I keep getting pinged about my thoughts on a recent ABC News story regarding black women and marriage. I get tired of repeating myself so here are some quick thoughts in one place. To make my points I am going to touch a lot of subjects that won't be given anything near the time that they deserve so I apologize in advance. Here we go.

The story is what I generally expect from the media: sloppily over-pursuing tangents to the point where the real issues are obfuscated beyond recognition. My biggest problem with it was the poor - almost negligent - use of statistical data in the early parts of the presentation.

Staggering fact:

"Black women outnumber black men by 1.8 million"

Women always outnumber men as they live significantly longer - no doubt because they do much less stupid crap when they are young - so just throwing this number out there with no context whatsoever is irresponsible. White women outnumber white men by 2 million, does that mean white women are worse off? No, because 2 million makes up a lower percentage of the white population. White men are 49.59% of the white population while black men are 47.98% of the black population. Going by the widely used but, in my opinion, very flawed idea that what's white statistically is right statistically, that's a pretty significant deviance over millions of people.

So you might say: "Ok, Rashid, so they didn't get into as much detail as your geeky ass would like. Regardless, all you just did was prove their base point that the 1.8 million man deficit is significant." Good point, but one thing they leave out is the fact that roughly 25% of black people live in poverty. This is a very important statistic in the context of the article.

Let's start at 1:32 where they take 100 black men and then subtract the number with no high school diploma (21%), no job (17%), or incarcerated (8%*).

I have the asterisk by the 8% because, for some inexplicable reason, they only included incarcerated black men between 25 and 34. Apparently getting locked up only counts you out of dating eligibility for 9 special years where having no job or high school diploma constitutes permanently elimination. Seriously, what group are we talking about here? a) all black men b) black men between the ages or 25 and 34 or c) some completely arbitrary mix of the two? If we're talking c here (and we are), this data is pretty much useless.

It gets worse.

The real problem with the data in the story is this: the women being profiled are professional, middle class women yet the data they present applies to the entire spectrum of black men. Doing this assumes that every black man is in the dating pool of these women. While black women might be more likely to date somebody from a lower social class than other races of women, this is absolutely not the norm. I don't think these "MBAs, MDs, and JDs" are giving much play to dudes who are only bringing the letters "E&J."

This is extremely important, because when you start looking at those outcomes listed earlier, particularly high school dropouts - an activity that correlates very highly with incarceration (I wonder if they accounted for that overlap in their statistics, for some reason I doubt it) - you'll find that most of the black men who fell into that trap came from impoverished surroundings and these ladies most likely did not. That means that while Nichole quite rightly laments the fate of the gentlemen she processes and prosecutes in the legal system (1:49), had they not been arrested she probably wouldn't have given them the time of day anyway.

According to census data from 2002 (old yes, but I think it makes the point) there were 3.3 million black men living below the poverty level against 4.8 million black women. When this data was gathered, there were 36 million black people in America 16.6 million men and 19.2 million women. That is a 2.6 million person disparity(!!!!) of which over half (1.5 million) is accounted for in the bottom 22.7% of the population.

In other words, the majority (58%) of the male "shortage" - much of which is natural to begin with - is accounted for in 22.7% of the population. A group which is pretty much 100% likely to not be dating the women being interviewed. This strongly repaints the picture presented by the story.

The real note of concern is that there is an alarmingly serious numbers problem with black men in this country, but it is decidedly not with the men who the women being profiled would date. It is with the poor black men vastly outnumbered by women in their social class. The problems that these women have, unlike the women being interviewed, are exacerbated by their considerably lower probability of out marriage due to highly segregated living and lower levels of socialization. This is a huge problem with far reaching implications through all of America and is much more deserving of highlighting - particularly how "War on Drugs" has and does impact this situation.

Back to the subjects of the story. These women do face real issues pertaining to their standards, upper middle class "desirability" of black women, interracial dating, changing gender roles, and general gender politics which are worth their own analysis (and, to be fair, some were covered but just not covered all that well), but the "shock and awe" type numbers presented to make a case of slim pickings were specious to say the least.

Random Data Notes:

- I find it remarkable that there is a male deficit of just 1.8 million against 2.6 million nine years ago. I'd like to look deeper into it but, on top of a 5+ million population gain, that sounds like progress. However, it could just mean that there are a lot of black male babies, which could be all the more reason to worry.

- I was crunching some numbers comparing white male/female ratio to black male/female ratio and the black ratio just falls like a rock at age 24. From age 24 to 44 the percentage of men drops from 50.5% to 46.9 percent. White men fall 1 percent in that interval and take FIFTY YEARS to make a 4% drop. Wow.

Here's the table I built (2008 data) I am scared to see how this looks broken out by income (T = Total, M = Male, F = Female):

stats