Washington, D.C., writer Marjorie Valbrun says she’s sick to death of folks who view the sorry state of black male/female relationships through the idealized lens of the “Obama Example.”
“The Obamas live in a rarified world that 99.9 percent of us will never experience, so we need to get over comparing their lives to ours,” she says on The Root.com.
Valbrun says she’s also tired of smart, educated black women being blamed for their singleness.
“The reason that many black women with backgrounds similar to Michelle Obama’s aren’t married is not because they would not give similarly skinny, big-eared, smart guys a chance: It’s because there aren’t enough of those guys to go around. Smart women are smart enough to snatch them up. That’s why there aren’t millions of Barack Obama clones walking around wondering why no black woman will have them,” she writes.
Far from being too picky, she says, many black women have become “desperate and not discerning enough.”
“The sad reality is that we are living in very difficult times for black coupling. More of our men are in jail than ever before. Huge numbers of them are unemployed or underemployed. More black women than black men have college degrees. More black men than black women are dating outside of their race. It would be nice to pretend these factors don’t matter, but they do,” she says.
Qcity question: Is Valbrun right, or is there another side to this issue that she’s not considering?
