(BBN Editor’s Note: This commentary, written by Professor Marc Lamont Hill of Columbia University, receives Front Page placement because it is a long overdue-public perspective that is necessary from the voices of Black men. Recently, mainstream news organizations, book publishers and popular culture outlets have turned over the discussion of Black communities - specifically the topic of Black women and why they are not getting married – to comedians, entertainers and popular culture pundits.
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(telegraph) Peter Backus – a maths tutor at the University of Warwick – is the author of a controversial thesis: Why I Don't Have A Girlfriend. In it, the 31-year-old estimates that our chances of finding love are just one in 285,000. By applying Professor Drake's opaque theory of astrophysics N = R* x Fp x Ne x Fi x Fc x L (in which the pioneering scientist predicted that there could be 10,000 civilisations in our galaxy) to singledom, Backus has discovered that out of the 30 million women in the UK, only 26 would make suitable girlfriends for him. Isn't he just being picky, though? "This is what people tell me," laughs Backus, a good-looking man from Seattle, "particularly because of the part where I say that I might only find one in twenty women attractive, but I don't just mean good-looking, I mean attractive to me. " "The paper isn't actually about how to find love," he continues.  More...

(time) More than 5 million unmarried couples cohabit in the U. S. , nearly eight times the number in 1970, and a record-breaking 40% of babies born in 2007 had unmarried parents (that's up 25% from 2002). Sure, there are plenty of baby-daddies in the Levi Johnston vein, i. e.  More...

(msn) Sex is great until, well, it's not so great. When something goes awry, it's easy to blame being in a bad patch or a bad relationship. Or . . .  More...

(dyson/altnet) Femiphobia — the fear and disdain of the female. We’ve got to grapple with instances of internalized sexism in women where the ventriloquist magic of patriarchy is occurring — women’s lips are moving, but men’s voices and beliefs are speaking. A great deal of the nation’s gender problem has to do with how men think about women. Such thinking is largely rooted in the belief that God has set up a hierarchy where women fall beneath men in the natural order of things. But I think it’s long past time that we re-examine our beliefs and come up with different ideas about how things work, and how we should behave in light of what we learn.  More...

(David Swerdlick) Like just about everyone else last week, I read “What Single Women Can Learn From Michelle”—Jenée Desmond-Harris’ sista grrl power manifesto—with keen interest. After all, I’m just as concerned as the next guy with staying up on what “successful black women, with college degrees, ambitious careers and five-year plans” are really thinking. I ought to be—for 10 years I’ve been married to a woman who fits that exact description. You can’t argue with Jenée’s thesis: her coterie of pedigreed, upwardly mobile black women have to dig deeper for unseen potential if they’re looking for “Mr. Right.  More...

(msnbc) Men have been hit much harder than women by this recession. Close to 80 percent of the job losses since December 2007 were jobs held by men, according to economics expert Mark J. Perry, who analyzed Bureau of Labor Statistics data. April unemployment was a seasonally adjusted 10 percent for men and 7. 6 percent for women.  More...

(msnbc) Barack Obama celebrated Father's Day by calling on black fathers, who he said are "missing from too many lives and too many homes," to become active in raising their children. "They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it," the Democratic presidential candidate said Sunday at a largely black church in his hometown. Reminding the congregation of his firsthand experience growing up without a father, Obama said he was lucky to have loving grandparents who helped his mother. He got support, second chances and scholarships that helped him get an education.  More...