class levels of the wider society and economy?" What we're witnessing, in other words, could be called the feminization of the African-American elite.