The debate about single Black females rages on. This time Atlantic Monthly columnist Ta-Nehisi Coates takes Newsweek writer Allison Samuels to task for her assessment of Black relationships and interracial dating. In a piece written in response to the “Princess and the Frog” last month Samuels wrote:
“Since the 1960s, marriages between black men and white women have been steadily increasing. Yet only 4 percent of black women do the same. Why? Black women, for better or worse, have always seemed to maintain a loyalty to the ideal of the black family unit. That’s understandable, even noble, but it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when so many black men don’t feel the same way.”
Samuels goes on to say that Black women should take a page from “Princess and the Frog” character Tiana and consider interracial dating. Now a Disney character is the model for love and marriage Ms. Samuels? But she digresses: “I’m certainly not suggesting that we all follow in the steps of a fictional character, but I am proposing that we take a good, long look at what the fairy tale is trying to teach the children of the world–and us,” she writes.
Coates counters Samuels argument saying that, yes, interracial marriage is more common now than a half-century but that’s no reason to advise, say, his daughter “to marry outside her race because ‘black men are doing it,’ or some such. This is marriage advice premised on a kind of racial revenge.”
He adds, “If I were a black woman, I’d be really sick of this “your doomed as a single black women” narrative. It’s really getting silly.”
Read a commentary on “The Black Men Shortage.”