It’s funny that this is coming up for discussion. Certainly, there are many of you out there that have known women to take care of their men or to make more than him. In my personal experience, at least in the black community, that has been a reality for a long time and I see it growing amongst young people as well. Young ladies are literally paying their boyfriends to go out with them. I heard the craziest thing last year, “If you thought of the date and asked him to go to this place, then you pay because it was your idea.” Is this sounding crazy to anyone, but me?
Now CNN has several women in their report showing these happy women with men that not only make less money than they do, but have far less education. Now this is truly a refreshing perspective because of all the criticism that black women, specifically, get about being gold diggers and running credit checks on their men. This shows, to me, a more truthful face of what is going on in America, but also what has been going on for years in the black community. And don’t take it out of perspective to mean that black men are kicking back living off of their women at an alarming rate because that’s not true either. But the disparity in employment and education has been there for years.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics paints an ugly picture of reality, but you will see vividly in their statistics that just between 2009 and 2010, black men have been unemployed at a higher rate than black women. In April 2009, 13,650 black men were unemployed while only 9,470 black women were out of work. In 2010, there was a drastic shift in women’s unemployment rate to 12,520 to men’s 14,620. And while those numbers are staggering, the unemployment rates between the two do not change. Black men have consistently been unemployed more than their women.
But like these women reveal in the CNN report, more than anything else in the world, they just want to be treated like the queens that they are, so the kingdom can be at peace.
