I read Leonard Pitts’ “Love an issue of freedom, not race” (Commentary, June 20) with interest. A more accurate title would have been, “Love an issue of freedom and race.” Frankly, I couldn’t care less about whom Kobe Bryant marries. He can marry anyone he wants. It is none of my business. This is a free country. But there is more to this than freedom.
Mr. Pitts’ article seemed to castigate African-American women for their discontent without any explanation for it. He classified it as wrongheaded thinking because his understanding is stuck on freedom.
He should take a look at the race side. His other comment amazed me. He wrote, ” . . . it’s wrong to expect an individual to live his life by the dictates of a group.” African-Americans have lived by the dictates of the white majority since I was born in 1927. I was born in the middle of the first Jim Crow period and am now witnessing it happening again.
An African-American is 57 times more likely to be arrested for drugs than a white person, even though whites are more frequent users. On May 31 there were 44,913 adults incarcerated in Illinois and 29,083 were African-American, once again losing the right to vote. Most of the prison population are men, many of whom are or could have been candidates for marriage to African-American women because 98 percent of African-American women marry African-American men as opposed to 85 percent of African-American men who marry African-American women.
These disparities create a larger number of never-married African-American women than ever before. That is the race side of the issue.
Mr. Pitts states that the denial of rights of marriage is ultimately the denial of freedom. He is right. Why an African-American woman would want Kobe, or any other person who does not like them, except for the money, is beyond me. The point is who will marry African-American women if African-American men are too racist to do so?
A never-married woman uses contraceptives, abstains or eventually becomes a single head of household. Because these households are disproportionately African-American and because shotgun marriages are no longer tolerated in the African-American community, is that a race problem or a freedom problem or both?
