7/6/04 Detroit Free Press: Far too many brides, too few brothers,  
by Desiree Cooper, Free Press Columnist  
    My daughter had just turned 13 when I got an e-mail from my good friend who'd been born in India . At a family wedding in Toronto , she'd spied a handsome 15-year-old boy who was "witty, with the intelligence of someone twice his age."  
    "If you ever want to arrange a marriage for your daughter," she said, "I've found her guy."  
    What? A husband for my 13-year-old baby girl? That was child abuse, I thought, Old World chauvinism and . . . and . . . possibly the only sure road to my daughter's happiness.  
    No one at the altar  
    Look around you. You see African-American women everywhere -- in corporations, in politics, in universities. They are self-assured, well put-together -- and single.  
    In some cases, they've chosen a single lifestyle, some having never been married and some remaining single after a divorce. But in too many cases, the choice to remain single has been made for them.  
    The fact is that if my daughter ever wishes to marry a black man, the odds are daunting. According to Larry E. Davis, author of the book "Black and Single: Meeting and Choosing a Partner Who's Right for You" (Agate Publishing, $13.95), there are only five marriageable black men for every 10 marriageable black women, when you exclude those who are chronically unemployed, drug addicted or incarcerated.  
    One in eight black men in their late 20s is incarcerated on any given day. And they're scarce on historically black college campuses. Clark Atlanta University is 71-percent female; Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans is 70-percent female and Howard University in Washington, D.C.,is 64-percent female.  
    Black women, then, must consider alternatives if they wish to experience marriage. Interracial marriage is an obvious option. But according to the U.S. Census Bureau, there were 311,000 black-white married couples in the United States in 1997, but two-thirds of them consisted of a black husband and a white wife.  
    For black women, that's the unkindest cut of all. Not only are there very few eligible black men, but nearly 12 percent of black men who are married don't choose black women -- and, for the most part, men of other races didn't chose them, either.  
    The reasons vary. I've heard black men complain that black women are more combative, domineering and critical than other women -- a phenomenon which, if true, may be the less-heralded result of the pervasiveness of female-headed households in the black community.  
    Others have complained that too many black women are more concerned about the contents of a man's wallet than the content of his character. And, of course, there's the age-old reason why black women are often passed over as mates in general: In a society still flush with racism, the brass ring of marriage is having a white woman as a bride.  
    Making a match  
    So what is a black girl to do? Black-interest magazines have been suggesting for years that black women should share men, change their views about who qualifies as marriageable or be open to redefined roles in a male-female relationship. I don't know what the future holds for my daughter, but suddenly, the idea of an arranged marriage seems like a credible option.  
    I e-mailed my friend with my daughter's particulars, to which she replied, "Now, we just wait."  
    As the mother of an African-American daughter, that's all I can do -- wait and pray.  

4/7/02 Chicago Tribune: "More Black Women Cross Color Line," 
    For years black women watched as black men dated and married white women, gallantly strolling down the street with them or awkwardly bringing them to family reunions.
    Sometimes when a black man achieved fame and fortune, black women would hold their collective breaths, wondering whether he would bypass someone like them for a woman of another race.  And among themselves, black women have talked endlessly about the shortage of eligible black men.
    Now, as if to say, "enough of that," black women have begun their own silent march across the color line.  In growing numbers, they are dating and marrying white men.
    The number of black female-white male marriages remained fairly static between 1960 and 1980, going from 26,000 to 27,000.  But by 2000, the number had almost tripled to 80,000, according to Current Population Survey figures.
    By comparison, the number of marriages between black men and white women rose from 94,000 in 1980 to 227,000 in 2000.
    Black male-white female couples still outnumber black female-white male couples 4 to 1.


6/8/06 Dallas Morning News: "Black and Male in America,"
Dr. Marcus Martin:
    About age 14, you begin to see a significant imbalance among African-Americans, with females outnumbering males.  The gap is greatest in the 18-to-34 age range - at the very time many young African-American males should be marrying and during an important period in one's wage earning career.
