Black Women, Black Love
America's War on African American Marriage
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A “powerful, persuasive, and devastatingly haunting” examination of America’s racist, centuries-long oppression of Black love (Carol Anderson, bestselling author of White Rage)
According to the 2010 US census, more than seventy percent of Black women in America are unmarried. Black Women, Black Love reveals how four centuries of laws, policies, and customs have created that crisis.
Dianne M. Stewart begins in the colonial era, when slave owners denied Blacks the right to marry, divided families, and, in many cases, raped enslaved women and girls. Later, during Reconstruction and the ensuing decades, violence split up couples again as millions embarked on the Great Migration north, where the welfare system mandated that women remain single in order to receive government support. And no institution has forbidden Black love as effectively as the prison-industrial complex, which removes Black men en masse from the pool of marriageable partners.
Prodigiously researched and deeply felt, Black Women, Black Love reveals how white supremacy has systematically broken the heart of Black America, and it proposes strategies for dismantling the structural forces that have plagued Black love and marriage for centuries.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Stewart (Three Eyes for the Journey), a professor of religion and African American studies at Emory University, examines the "structural forces" that have led to disproportionately low marriage and high divorce rates among heterosexual African Americans in this thought-provoking account. She characterizes "Black women's lack of options for suitable love and partnership with Black men" as "America's most hidden civil rights issue," and traces the root causes back to slave laws that deprived African American women of the right to control their romantic and reproductive lives. After the Civil War, Stewart writes, federal and state authorities established parameters for "legitimate" marriage that didn't necessarily reflect Black experiences or desires, and racially motivated violence undermined marital and family stability. Stewart also reveals how allegations of "welfare fraud" have been used to shape Black women's behavior to a white patriarchal model, notes the devastating effects of racial bias in the justice system, and critiques self-help solutions to Black women's romantic challenges offered by TV shows like Being Mary Jane. Though she writes in an academic register, Stewart folds in intriguing personal reflections and pop culture analysis. The result is a well-documented and persuasive case that supporting Black love and marriage is a key step in unwinding racial inequality in America.
