I figured it was time to begin looking at some of the facts of the black community and analyzing them.  Not only has this spawned my black fact series of video blogs, but it has also caused me to develop an even deeper passion for my community; the Black American Community.  Although most of my question seem to revolve around the economic and psychological state of my community, most of the more interesting statistics came when I started researching the black family.  Very briefly here I am going to look at 3 of the biggest rumors available concerning the black man and the black woman as a family unit. 

1. Black men aren’t smart enough to keep up with black women.

The first rumor is actually one that I addressed in the first episode of the series (click series to see it) and one that I never really gave much credence to.  That is the rumor that says that black women are severely outpacing black men when it comes to educational attainment which causes black women to struggle with finding a suitable mate on their economic and mental level.  Now while I believe other factors come into play when it comes to women and men being on equal footing, saying that educational attainment is a contributing factor just isn’t true.  Per the last census in 2010 black women were graduating at a rate of 21.4% and men were at 17.7%.  In the last 50 years there hasn’t been more than a 5% gap in attainment between men and women.  The numbers most often quoted are from people that compare the age groups 22-28 which is still only a 5 percent gap with men at 10 and women at 15 percent of the population.  Those ARE NOT run away percentage differences.  We have been bamboozled and our women have got to stop using this as an excuse for being single.  If you want to be single that’s fine, but your education isn’t the reason for it.  Is it a factor sure it is, with 18 million black men and 20 million black women 5% can seem interesting.  What I am calling untrue is the notion that women are running away from men, I have heard numbers as high as 50%.

2. Black men are running to marry every race but black women.

The second rumor seems to be just as big if not bigger than the first and again is something that is covered in the black fact series.  Let me go ahead and give the number; 8.7%.  8.7% of black men are marrying white women.  Around 90% of married black men are married to black women.  Not even sure if I should go any deeper into this.  Black women are at about 3.7% when it comes to marrying white men.   Neither white men nor white women are even above 1% so we aren’t even going to go into that.  But this needs to just be eliminated altogether from our thought processes.

3.  Slavery is the cause of the destruction of the Black Family. (video Here)

This statement has been circulating in the black community since before I was born I’m sure and is interesting to note.  I’m going to go ahead and go out on a limb and call this one false as well.  You see black female head of household arrangements is a relatively new phenomenon.  From 1890 to about 1950 blacks where actually getting married at higher rates than whites.  Marriage rates for both continued to increase from 1890 through to a peak for blacks in 1950 (78%) and for whites in 1960 (80%) and has been declining for both races ever since, just more sharply for blacks, a lot more sharply.  The female head of households have traditionally been because of the death of black men, meaning female head of households traditionally speaking have been widows.  In the 1950’s female head of households sat at 17.6%,
1960’s 21.7%,
1970’s 27.8’s,
1980’s 37.8%.
By looking at these numbers it becomes clear that slavery couldn’t be the reason for the black family because for a significant period after slavery blacks where getting married and led by black men.  So the question has to be what happened in the 60’s that changed all that.  That is something I won’t get into in this blog but several big things did indeed happen that changed the way the black family operated.

So here they are, 3 “facts” of the community that in my opinion need to be thrown out.  But how do you feel about the “facts” circulating in our community?  Do you have other myths that you believe need to be exposed?  And why do these things survive even though they are easily dis-proven by looking at numbers that are readily available?