    So it's true that you can reduce crime by removing all of the young men from the neighborhood, but at the price of dramatic changes in family structure, unstable neighborhood conditions, low marriage rates, etc.
    We talk about black men being endangered, but prison and premature mortality are tremendous threats to African-American females as well.  It is very disheartening to know that my 5-year-old daughter has less than a one-in-two chance of getting married.

7/13/04 Wall Street Journal, p. D8: "Sex Matters,"
    The authors neglect one offsetting benefit of having more young men than 
young women. In the U.S. , a high sex ratio is statistically associated with high rates of marriage and low rates of illegitimate births. This argument, first made 
by Marcia Guttenberg and Paul Secord and amplified in other studies -- and in 
[James Q. Wilson's] book, "The Marriage Problem" -- arises from the laws of supply and demand.
    If there are a lot of men for young women, then the women will trade sex in exchange for what they value, which for most women is a stable relationship -- 
that is, marriage and two-parent child care. But if men are scarce and women abundant, then women will lose their bargaining power and exchange sex for whatever is available: one-night stands, illegitimate children or even prostitution. In the U.S. , African-Americans have a very low sex ratio, and the consequences of that fact are obvious.  


1) Madonna
2) Margaret Trudeau
3) Margot Kidder
4) Carmen Electra
5) Peggy Lipton
6) Heidi Klum
7) Jennifer Lopez
8) Idina Menzel (actress married to actor Taye Diggs)
9) Aug. 2005: Jennifer Hyatte, accused of killing corrections officer Wayne Morgan, while freeing husband
10) Nov. 2005: Lindsey Holt, teacher at South Garland High School (Dallas, Texas) arrested for having sex with student in car. 
11) Nov. 2005: Debra Lafave, teacher at Greco Middle School in Tampa , Florida pled guilty to having sex with 14-year-old student.  She was a newlywed at the time.  She will lose her teaching certificate, must register with the state as a sexual predator, may not have any contact with children including the victim, and will not be allowed to profit from the sale of her story or personal appearances.

11/23/05 wfaa.com (WFAA-TV): Teacher found in car with student arrested,"
   A South Garland High School teacher and student were caught in a compromising position in a car that put the teacher behind bars Wednesday.
    Lindsey Holt, 23, faces two to 20 years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000 after police said they found her and the student in a car parked in a Garland park.    
   The teacher was released from the Garland Detention Center on a $5,000 bond.
    Police charged Holt with having an improper relationship with a student, which according to state law involves sexual contact.
    However, police have not charged her with sexual assault because the student was 17 and is officially an adult, but they said what happened at the Garland park was criminal.
    The police have not released details, but said police officers doing routine patrols in the park came across the two in the car.
    "They came across the vehicle, which for some reason raised their suspicion, walked up to it and that was when they saw the teacher and student in a compromising position," said Joe Harn, Garland Police Department.
    The park is down the road from the South Garland High School where Holt is a first-year home education teacher.
    "You're supposed to be teaching the kids and instead you are teaching them the birds and the bees and everything," said Chris Harnd, a former South Garland High School student. "That is not how it is supposed to go. Youre supposed to be teaching home-ed and that is it."
    Many students at the school described Holt as a popular teacher at the school.
    "She was just a cool teacher," said Nathias Slaughter, Garland student. "I never thought anything. I never would have thought she would have an affair with a student from the school or anything like that."
    Holt will not return to the classroom she has been placed on paid leave until the outcome of the investigation.
    Police are still looking into what kind of relationship the student and teacher had, and more charges are possible against the teacher.

11/22/05 Associated Press: Fla. Teacher Pleads Guilty in Sex Case,
    Tampa , Fla. - A female teacher pleaded guilty Tuesday to having sex with a 14-year-old student, avoiding prison as part of a plea agreement.
    Debra Lafave, 25, will serve three years of house arrest and seven years' probation. She pleaded guilty to two counts of lewd and lascivious battery.
    The former Greco Middle School reading teacher apologized during the hearing, saying "I accept full responsibility for my actions."
