Black men, Asian women

There are only 34,000 black men in America married to Asian women. That is about one married black man in a hundred. Asian women marry black men at about the same rate. Some number of these men met their wives overseas while serving in the military. Black men are five times more likely to marry an Asian than are black women.

Despite their low numbers they have some famous sons and daughters: Tiger Woods (golfer, Thai mother), Amerie (singer, Korean mother), Hines Ward (football player, Korean), Will Demps (football player, Korean)Tasha Reid (rapper, Korean), Crystal Kay (singer, Korean), Tomika Skanes (video vixen, Korean), La’Shontae Heckard (video vixen, Korean), Kimora Lee Simmons (businesswoman, Korean-Japanese), Sharon Leal (actress, Filipino) and Lou Jing (singer, Chinese).

Steve Sailer, an intellectual skinhead, says that Asian women are the most desirable women and black men are the most desirable men – more desirable than even their white counterparts. He bases that on the amount of body fat men and women of different races have.

That helps him to show why so many white women are with black men and so many white men are with Asian women. But he never stops to ask why the match made in Sailerite heaven – black men and Asian women – is so rare, less than 2% of all interracial marriages.

In an OkCupid study of online dating, Asian women were the least likely to show interest in black men.

Some say it is because Asian parents are even more racist than white ones. I am not sure how you would prove that. Kate Rigg put it this way:

My boyfriend’s Black and there’s gonna be trouble
My parents want to live in a Negro-free bubble

For black servicemen in Asia the circumstances would be different since presumably they would be seen as being more American than black.

Then there are some who say it is because Asian women do not fit black ideas of female beauty. Their bodies in general are too thin. Smooth magazine, a black men’s magazine, lists its top 100 women every year. In 2009 not a single one was clearly Asian – though in the past some have been part Asian, like Tomika Skanes and La’Shontae Heckard.

Even granting all that, there are most certainly black men who love how Asian women look and Asian women who are not about to let racism get in the way of their own happiness.

But maybe it is simpler than all that: As it turns out white men, who so famously have an Asian fetish, marry Asian women at about the same rate as black men: about one married man in a hundred.

But then why do white men seem to have an Asian fetish when black men generally do not? Because one Asian woman in six is married to a white man. But it is probably not even a case of a white fetish among Asian women: many of them live and work in places where it is much easier to meet white men than even Asian men, much less black men.

See also:

• Stuff Black People Hate: Subtle Racism III: Asian Chicks
• Steve Sailer: Is Love Colorblind?
• Rinku Sen: Black Men, Asian Women
• Asian fetish
• Blasian
  • Lou Jing
• race and dating
  • OkCupid study on interracial dating
• Smooth magazine

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Why so few black men marry black women

Why do so few black American men marry black women? Mainly because there are not enough of them.

About 42% of black American women have never been married. Never. For white women the number is 22%.

For every 100 black women:

• 35 are now married to a black man
• 1 is now married outside the race
• 22 were once married
• 42 were never married

So what is going on with those 42 black men? Where are they? What are they doing? I ran some numbers, mainly using Census numbers for 2004. Here is what I found, listed in order from the least important to the most important (going by the numbers):

• 1 is gay. He will never marry because he only goes with men.
• 2 are married outside the race. Black men marry outside the race at a rate far higher than other men marry into it. This leaves over 200,000 black women without husbands.
• 4 are in prison. Another 10 will be in prison at some point in their lives. Over a half million single black men are in prison. Black men are seven times more likely to be put in prison than white men. But that is another story.
• 4 lack enough education. Unlike with whites, among blacks more women have degrees than do men. That means over a half million black women will be forced to marry down – or out of the race altogether. Either that or never get married. Which is the most likely outcome: few men want to marry a woman with more education and few men of other races are willing to marry a black woman. Among married white men, for example, only 1 in 400 has a black wife. For Asian men it is 1 in 450.
• 13 are too young or not otherwise ready for marriage. The numbers I am using from the Census count anyone 15 years of age or older. So some of these are too young to marry. But others would have married – in the old days, that is, when sex was a big reason for men to get married. These days there is so much sex outside of marriage that that reason is dead and gone. That means many men are no longer in a big rush to get married – if ever.
• 18 are dead. People forget this, but there is a huge oversupply of black women. Huge. Even if every single living black man married a black woman, 18% of black women would still not be married! Throw in interracial marriages and that still leaves 17% of black women without a husband. This is by far the biggest reason for that 42%.

You can throw in 10 divorced and widowed men into the mix. That might sound good, but then along with them come the 22 women who were once married, making matters worse not better. It will be hard for them to remarry, but some will.

White women are affected by the same sort of things, but in each case the numbers are not so bad. Instead of 18 dead, for example, there are only 6. Instead of 4 in prison, only 1 is. And so on. It all adds up making it much worse for blacks than for whites.

