My Apology to Black Women

By Djuan Coleon

I was listening to the radio and they were discussing the topic “Can Mr. Right Be White?” This topic arose to address the disparity between eligible Black women and Black men. A lot of Black women have grown tired of being alone or celibate and now were considering dating outside of the race to find love and companionship. I thought, Oh, here we go; more propaganda to tell Black people and Black women how messed up they are. Y’all know how the media do, so I checked the statistics out:

• In 1963 when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech, more than 70 percent of all Black families were headed by married couples. In 2002, that number was 48 percent.
• 42% Black women have never married. 45% of Black men have never married.
• The percentage of Black women who are married declined from 62 percent to 30 percent between 1950 and 2005.
• Studies reports that by the age of 30, 81 percent of White women and 77 percent of Hispanics and Asians will marry, but that only 52 percent of Black women will marry by that age.
• Black women are also the least likely to re-marry following divorce. Only 32 percent of Black women will get married again within five years of divorce; that figure is 58 percent for White women and 44 percent for Hispanic women.

- (statistics from Ebony, Nov, 2003 by Joy Bennett Kinnon)

Then you have to consider that 1 in 10 Black men will marry white women. Couple that with the prison industrial complex where brothers are going to jail as fast as they can build them. Multiply that with unemployment, which is higher now than it was during the Civil Rights era. The problem IS NOT BLACK WOMEN. Black women want to get married and raise a family. I look at the situation and feel like crap. Here we are stunting like we the “man,” but we can’t cover our women and even worse, they now have to go elsewhere to look for love. What a slap in the face, our greatest treasure, our prize, our Queens have no Kings willing to be Kings and be responsible for the race. We have to be responsible and accountable enough to realize that pontificating eloquent orations on Tavis Smiley’s State of Black America does not solve the major issue affecting Black America.

It starts at home; it starts with The Union of husband and wife. Men have to realize to rebuild and to progress it means finding that queen and building with her. I know it is like 10 to 1 out here and Black males want to procrastinate and “shop around” or just play around as long as they can being selfish. The consequences of our lack of forethought and concern for the big picture have us in this state of influx and crisis. I got to apologize, we as men have got to apologize for:

• Being baby daddies instead of husbands and fathers.
• Cheating on the good women we have trying to entertain “sides” when God has blessed us with a gracious “entrée.”
• Stringing women along for years with no intention of marrying them.
• Being unable to control our sexual urges, being dogs unable to think and rationalize the consequences of living to get the next five-second orgasm.
• Disrespecting women in words and deeds, having no regard for the lasting effects of chauvinistic attitudes on steroids.
• Being insecure and afraid to deal with and build with successful Black women.
• I apologize for those turds that go around in the media and trash Black women and say why they are “too hard to deal with” and why they got to marry a non Black woman.
• We must apologize for planting seeds and running away.
• Falling in the traps that send us to prison resulting in leaving Black women uncovered and the children unprotected having to fend for themselves.
• We must apologize for getting money and then wanting to escape reality and marry non-Black women.
• I apologize for being impatience and undisciplined enough to go to school or finish school in order to provide a more stable situation for the Black family to succeed.
• What apology can there be for being on the “down low” and spreading all types of diseases?

I think about slavery and how Black men could not have a family. Now I feel like we don’t deserve one. I think about all the friends I know who are not interested in getting married. Men want to just “kick it,” waiting around in their 30s and 40s with nothing but excuses. If Black men don’t value having a family then where will we be as a race 10, 15 years from now? God must be shaking His head thinking “I allow you to get emancipated, civil freedoms and have blessed you with all the abilities and talents to be wealthy and repopulate the earth according to Genesis 1:28: Yet you despise the wife of your youth.“The Lord will cut off the man that hath done this, both the master, and the scholar, out of the tabernacles of Jacob, and him that offereth an offering to the Lord of hosts. And this again have you done, you have covered the altar of the Lord with tears, with weeping, and bellowing, so that I have no more a regard to sacrifice, neither do I accept any atonement at your hands. And you have said: For what cause? Because the Lord hath been witness between thee, and the wife of thy youth, whom thou hast despised: yet she was thy partner, and the wife of thy covenant. Did not one make her, and she is the residue of his spirit? And what doth one seek, but the seed of God? Keep then your spirit, and despise not the wife of thy youth.” (Malachi 2:12-15) There are countless blessings that are available to us if we find a wife and be faithful. That prosperity, that wealth that eludes us will continue to do so because we reject and despise what God has ordained from the beginning. Feedback