    The boy told investigators the two had sex in a classroom at the Greco school, located in Temple Terrace near Tampa , in her Riverview town house and once in a vehicle while his 15-year-old cousin drove them around Marion County .
    The boy told investigators Lafave told him her marriage was in trouble and that she was aroused by the fact that having sex with him was not allowed. He said he and Lafave, a newlywed at the time, got to know each other on their way back from a class trip to SeaWorld Orlando in May 2004.
    If convicted at trial, she could have faced up to 15 years in prison on each count. The plea agreement also was designed to resolve similar charges pending in Marion County .
    Hillsborough Circuit Judge Wayne Timmerman said LaFave also will forever lose her teaching certificate, must register with the state as a sexual predator, may not have any contact with children including the victim, and will not be allowed to profit from the sale of her story or personal appearances.
    Prosecutor Michael Sinacore said the young victim's family wanted to get the case over with because of the intense public and media scrutiny.
    "We're happy that the victim's family can put this case behind them," he said. "The whole process has been very difficult, and we hope they can now resume their lives."
    After Tuesday's hearing, her attorney, John Fitzgibbons, said the plea was "a fair resolution of this case." Asked how she felt afterward, Lafave said "tired."
    Fitzgibbons said in July that plea negotiations had broken off because prosecutors insisted on prison time, which he said would be too dangerous for someone as attractive as Lafave. He said then that she planned to plead insanity at trial, claiming emotional stress kept her from knowing right from wrong.

5/6/05 Dallas Morning News: Family ties,
By Robin Galiano Russell
   Many spiritual leaders in the African-American community may well cringe when they hear American Idol winner Fantasia sing "Baby Mama," her hit tune in praise of single mothers raising children on their own.
   That's because they see a near-epidemic of single-parent homes among African-Americans, who have a lower marriage rate and a higher out-of-wedlock birth rate than any other ethnic group.
    The statistics are enough to set Bill Cosby, among others, off on a rant. Seven in 10 black children are now born to unmarried mothers. African-American women are 25 percent more likely than whites to never marry, and half as likely to be currently married.
    It's the children who are most likely to be adversely affected by such circumstances, said Ron Haskins, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a think tank that held a forum last year on marriage and the black church. Black children, he said, are more likely than any other group to witness male unemployment, violence and poverty.
    The Rev. Sheron Patterson, pastor of St. Paul United Methodist Church in downtown Dallas , said she sometimes meets with resistance when she tries to talk about the importance of two-parent parenting. Many black women, she said, feel that marriage isn't worth the trouble. Some complain that the pool of desirable mates isn't deep, and they're resigned to having to "make it on their own." Some, she said, take offense when she preaches about the importance of marriage, since they grew up in single-mother homes.
    Alvin Poussaint, a professor of psychiatry and associate dean at Harvard Medical School , cites a perceived shortage of available black men as one reason for the marriage crisis. Millions of African-American men, he noted, are in prison, in jail or unemployed.

12/11/04 Dallas Morning News: Living with AIDS: Angry, resentful and feeling betrayed, an African-American woman is part of a growing population facing the daily struggle
By Robin Galiano Russell
    At Parkland Hospital's AIDS clinic for her monthly checkup, Karen takes a seat in the back of the waiting room, arms crossed and shades on. She watches the other patients awaiting treatment and finds it hard to imagine herself among them. It's still too raw, too hard to think of herself as having AIDS.
    "I don't feel it's a clique I wanna be in. I don't really want to talk about it like some of them do," says the 40-year-old African-American woman.
    Karen, who asked that only her first name be used, didn't know she had AIDS until November 2003, when she was taken by ambulance, hallucinating and feverish, to Medical Center of Plano. She suspects now that she was infected for at least two years before her illness was diagnosed. Her partner of seven years transmitted the virus to her, Karen says.
    Now her life is a daily struggle, to find the right medication, to tell her family and friends, to push back the fear and get through the day. She is unable to work because she's so fatigued and sick much of the time.
    Karen feels hurt, betrayed, scared and lonely. She is among the growing population of black women who are disproportionately affected by HIV and AIDS. Sometimes it's from a partner released from prison with HIV or doing drugs. Sometimes it's from a black male who is bisexual or who tries to deny his homosexuality by returning to a female partner.
