#78. Meet-Cutes

Valentine's Day. How many Black women across America will fail to get a Valentine's Day card, chocolate (though the vast majority don't need it), or flowers on February 14? What's that percentage of fatherless Black children in America? 70 percent? 75 percent? Eighty-five - 90 percent in some inner-cities like Detroit?

A "Meet-Cute" in Action

The question that has to be asked is where do Black people have the time to engage in any form of meaningful relationship before a child is produced from the nocturnal interaction? Perhaps a quick look at the type of music coming from the Black community might provide an unnecessary window into the bedroom activities of Black. From a CNN article asking "Where is the love in R&B Music?" we learn this:

Then it all seemed to evaporate. Crack cocaine decimated black communities in the 1980s. The blue-collar jobs that gave many black families a foothold in the middle class began to disappear. Desegregation split the black community. Those with money and education moved to the suburbs. The ones left behind became more isolated. 


Today, we have a black first family, but our own families are collapsing. A 2009 study from the Institute for American Values and the National Center on African American Marriages and Parenting at Hampton University in Virginia highlights the erosion.

The study found that while 70.3% of all black adults were married in 1970, that rate dropped to 39.6% by 2008. The study also showed that while 37.6% of black births were to unmarried parents in 1970, that figure soared to 71.6% by 2008.

Our music became as grim as those statistics. Singing about love now seems outdated.

Too narcissistic to love

Something else also happened: Black people became more narcissistic, and so did our love songs.


A recent study of Billboard hits confirms the notion that wooing a woman is disappearing from modern R&B.

Psychology professor Gordon Gallup Jr. and student Dawn Hobbs studied the subject matter of the 174 songs that made the Billboard Top 10 in 2009. They analyzed three musical genres among the top-selling songs: R&B, country and pop.

The researchers at the University at Albany in New York found that R&B contained the most references to sex per song (an average of 16 sex-related phrases per song). The top three sexual themes in R&B songs were the singer's sex appeal, the singer's wealth as it relates to finding a partner, and descriptions of sex acts. A total of 19 song themes were examined.

The least-popular theme in R&B music was "courtship," while country music offered more songs about courtship than any other genre, the study said.

Music critic Ollison says men and women have objectified each other in modern R&B and whine "about not getting what they felt they deserved."

Sigh. This article fails to point out that Black illegitimacy rates in the 1970s (and 1950s, and 1930s) was embarrassingly high when compared to the white rate. As the power of Black-Run America (BRA) has become the dominant ideology of our nation, any discussion of why this might be has been suppressed in lieu of confronting the notion that a disproportionate number of individual Black people - when added together - have always lacked the ability to engage in safe premarital sex.

Unlike white people who actively engage in family planning and use contraceptives, Black people have - based on long-term high rates of out-of-wedlock birth - have always lacked these traits.

So where is it that Black men and Black women meet to engage in nocturnal or day-time coitus session that will inevitably spawn a child dependent on the state (entitlement programs), private philanthropy, or alms from a church to survive long enough to cause disproportionate amounts of disruptions at high schools that few have the mental capacity to graduate from?

Online dating? Perhaps. But these illicit hook-ups via free online dating sites like OK Cupid and Plenty of Fish (Black people lack the monetary means to pay for Match) only help spread high rates of STDS among Black - remember, there is no digital divide - that sadly showcase the fact that the Blacks act as incubators for these diseases:

"Unfortunately, we are seeing a disproportionate burden of the STDs among African Americans and Hispanics and young people," Dr. Kevin Fenton, director of the CDC's National Center for HIV/AIDs, Viral Hepatitis, STD and TB Prevention, told The Root in a telephone interview. "These trends reflect the harsh realities of socioeconomic disadvantages that are taking place as a result of the economic downturn. The people contracting the diseases likely do not have access to health care. Other factors include employment. All of these things need to be addressed through education in the community.”

