Post-Ghetto fabulous: coming to grips with black women's success

Washington Monthly, April, 2003 by Debra J. Dickerson

It is crucial to divine whether black women "lack" families or "opt against" them--a choice that, to be sane, some number of women consciously make. More power to them. Having my son 22 months ago put my career into a tailspin from which it has yet to recover. For me, taking my roles as wife and mother seriously means I will never achieve all of which I am capable. But to ignore this important distinction between choosing and accepting solitude is to do black women, and the very institution of family, a disservice. Two of three black marriages end in divorce, far more than other groups; less than one-third of black women are married. The black-white marriage rate is composed primarily of black men marrying out. And, as has been widely reported, six of 10 black children are raised by their mothers alone, a situation which, barring major parental dysfunction, is a tragedy for mother, father, and children alike. When it comes to domestic arrangements, blacks are America's perennial loss leaders. As scholar Orlando Patterson put it, African Americans are the most unpartnered and alienated people in the world; we ought to be trying to remedy that, not make ourselves feel good about it. Certainly, as Chambers notes, blacks live in a tradition of extended and created families--but not because we prefer it. That was what was required to survive in a hostile environment; our whole existence in America has been improvisational. Isn't it time yet to write it down and figure a few key things out? Like why black men and black women can't cooperate? Many black women are lonely and overburdened, many black men are deprived of their children's love, and there's nothing to be lost by saying so. Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Dole, and Margaret Thatcher all have husbands. Why don't Condi and Oprah? Preordained lovelessness should not be the price anyone pays for success. Chambers, however, makes a point in this regard that I had not before encountered but which rang immediately true; some of these "can't find a good man" claimants may well be gay. Homosexuality is still considered an unforgiveable perversion among many blacks, often more so for women than men. In the Southern Baptist church I grew up in, it was often stated that a daughter who was a murderer was preferable to one who was a "bull dagger."

Disagreements aside, Chambers's book does much to make visible the invisible lives of those black women who are not on crack or trying to move from welfare to work, the only kind of black women most of America seems to think there are. What is perhaps most bracing about Having It All? is the unapologetic voices of young, post-Movement women, the ones that all the marching was for. Take Crystal Ashby, an antitrust lawyer for a major Chicago oil company. "Her education also heightened her sense of entitlement," writes Chambers. "From an early age Crystal remembers thinking, `Why not me?' `I always believed that someday I could live in a house like the ones I went to school around, that I could live that lifestyle.' But it's also true that Ashby's early years of attending white prep schools has given her a lifetime of training in keeping the peace, `The reality is a lot of my friends are white, and a lot of my friends are black,' she says. `I work in an environment where my exposure is primarily white. You can either be a loner or assimilate. These are the people I spend my days with, and I like my days to be pleasant.'"