    "I heard about 'down-low brothers,' guys living a double life, and I began to wonder," Karen says.
    Statistics show HIV/AIDS affects black people more than any other group in Dallas and across the country, and black women are among the fastest growing populations with AIDS. African-Americans accounted for nearly 50 percent of new AIDS in 2003 cases in Dallas County , but only 20 percent of the overall population, according to AIDS Arms of Dallas. More than 1,300 new AIDS cases in Dallas were identified that year.
    Black women make up 58 percent of all new female infections in Dallas . Blacks and Hispanics have the lowest levels of access to care, and tend to enter treatment at later stages in the disease, creating complications in controlling it.
    Amber Harrison, a caseworker for AIDS Arms, says the new faces of AIDS have changed in the third decade of the disease. Many of her clients are heterosexual women, ages 26-35 with children, and more frequently now adolescents, ages 13-24. Many females learn they have HIV or AIDS when they have a pregnancy test, she says.

 8/21/05 Dallas Morning News: Black America's Crisis: Forty years after a controversial report, the question is whether we're any closer to facing the facts about poverty, race and single moms
By Kay S. Hymowitz
   Read through the megazillion words on class, income mobility and poverty in the recent New York Times series "Class Matters," and you still won't grasp two of the most basic truths on the subject:
    1. Entrenched, multigenerational poverty is largely black; and
    2. It is intricately intertwined with the collapse of the nuclear family in the inner city.
    By now, these facts shouldn't be hard to grasp. Almost 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers. Those mothers are far more likely than married mothers to be poor, even after a post-welfare-reform decline in child poverty. They are also more likely to pass that poverty on to their children. Single motherhood is a largely low-income and disproportionately black problem.
    The truth is that we are now a two-family nation, separate and unequal one thriving and intact, and the other struggling, broken and far too often African-American.
    40 years Daniel Patrick Moynihan's Department of Labor report entitled "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action," warned that the ghetto family was in disarray.
    Most analysts assumed that once the nation removed discriminatory legal barriers and expanded employment opportunities, blacks would advance, just as poor immigrants had.
    About half of all blacks had moved into the middle class by the mid-'60s, but now progress seemed to be stalling. The rise in black income relative to that of whites, steady throughout the '50s, was sputtering to a halt.
    Policymakers had assumed that if male heads of household had jobs, women and children would be provided for. This no longer seemed true. Even while more black men were getting jobs, more black women were joining the welfare rolls. Mr. Moynihan, then assistant secretary of labor, decided that a serious analysis was in order.
    Mr. Moynihan argued that the rise in single-mother families was not due to a lack of jobs, but rather to a destructive vein in ghetto culture that could be traced back to slavery and Jim Crow discrimination. Though black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier had already introduced the idea in the 1930s, Mr. Moynihan's argument defied conventional social-science wisdom.
    He also described the emergence of a "tangle of pathology," including delinquency, joblessness, school failure, crime and fatherlessness that characterized ghetto or what would come to be called underclass behavior. Mr. Moynihan knew the dangers these threats posed to "the basic socializing unit" of the family, because more than most social scientists, Mr. Moynihan understood what families do. They "shape their children's character and ability," he wrote. "By and large, adult conduct in society is learned as a child." What children learned in the "disorganized home[s]" of the ghetto, as he described through his forest of graphs, was that adults do not finish school, get jobs or, in the case of men, take care of their children or obey the law. Marriage, on the other hand, provides a "stable home" for children to learn common virtues.
    Implicit in Mr. Moynihan's analysis was that marriage orients men and women toward the future, asking them not just to commit to each other but to plan, to earn, to save and to devote themselves to advancing their children's prospects. Single mothers in the ghetto, on the other hand, tended to drift into pregnancy and to float through the chaos around them. Such mothers are unlikely to "shape their children's character and ability" in ways that lead to upward mobility.
