How To Die Alone With All Fifteen of Your Cats

From Danielle Belton’s The Black Snob

One. Get 15 cats.

Two. Keep reading articles like these.

"Black women are in market failure," says writer Karyn Langhorne Folan. "The solution is to find a new market for your commodity. And in this case, we are the commodity and the new market is men of other races."

Market failure? I didn’t realize black women were GM stock! Black women! The Detroit of womenfolks!

When my cyber play cousin AverageBro sent me this article my first reaction was to throw up my hands screaming, do a Luvvie-patented "wall slide," then curl up in a corner and cry. Not that these articles depress me because my personal solution to the so-called black marriage crisis is to not worry about it. (Hooked on "Marriage Panic!" did not work for me!) So no. It more so bothers me that these articles seemed to have escaped from the reservations of black female angst — your pages of Essence and Ebony — and have trickled out of periodical plantation and are now storming the gates at every conceivable mass media outlet.

When the "Everybody Hates Black Women and We’re All Gonna Die Alone So Find A Man, ANY MAN, And Be All Clingy And Weird" story winds up on FOX News, where, naturally, Bill O’Reilly will look into the camera with all seriousness and find some way to pin this on Obama … ("The Obamas? Have they made black women set their standards too high? And are black women finally desperate enough to let me rub a falafel on them? Questions answered on the next FACTOR!") … I will officially throw up both my hands, holler and submit.

What do you want from me, mass media, with your sudden interest in a story that has been around the mulberry bush, through the back door, over the river and through the woods and back again? Are you trying to give me a complex on purpose?

I realize that there are these people, called women, and some of them want to get "The Marrieds" all Malcolm X style — by any means necessary. Shotgun in hand, peepin’ out the window for eligible bachelors. And while some of those women have been dealt a raw deal, others have their own personal issues that are keeping them from finding Mr. Right. But if you run around with the mindset "Nobody wants me!" in full blown panic mode how does that actually "help" you? It’s like the world is screaming at you in multiple, contradictory ways. Nobody wants black women! Solution: Black women should date outside their race! But WAIT! I thought nobody wanted us? Waaaaaaah! *wall slide*

Acting like no one wants you is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Have no value and you will be devalued. I swear. Sack it up, womenfolk who want to get "The Marrieds!" Telling anyone who will listen that you can’t get no satisfaction though you tried is not going to solve the problem.

That said, this particular article is encouraging black women to date outside our race. Good for them. I’m all "Kanye Shrug" about it. I usually am about these sort of things. I find the "Find A White Man" wonder drug a little disingenuous. All men are different. Some men are good, some men are bad. Race has nothing to do with that. (Which one of the interviewees in the article tries to point out, but it gets a little lost in all that "EVERYBODY PANIC!") But if you’re also operating under the premise that black women aren’t popular with ANYBODY it seems like you’re purposely setting up a bunch of folks for perpetual defeat. How exactly do you suddenly get these magical white, Latino, Asian men to chase your ass when they have never chased your ass? And, while no one seems to want to write an article about it, if you ever want to hear a parallel version of this whole "Nobody wants me!" racial dealie from a male perspective go troll some Asian American blogs, message boards and magazines and let the lonely Asian man take you on the mother of all bitch rants.

Rooks’ Asian American male students have said that they’ve been rejected by Asian American women who complain that Asian males “aren’t spontaneous; they don’t laugh; they aren’t tall,” according to Rooks. “Asian men start questioning their identity. They’re asking themselves why they can’t get a date, ‘Is it because I’m Japanese American, Korean American, because of the negative stereotypes, or because I’m a jerk?’”

OMG! Change Asian to black and male to female and … gosh darn it! It’s like looking in a mirror. An angry, bitter, can’t-get-laid mirror!

Alleged Asian male bitterness aside, white women with degrees are almost equally frustrated about their options for "The Marrieds," leading me to think this has more to do with the on-going shifts in gender roles in our society than someone just being inherently undateable. It’s just HARD to find love, y’all! It was never easy. It was just in the past people got married out of high school and had a couple kids before they hit 25. Your choices were limited. You weren’t as mobile. Now you’re very mobile and have lots of choices. Men and women have all the choices in the world, and folks take their time about choosing.

But hey, if your goal is to get that gold ring on your finger, more power to you. I just know if you walk around smelling and looking like ten miles of hard up the type of people you attract will reflect that.

Or, I dunno. Go stalk an Asian man. Couldn’t hurt.

In Praise of Damaged Leaders

Dr. Martin Davidson is Associate Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business where he also serves as Associate Dean and Chief Diversity Officer. He blogs at Leveraging Difference.

Barack Obama still sneaks cigarettes. Gordon Brown has a mean temper. Surgeon General Regina Benjamin struggles with her weight. At what point do a leader’s personal vices begin to undermine effectiveness? Is it better to hide them or acknowledge them?

The greatest misstep I see contemporary leaders make is trying to look flawless. There is a model of leadership out there that says that in order to be an effective leader, a person must appear to be more knowledgeable, more competent, more ethical, more poised, and more inspiring than the people she or he leads.

This need to appear to be all-but-perfect gets leaders in trouble. First, it makes them hesitant to show that they might not know all the answers. One corporate leader I met was convinced that his people respected him because he was always prepared for tough questions and had good answers if he was ever asked. He was confident that he was inspiring his people with his formidable ability to give them the answers they needed. When I talked with his people, they had a different impression. They said he came off like a headstrong, rigid know-it-all, unwilling to concede that someone else might have a good idea, too. This leader’s need to look like he knew all the answers blinded him to the debilitating impact his behavior was having on his people.

Second, the desire to appear perfect makes leaders avoid taking risks that help them support and learn from others, especially those who are very different. In my research and consulting on diversity and global leadership, a very common scenario plays out all the time.

After being belittled at work, an Asian man talks with a white U.S. leader who, trying to support him, tells him she knows what he is experiencing ("I know just how you feel–as a woman that happens to me, too"). His reaction is that she can’t really know how he feels because what she experiences as white woman is different from what he experiences as an Asian man. He walks away from the conversation feeling that she was disingenuous and even offensive.

The leader’s mistake was avoiding speaking openly with her colleague because she worried that the conversation would lead to a sensitive discussion of race and culture and that she would further offend him by unintentionally saying something hurtful. Real support would have been to risk talking with her colleague openly, because maybe such an open discussion was exactly what would have helped him. Sure she might have said something offensive, but sometimes, leadership is taking that risk. Leadership means not being handcuffed by your fear that you might not do it the right way. Leadership is about making mistakes and learning from them. Leadership is being willing to appear damaged.

The great leaders of the 21st century will be very competent at what they do, make no mistake about that. But they will also be courageous in their willingness to support their people, even if it means being seen under harsh lighting. They will know what they don’t know and will be open to having others teach them. Our next great leaders will dare to be flawed and that, in part, is why people will follow them.

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