Victimhood Poker

This one from yesterday's Guardian is absolutely awesome. The writer (an African-American woman who doesn't appear to like men of any colour) is quite possibly the most prejudiced writer to grace those pages for simply yonks (for example, she seems to assume that people should marry others of the same race; she's clearly unhappy being single but looks down on married people) and lacks any sort of self-awareness. Everything is always somebody else's fault:

It's cast as a crisis for the African American community, but the subtext is that women should settle down – and settle for less... Over the last decade, America has been playing an increasingly aggressive game of "What's wrong with you, then?" with heterosexual single black women.

US marriage rates are dropping, according to a recent Pew Research Center study. But African Americans marry even less often than their white counterparts. According to the 2010 census, just over 26% of white Americans aged 15 and older have never married, compared to 47% of the black population.

We are told that the "black marriage crisis" (pdf) affects none so much as black women. Though black men are equally unmarried, news articles, panel discussions, special reports and books solely lament the fact that black women are half as likely to marry as white women.

There are, of course, many complicated reasons for this gap. Experts cite numbers: there are more American black women than men; higher rates of interracial partnering among black men; bias against black men in the criminal justice system and the legacy of slavery. There is also the achievement gap: black women outnumber black men in higher education more than two to one, and this often creates a wedge of opportunity and class between them.

But no reason seems more compelling than the idea that black women need to change who they are and what they want. In Is Marriage For White People?, Ralph Richard Banks tells black women to date more nonblack men. In an interview with gossip site NecoleBitchie.com that exploded around the web, actor and singer Tyrese cautioned black women against being "too independent".

And so on and so forth. If there's anybody she hasn't been rude about, I'd be pleased to hear who.