See also:

• Why so few white men marry black women
• black women

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The coon stereotype

The coon stereotype (1600s – ) is one of the main ways white Americans have of looking at black men. It sees black men as being not particularly bright or hard-working, as shiftless and good-for-nothing, as someone you cannot count on, who would rather live off of the work of others. Whites saw them that way as slaves and still tend to see them that way even now.

Coons, in the pure, lived in slow motion: they moved slowly and talked slowly. They could never manage to speak proper English and always messed up long words. They were easy to fool and take advantage of. They loved to eat watermelon and play games of chance. When they had money they dressed to show off. They avoided marriage, creating matriarchs, but when they did marry they were ruled by their Sapphire wives. They have big smiles and wide-open eyes. They were friendly, not violent, but could not be trusted with anything.

From what we know, blacks as slaves were worked hard. Before the British stopped the slave trade and slaves were still cheap, they were sometimes worked to death. Someone in Barbados had worked it out: you got the most for your money if you could work a slave to death in seven years. And they did.

So, like many of these stereotypes, this one is less about how black people truly are and more about hiding an uncomfortable truth about white people: that whites are not hard-working enough, that they would rather live off the work of others. It comes from the guilt of owning and using slaves.

The coon image has been firmly planted in the American mind, first by minstrel shows in the 1800s and then by Hollywood.

Coons were common in American films in the 1930s and 1940s. The black actor Stepin Fetchit became rich and famous playing coons. He thought he was helping the cause of black people. It was kind of like Halle Berry winning an Oscar for playing a Jezebel character. You can be liked by whites for the wrong reasons.

Part of the coon thing is to speak bad English. It shows whites what little intelligence blacks have. The English you hear coons speak in Hollywood films was taught to them by whites – it is not something that blacks spoke themselves in those days, if ever. “”I’se be catchin’ ma feets nah, boss.”

In the 1950s even whites stopped laughing at coons, but you still see them in films. Tyrese Gibson in John Singleton’s “Baby Boy” (2001) comes to mind, though he grows out of it. Some say Jar Jar Binks in the Star Wars films was one too.

These days the coon stereotype is used to excuse the low position of black men compared to whites: you need brains and hard work to succeed in America and, the stereotype says, too many black men are just too coon to keep up.

See also:

• stereotype
• Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia
• Some other stereotypes:
  • The black brute stereotyp
  • The matriarch stereotype
  • The Sapphire stereotype
  • The Jezebel stereotype
• Race in America
• How white people think
• Flavor of Love
• Ebonics

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The black brute stereotype

The black brute stereotype (1870s – ) is one of the pictures white Americans have in their heads about black men: as savage, violent, amazingly strong and not caring about right and wrong. Black men rape and kill for no reason. They cannot control themselves. Whites do not believe that every black man is like that, but they think plenty of them are.

Willie Horton, Emmett Till and Rodney King were all seen in this light. It is why Susan Smith could blame a black man for killing her children and be believed: because black men are like that: they kill for no reason, even children!

It is why whites are afraid to walk alone in black neighbourhoods: some black man might jump out of nowhere and rape or kill them. They especially like to rape and kill complete strangers at night. It is why whites cross the street to the other side – just to be safe! As if savage killers cannot cross the street too!

When a white man kills someone, white people ask, “Why did he do it?” But when a black man kills someone they do not ask why. They already know: because he is black.

As stereotypes go, this one is pretty new: it did not arise till the 1870s, after the black slaves were freed. As slaves they were seen as simple and childlike. Once freed, they were seen as being wild and out of control.

So if blacks were not kept in line by terror and lynchings, black men would freely rape white women. What, after all, would stop them? This became the stated excuse for Jim Crow – to protect pure white women against savage black men. When Congress tried to pass a law against lynching, white Southerners blocked it in the Senate for just this reason.

As it turns out, of all the blacks who were lynched only about one in seven was guilty of raping a white woman. In the case of Emmett Till all he did was call a white woman “Baby”. That was enough for her husband and her brother to kill him, a 14-year-old boy – and get away with it.

The true brutes in Jim Crow times were white men. They raped far more women, black and white – and, in the case of black women, got away with it. They were the ones who carried out the lynchings – which were far more savage and frequent than anything blacks had the power to do.

And even today blacks are three times more likely to be physically threatened, harmed or killed because of their race than are whites. So this idea of whites as peaceful and blacks as threatening to whites is not rooted in fact. It is rooted in something else.

Yes, there are black men who are violent and savage, who do unspeakable things. But there are white men like that too. In either case, they are hardly common enough to reasonably determine one’s ideas about the ordinary people of either race.

 

See also:

• stereotype
• Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia
• Sean Bell
• Race in America
• How white people think
• Jim Crow
• Bob Dylan: The Death of Emmett Til
• The pure white woman stereotype

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