    Separate and unequal families, in other words, meant that blacks would have their liberty, but that they would be strangers to equality. Hence, Mr. Moynihan's conclusion: "A national effort toward the problems of Negro Americans must be directed toward the question of family structure."
    Over the next 15 years, the black family question actually became a growth industry inside academe, the foundations and the government. Scholars invented a fantasy family whose function was not to reflect truth, but to soothe injured black self-esteem and to bolster the emerging feminist critique of male privilege, bourgeois individualism and the nuclear family. In fact, some scholars continued, maybe the nuclear family was just a toxic white hang-up, anyway. No one asked what nuclear families did or how they prepared children for a modern economy. The important point was simply that they were not black.
    Feminists, similarly fixated on overturning the "oppressive ideal of the nuclear family," also welcomed this dubious scholarship. Fretting about single-parent families was now not only racist, but also sexist, an effort to deny women their independence, their sexuality or both. As for the poverty of single mothers, that was simply more proof of patriarchal oppression.
    The partisans of single motherhood got a perfect chance to test their theories, since the urban ghettos were fast turning into nuclear-family-free zones. Indeed, by 1980, 15 years after "The Negro Family," the out-of-wedlock birthrate among blacks had more than doubled, to 56 percent. In the ghetto, that number was considerably higher, as high as 66 percent in New York City .
    Liberal advocates had two main ways of dodging the subject of family collapse while still addressing its increasingly alarming fallout. The first was to talk about children not as the offspring of individual mothers and fathers responsible for rearing them, but as an oppressed class in need of government programs. The second way was to talk instead about the epidemic of teen pregnancy.
    There was just one small problem: There was no epidemic of teen pregnancy. There was an out-of-wedlock teen-pregnancy epidemic. Teenagers had gotten pregnant at even higher rates in the past. Back in the day, however, when they found out they were pregnant, girls had either gotten married or given their babies up for adoption.
    Not this generation. They were used to seeing children growing up without fathers, and they felt no shame about arriving at the maternity ward with no rings on their fingers, even at 15.
    Failing to define the problem accurately, advocates were in no position to find the solution. Teen pregnancy not only failed to go down, despite all the public attention, the tens of millions of dollars and the birth control pills that were thrown its way, but it actually went up. About 80 percent of those young girls who became mothers were single, and the vast majority would be poor.
    Throughout the 1980s, the inner city continued to unravel. Child poverty stayed close to 20 percent, hitting a high of 22.7 percent in 1993. Welfare dependency continued to rise, soaring from 2 million families in 1970 to 5 million by 1995. By 1990, 65 percent of all black children were being born to unmarried women. By this point, no one doubted that most of these children were destined to grow up poor and to pass down the legacy of single parenting.
    The only good news was that the bad news was so unrelentingly bad that the usual bromides and evasions could no longer hold. Something had to shake up what amounted to an ideological paralysis, and that something came from conservatives. Three thinkers in particular Charles Murray, Lawrence Mead and Thomas Sowell though they did not always write directly about the black family, effectively changed the conversation about it.
    First, they did not flinch from blunt language in describing the wreckage of the inner city. Second, they pointed at the welfare policies of the 1960s as the cause of inner-city dysfunction, and in so doing, they made the welfare mother the public symbol of the ghetto's ills. And third, they believed that the poor would have to change their behavior instead of waiting for Washington to end poverty.
    By the early 1990s, when the ghetto was at its nadir, public opinion had clearly turned. Welfare-reform was enacted.
    So, have we reached the end of the Moynihan report saga? That would be vastly overstating matters. Remember: 70 percent of black children are still born to unmarried mothers, and many academics, cultural leaders, organizations and even individuals of all races and classes cannot bring themselves to admit that marriage protects children.
    Still, the nation is at a cultural inflection point that portends change. Though they always caution that "marriage is not a panacea," social scientists almost uniformly accept the research that confirms the benefits for children growing up with their own married parents. Welfare reform and tougher child-support regulations have reinforced the message of personal responsibility. There are raw numbers to support the case for optimism: Teen pregnancy, which started to decline in the mid-'90s in response to a crisper, teen-pregnancy-is-a-bad-idea cultural message, is at its lowest rate ever.
