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.

Acclaimed Author Steven Barnes on Avatar

A gentleman referred me to his website, upon which there is an essay stating that "Avatar" triggered a sense of guilt about being white. Saw it as a condemnation of the military, and of corporations. Really? This gentleman needs to love himself more, accept himself more deeply. Criticizing behaviors, or writing cautionary tales about the excesses of a group or organization is not the same as condemning it.

But that is exactly how many people feel. And that is not mature behavior. Unfortunately, society doesn’t really encourage us to be adults (which is an observation or criticism, not a condemnation of society. Sheesh.) I mean, if I tell Jason he’s done something wrong, his poor little heart lurches to the conclusion that he must be a BAD BOY. This is one of the reasons that I will stand him in front of a mirror, have him look at himself and say "I like myself!"

This is horribly hard for him at first, but when he gets into it, there are joyous giggles. Oddly (not really) discipline and criticism are taken MUCH better for the rest of the day–I can point out a non-optimal behavior without him leaping to the conclusion that if he isn’t the best boy in the world, he must be the worst.

And I think that a huge percentage of people live in such a binary world. If America isn’t clearly the best on every issue, all the time…you must be saying America is AWFUL. If racial group X has abused its power, or segments of it are organized in patterns inefficient for producing stable social/family units…why, I must be CONDEMING it. They’re the worst!

If corporations eat everything in sight, and you point that out, why, you must be saying corporations are EVIL! No, I’m saying they eat everything in sight, and must be treated like the jolly predators they are. Like Sam Neil said in Jurassic Park about carnivorous animals: they aren’t evil, they "just do what they do." We must simply be careful of limiting them to their appropriate place in the circle of economic life.

If mercenaries in the service of corporations are said to be capable of amoral behavior, that is hardly a condemnation of the military. It is an acknowledgement that the warrior urge is related to the "death drive," and must be balanced by love and controlled by diplomacy and compassion. Society cannot exist without the courageous men and women who eat stress and spit fire. God knows I ain’t going into the caves of Tora Bora…not unless there is absolutely, positively no one else to do it. But condemn this vital drive for OUR mismanagement of it? That would be like condemning the sex drive because immature expressions of it lead to illegitimate children and the spread of disease.

The sex drive, the survival instinct, the drive to dominate and control…these things are not evil. They just are what they are, do what they do. Get this straight: I LOVE this country. There is no where I’d rather live. But because it is populated by human beings, it has been guilty of horrific acts. But wow, can you believe how hard we try to grow and heal? Amazing.

So many men feel guilty about being men, ignoring the price of carrying that toxic and intoxicating drug testosterone in their veins. And apparently, the legacy of racism is that we can’t really think of humanity as being non-heirarchical. That the attempt to embrace "equality" leads to staying quiet about your beliefs that group X ain’t quite up to snuff. And if you say something that trips a guilt switch, the easiest default is to assume that, well, if My Group isn’t BETTER, then We must be worse. Must be. What else could anyone possibly be saying, eh..?

This kind of thinking is poisonous. We are so much better than this. We MUST be able to speak of our pain, speak our truth. And be able to hear it while maintaining, without the slightest doubt, the knowledge that no one is closer to the divine than we are.

The problem is that the cost of holding that belief is abandoning the hope that we are closer to the divine than others. And that, apparently, for almost everyone: whites, blacks, gays, straights, Americans, non-Americans, men and women…virtually everyone seems to need that belief just to make it through their lives.

Believing in differential worth, applied to entire groups of human beings, seems to be one of the most addictive drugs in the world. And when it turns on you…God in heaven, is it ever vicious.

You deserve better than that, each and every one of you. The love you have for yourself will be the love you can offer your family, your community, your world. And trust me: we need every drop you can muster.

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