Short answer to the title of this post: Because black women, as a whole, have issues in the relationship department. While I understand that it can be annoying for individual black women to feel as if their relationship status is under the microscope and always up for discussion, those individual women just need to walk away while the discussions are going on. It is my firm belief that in order for problems to be solved they must first be openly, honestly, and sometimes brutally be discussed.

Black women have…

The lowest marriage rates

The highest divorce rates

The highest out-of-wedlock birth rates

Some of the highest poverty rates

These are not statistics that are being made up to make black women look bad. These stories in the newspapers and in magazines about black women and their relationships are not just about getting traffic, having 100+ comment counts,and causing a media firestorm. These stories are about the fact that there is something abnormal, something mysterious and spooky and altogether ookey, going on with black women as a group. And what is going on is being reflected in statistics.

If you’re tired of discussing the trials and tribulations of black women then feel free to take a break from it all, but don’t try to discourage other people from talking about the mess that is right in front of their face. You might want to pretend like you don’t smell something, you might want to pretend like you can’t tell that the emperor has no clothes on, but the rest of us can smell the funk in the air and we can see the emperor’s beer gut.

When black women are running the world or, at a bare minimum, when black women stop ranking dead last in most of the best statistics and dead first in many of the positive statistics, then I’ll stop talking about the relationship status of black women. That day hasn’t arrived yet, so keep an eye out for my next post.

(Chris here, hijacking Jamila’s post. Throwing my two shillings in)