    And finally, in the ghetto itself, there is a growing feeling that mother-only families don't work.
    That's why people are lining up to see an aging comedian as he voices some not-very-funny opinions about parenting.
    That's why so many young men are vowing to be the fathers they never had.
    That's why there has been an uptick, albeit small, in the number of black children living with their married parents.
   Kay S. Hymowitz is a scholar at the Manhattan Institute. A longer version of this essay appears in the current issue of City Journal. You may respond to this article at www.city-journal.org.

 8/12/05 Dallas Morning News:
    Froma Harrop: Missing sensitivity: Both Natalee Holloway and Latoyia Figueroa disappeared recently, but only one has gotten much media coverage. 
    The public's uneven interest in various missing young women has set off a useful debate. By "the public," I mean the media. The question is whether the cable channels, magazines and tabloids care mostly about victims who are white and little about similar tragedies involving blacks or Hispanics. 
    The coverage has been nonstop for Natalee Holloway, the 18-year-old blonde from Birmingham , Ala. , who vanished during a high school trip to Aruba . By contrast, the disappearance of Latoyia Figueroa, a 24-year-old black woman from Philadelphia , drew relatively little attention. Her father and bloggers have made an issue of this lopsided treatment. 
    The national media obsessed over Laci Peterson, the missing 27-year-old from Modesto , Calif. , whose pregnant body eventually washed up along San Francisco Bay . Mrs. Peterson was white and college-educated. But Evelyn Hernandez, 24, was also pregnant, and her body was found in the same bay. The media, however, paid scant attention to this immigrant from El Salvador . 
    So the question can't be avoided: All things being equal, do the media care a lot more about white victims than about their darker-skinned sisters? The quick answer is yes. But in the cases of Ms. Figueroa, Ms. Hernandez and many other poor women, all else was not equal. 
    Both Ms. Figueroa and Ms. Hernandez were about to have their second child out of wedlock. Americans may have become more accepting of single motherhood, but they also know the following: Women who go this route live more dangerously than mothers with husbands. And, let's face it, a death is less newsworthy when it occurs in a war zone than in an American shopping mall. 
    Single women who have a succession of children by different men are operating in a sociological war zone. When terrible things happen to them, the people who love them grieve, of course. But their stories would be far more shocking to the general public had they been cocooned in a stable marriage. 
    Ms. Figueroa was by all accounts a loving and wonderful woman. She was devoted to her daughter and worked hard at a restaurant. The same goes for Ms. Hernandez, who was in the country legally, took fine care of her son and worked at a variety of jobs. But they were both pregnant by men to whom they had no legal ties. The annals of crime are stacked with stories of men who killed their pregnant girlfriends (not a few of them white), rather than pay for child support. In both these cases, the father is a "person of interest" to police. 
    Note how, in sensational crimes, the media fixate more on betrayals by people close to the victims than on the victims themselves. The upper-middle-income trappings no doubt spurred interest in the Peterson saga. But what activated this story was the deep suspicion, later conviction, that Laci's husband had murdered his pregnant wife. Without this storyline, Laci Peterson would have been lost among the other 200,000 Americans who are reported missing every year. 
    The lurking question in the Natalee Holloway story is how a high school senior on a class trip could be allowed to leave a nightclub in the wee hours with three strange men. (The whole idea of a class trip to a swinging Caribbean island also seems strange to old-fashioned types.) One expects high school kids to have supervision. 
    Underlying the heartbreak in the Figueroa and Hernandez and similar cases is that the victims were all alone, and that made their stories less compelling. Had the women been white and the other particulars the same, these situations would have commanded only marginally more attention. 
    All this does not absolve newsrooms of the responsibility to better examine crimes involving minorities. I'm convinced that a black middle-class suburbanite who was pregnant and found murdered would not receive nearly the attention showered on Laci Peterson. And she should. 
    But the reality is that race is just one element in the kind of story that excites the cable channels. As victims, abducted women are all equal. The details that make their cases newsworthy are not. 
    Froma Harrop writes for The Providence Journal, a Belo newspaper.