'Nightline' Asks Why Black Women 'Can't Get a Man'

The never-ending story "Why Can't a Successful Black Woman Find a Man?" received another public forum on Wednesday night. This time it was neither BET nor TV One spewing the oft repeated statistic that 43 percent of black women have never been married. This time it was the more surprising venue of ABC News' "Nightline" insisting that a crisis exists because 70 percent of professional black women are without husbands. The conversation itself was far more dismal than these figures. The serious, interesting and sensitive social and personal issues embedded in these statistics were hijacked by superficial, cartoonish dialogue that relied heavily on personal anecdotes and baseless personal impressions while perpetuating damaging sexism.

Wednesday night's program was co-hosted by comedian Steve Harvey and ABC News "Nightline" Correspondent Vicki Mabrey and welcomed guests Sherri Shepherd ("The View"), Jacqui Reid (journalist), Jimi Izrael (blogger) and Hill Harper (actor/author).

Like other discussions in the genre, the "Nightline" special began with the Disney-inspired assumption that marriage is an appropriate and universal goal for women. Any failure to achieve marriage must therefore be pathological. With this starting assumption panelists were encouraged to offer solutions without needing to fully articulate why low marriage rates are troubling.

Perhaps marriage is shorthand for describing loving partnerships. In this case the problem is that some African American women have a pressing and unfulfilled desire for emotional attachment, companionship, and love in the context of committed heterosexual relationships. This is reasonable human expectation. It is one that many men and women of all racial and ethnic backgrounds share. In a nation where we assert that citizens have an inalienable right to pursue happiness we might even argue (although it is a stretch) that this desire is essentially newsworthy.

However, given the distortions of or absence of black women in most mainstream media outlets we are skeptical that "Nightline" was primarily motivated by a desire to address the human needs of African American women. Instead, we suspect marriage is a trope for other anxieties about respectability, economic stability, and the maintenance of patriarchy. Which social issue appears on the public agenda is never accidental. In this moment of economic crisis, social change and racial transformation it is meaningful that black women are being encouraged to exclusively embrace traditional models of family and to view themselves as deficient if their lives do not fit neatly into these prescribed roles.

In the 1960s, the Moynihan Report blamed black women heads of household for social deterioration in black communities. In the 1980s single black mothers were vilified as welfare cheats responsible for the nation's economic decline. In the 1990s black women were blamed for birthing a generation of "crack babies" that were predicted to burden the nation's health and educational systems. The "Nightline" conversation was suspiciously reminiscent of this prior reasoning. As the nation copes with its anxieties about a black president, a shifting economy and a new global position, black women suddenly reemerge as a problem to be solved.

But even if we accepted the simplistic framing of an extant marriage crisis offered by the program, "Nightline" was stunningly simplistic (even for mainstream media) in its response to the issue. The solution offered most frequently in Wednesday's conversation was familiar: professional black women need to scale back expectations. Black female success is an impediment to finding and cultivating black love. Hinging heavily on humor and black female desperation, like so many other conversations, articles, and news programs before it, this conversation missed the opportunity to offer a thoughtful analysis of structural, sociological, historical and political realities that serve as an impediment to fruitful partnerships between black men and women.