Before February 2015 blows out of here on a blistering blanket of ‘blizzardry,’ and before Black History Month comes to a chilling close, and before the month that hosts Valentine’s Day is over and done with, I wanted to write, ever so briefly, about Black Love. This will be short and sweet because you like me, no doubt, have a short attention span and don’t want to read a long drawn out blog by some would-be expert on affairs of the heart. Trust, as someone recently separated (after a 27 year marriage), I am far from being an expert.
Some statements that I recently heard presented as absolutes, gave me pause — such comments as: “…most African American children come from single-parent homes,” and “…Hollywood filmmakers don’t believe that Black Love will sell,” and “…most publishers don’t believe Black 
romance is marketable.” I felt the urge to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) in defense of Black Love.
Over the past 20 years, I’ve seen an amazing increase in the number of two-parent households, monogamous relationships, engaged fathers, long-term romances and solid marriages among Black folk. My survey is far from scientific, but by sheer observation I can see a (slow but steady) return to the strong Black family unit that we o
nce enjoyed before leaving the Motherland and even after that — before the family units were dastardly torn apart.
In a BlackVoices (Huffington Post) interview, Duke University professor Marc Anthony Neal calls Black Love a “revolutionary act” because it “…represents an opposition to Black stereotypes and an ability to publicly acknowledge love for another Black person through marriage, an act that itself was illegal in antebellum America.”
Sadly, the statistics do not bear me out. In 1965, former Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan (later U.S. Senator from New York), in his report “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action,”
stated that roughly 25% of urban Black marriages were dissolved (divorce, abandonment, etc.); nearly 25% of children born in 1960 were “illegitimate,” (a word we no longer use) and nearly 25% of families in 1960 were headed by females – no doubt, startling statistics at the time. The bad news is that things have gotten worse on every front and across racial lines, according to the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C.
So, am I delusional? Probably. I will continue to see the cup as half full, however, and hope for the best. No hardcore statistics that things are on the upswing, just gut instinct. If we decide as a community that our families, our relationships, our children and our marriages are worth saving, we can reverse the paradigm. I’m going to take a crack at it again — some day. ~ Celeste Bateman
Here are some good websites/blogs on Black Love. Enjoy!
The Real Relationship Experts: The Ma’ats
