More Black Women Consider ‘Dating Out’
By Dionne Walker

For years, Toinetta Jones played the dating game by her mom’s strict rule.

“Mom always told me, ‘Don’t you ever bring a white man home,’” recalled Jones, echoing an edict issued by many Southern, black mothers.

But at 37, the Alexandria divorcee has shifted to dating “anyone who asks me out,” regardless of race.

“I don’t sit around dreaming about the perfect black man I’m going to marry,” Jones said.

Black women around the country also are reconsidering deep-seated reservations toward interracial relationships, reservations rooted in America’s history of slavery and segregation.

They’re taking cues from their favorite stars — from actress Shar Jackson to tennis pro Venus Williams — as well as support blogs, how-to books and interracially themed novels telling them it’s OK to “date out.”

It comes as statistics suggest American black women are among the least likely to marry.

“I’m not saying that white men are the answer to all our problems,” Jones said. “I’m just saying that they offer a different solution.”

She reflects many black women frustrated as the field of marriageable black men narrows: They’re nearly seven times more likely to be incarcerated than white men and more than twice as likely to be unemployed.

Census data showed 117,000 black wife-white husband couples in 2006, up from 95,000 in 2000.

There were just 26,000 such couples in 1960, before a Supreme Court ruling banished laws against mixed marriages.

Black female-white male romance has become a hot topic in black-geared magazines and on Web sites, even hitting the big screen in movies like last year’s “Something New.”

That film centers on an affluent black woman who falls for her white landscaper, a situation not unlikely as black women scale the corporate ladder, said Evia Moore, whose interracial marriage blog draws 1,000 visitors a day.

It features articles like “Could Mr. Right Be White?” and pictures of couples like white chef Wolfgang Puck and his new Ethiopian wife.

“Black women are refusing to comply with that message about just find yourself a good blue-collar man with a job, or just find a black man,” Moore said.

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