Metaresponse

I do think her angle is geographical, at least partially, and in any case, I'm not dismissing her problem. I'm stating a fact: successful black women do not have a monopoly on dating troubles. Your point is a good one--the dating woes of black women may be more systemic, more grounded in the sociological backdrop you bring up. I'm not arguing with that--I'm arguing with a couple of premises of the article--or what I perceived those premises to be.

Now, I'm not saying the issue doesn't merit discussion or study or fiction. If you'll recall, I said in my original post that I'd be interested in reading the book. However, I do want to make sure we're on the proper level of analysis. Returning to my statement that "successful black women do not have a monopoly on dating troubles," one could also accurately say that black people have no monopoly on having been hit hard by the recession. That is a true statement. It's also true that, as a demographic, black people have been hit harder for reasons that are systemic rather than not random. The latter is a valid point very worthy of discussion, policy consideration, etc. Nonetheless, running a headline about how black people have been hit hard by the recession is going to piss off unemployed white people with no health insurance. Running an article about how and why black people have been hit harder, as a group, would be less controversial (for more people, anyway).

What else don't black women have a monopoly on: being told that they don't deserve the kind of mate that they desire and that they're too picky. (Nor perceptions of aggressiveness, but that's another argument). I've often been told by family and friends that I was being too picky and should lower my standards. Now, the specifics didn't match--nobody specifically brought up not having a degree--but details aside, it does happen all the time. I rarely tell my parents that I'm dating, but at one point when I was in a longer-term relationship it was inevitable. Even after I discovered that the person I was dating was an inveterate asshole, I took much too long to broke up with him (partly because I listened to most of my friends, who encouraged me to work it out). When I finally did, my mother (who knew none of the details, but that's never stopped her) yelled at me for being picky and told me to get back together with him.

That's the danger of talking about "epidemics" based on one person's story. It's one thing to go anecdotal when it's her book, but it's another when it becomes a one-person trend article. If you're going to talk epidemics, you need numbers and maybe longitudinal studies. Otherwise, all I can do is talk back in anecdotes--my own as a single, reasonably successful and not hideous white woman, and those of my friends. Among my black, female friends in DC, the only one raised by a single mother is the only one who is married (or otherwise in a relationship). I'm not claiming I have a representative sample--not a lot of my friends, of any race, were raised by a single parents. But that's just it: we're either dealing in personal stories or we're dealing in trends, and to turn one into the other requires backing it with some empirical rigor.

Not having read the article about Holocaust survivors' children, I can't produce an informed response to whether or not the argument is analogous, but I don't think there's anything wrong with saying, "black people have all sorts of residual PTSD b/c of our history in this country." In fact, I think it would be worthwhile to consider the two together. It's not a competition; it's not an issue of "black people have it bad, too." Suggesting that black people, too, have PTSD issues to be considered doesn't imply that Holocaust survivors' issues don't deserve to be considered "in their own right." But "in their own right" doesn't conflict with being considered alongside of similar situations. In my humble opinion, looking at both together would only shed more light on the issues that Holocaust survivors children may have.