The stark results from 2010 data are as follows: While blacks represent just 14 percent of the population, they account for 35 percent of all reported chlamydia cases, nearly half of syphilis cases (48 percent) and almost three-quarters (69 percent) of gonorrhea cases. 

Further, the syphilis rate among young black men has increased dramatically in recent years (134 percent since 2006). Other CDC data suggest that this rise is likely driven by increases among young black gay and bisexual men, the report says. The overall syphilis rate decreased for the first time in a decade and is down 1.6 percent since 2009.

AIDS/HIV is basically kept alive in America via homosexual Black men (many of whom are bisexual, and pass it on to Black women who have rates of HIV at 15 times that of whites). And because Black people have a general desire to refrain from using prophylactics during romantic-less, sexual interactions, these STD trends will only get worse.

Knowing that so few Black women will be getting Valentine's Day cards tomorrow, it's important we try and figure out why. One Stanford University educator has tried to answer that question:

Over the past century, the institution of marriage has undergone a tremendous transformation in America — especially when it comes to African-Americans. Over the last half century, marriage rates in the black community have dwindled. Black women are more than three times as likely as white women to remain unmarried for their entire lives, and when they do marry they’re more likely than any other group to marry men with lower incomes, and less education, than their own.

Although, at first glance, this trend seems like a testament to the successes of feminism, Ralph Richard Banks, the author of the new book, “Is Marriage for White People?”, argues that it represents a disturbing shift in the landscape of African-American intimacy. Banks, a professor of law at Stanford University, uses detailed interviews and extensive statistical research to argue that this gender and racial imbalance has dire implications for both child-rearing and the long-term happiness of African-American women. In the process, he makes provocative claims about both the importance of marriage and the reasons for its decline — claims that are sure to inflame opinion in a number of circles.

It is only when you add the individual number of Black women together that a picture of marital degeneracy sets in. Perhaps if more Black individual males didn't engage in criminality (or if individual Black people didn't drop out of school) they'd be attractive partners for marriage. As it is, few Black males dare stick around after the act of copulation has produced a child the state (you, the tax-payer) will be charged with caring for.

With white people, it's different. White people all yearn for that magic moment when they meet their future spouse. Whether it's bumping into one another in a grocery store; meeting at the fraternity-sorority swap; being set-up on a blind-date by friends hoping to help you get lucky at love; at a wedding reception for a good friend, when you see a girl whose beauty overshadows even the bride; running into each other as you reach for that last seat on the subway; grow up together, attending the same schools and experiencing the same culture and traditions, only to find you desire seeing those same mores continued on through matrimony; or meeting late on night at a bar, exchanging numbers and beginning a courtship that ends in marriage, white people all desire that "meet-cute" to tell friends about and to induce jealousy among the female friends of their acquaintance.

Let's let Wikipedia supply that perfect definition of the "meet-cute":

A meet-cute is a situation in which a future romantic couple meets for the first time in a way that is considered adorable, entertaining, or amusing.
 


This type of situation is a staple of romantic comedies, commonly involving contrived, unusual, or comic circumstances. The technique creates an artificial situation contrived by the filmmakers in order to bring together characters in an entertaining manner. Frequently the meet-cute leads to a humorous clash of personalities or beliefs, embarrassing situations, or comical misunderstandings that further drive the plot.

For Black people, telling their friends they met the father of their children in the back seat of a Pontiac; while he was on probation; or at "the club," which quickly turned into a quickie in the bathroom isn't exactly an encounter that qualifies as a "meet-cute."

For white people, the "meet-cute" is that serendipitous encounter that becomes the foundation of a productive relationship, and eventually the story you'll tell your grandchildren about. It's the type of encounter that civilization is dependent upon; for individual Black people, who - when added together - showcase an inability to understand the vital nature of "meet cute," well, it's the type of thing that leads to a society's ruin.

For this reason, Stuff Black People Don't Like includes the Meet-Cute. The reason should be obvious.