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Home • News

A Few Good Men: Myths About Dating Black Men Debunked

White women don't have it any better, they say.
Myths About Dating Black Men Debunked
Bad Date Couple At Bar 400
By Charli Penn · Updated October 28, 2020
After a Wall Street Journal article, written by Ralph Banks, stated that dating white men will solve the single black woman’s dating crisis, it stirred up quite a bit of controversy last week.

Our own Real Talk columnist Demetria L. Lucas defended many of the arguments, though many black women were outraged by the article’s claims.

A new article from empower magazine was published this week aiming to debunk many of the statement made by banks and those biases they feel the media portrays regarding black women and dating.

If Bank’s article left you shaking your head in disbelief, you might want to give some of these stats a try. The article, written by Ivory A. Toldson, Ph.D., and Bryant Marks, Ph.D., takes on each topic one by one and offer up their own refuting stats.

Banks said in his article that “even if a majority of white men are uninterested in dating black women, that still leaves more than enough eligible white men for every single black woman in America.” But Toldon and Marks say that’s just not true.  

According to their census research there are 4.6 million more white women than white men. White men are also 7 times more likely to go to prison than white women and have almost a quarter million more white women than men graduate college. Add to that the fact that the rate of marriage among successful white men is very high.

So although Banks argues that black woman should seek out successful white men to date because they have a much smaller dating pool due to so many black men being unequal in education or incarcerated, one might argue that based on these stats, white women have the same problem too.

Were you surprised to learn that white women face similar dating dilemmas when it comes to available men? Which side of the argument are you on? Do these facts change how you feel about Bank’s article? Let’s discuss!

Remember that ultimate summer dating challenge we sent you on? Were any of the guys you approached white?