B.W.E Columnist Betty Chambers Exposes The Sinister Motives Behind The Media’s Obsession w/ Sex and The Single Black Woman Propaganda via [#bettychambers, #wsj, #bwe, #irdating, #ralphrichardbanks]

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The Betty Chambers Has Spoken Response  

Black women have to be happy on their own terms.  I’d respect the mainstream media if there

were more articles pertaining to black women, without the insincere hand-wringing, making their own decision to

integrate intimately with non-black men: by working with, making friends with, dating and marrying them. And solely for

their own benefit. -SOURCE

An Interracial Fix for Black Marriage

Black women could find more partners across the race line—and it might just spur more black couples to wed

By RALPH RICHARD BANKS | WSJ

MUST SEE:The Betty Chambers Has Spoken Response

“At this point in my life,” says Audrey, age 39, “I thought I’d be married with children.” A native of southeast Washington, D.C., and the child of parents who are approaching their 50th wedding anniversary, Audrey seems like the proverbial “good catch”—smart, funny, well-educated, attractive.

The Betty Chambers Has Spoken Response  

GoldenAh:

That article does have an air of “What can we do about these black women no one wants?”, right?

As far back as the 1990s, perhaps even earlier, the NY Times periodically ran articles about the large number of college

educated unmarried black women without children along with the high rate of out-of-wedlock births of single black

women.

The angle changes somewhat, but it still has the familiar reek of: Black women’s relationships are a problem for society.

Although I suspect they really mean, Black women’s existence is a problem for society.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. -SOURCE

Audrey earns a good living, too, with an income from management consulting that far surpasses what her parents ever made. Her social life is busy as well, filled with family, friends and church.

MasterfileOnly about one in 20 black women is interracially married; they are much less likely than black men to cross the race line.

What Audrey lacks is a husband. As she told me, sitting at a restaurant in the fashionable Dupont Circle neighborhood of the nation’s capital, “I’m trying to get to a point where I accept that marriage may never happen for me.”

Audrey belongs to the most unmarried group of people in the U.S.: black women. Nearly 70% of black women are unmarried, and the racial gap in marriage spans the socioeconomic spectrum, from the urban poor to well-off suburban professionals. Three in 10 college-educated black women haven’t married by age 40; their white peers are less than half as likely to have remained unwed.

The Betty Chambers Has Spoken Response  

I liked this comment by Daphne so much, I made it a separate post. Check out the following.

Regarding the WSJ* article making the rounds:

I found it bizarre that this was in the The Wall Street Journal*, just like I thought it was bizarre there was a similar article about black women in The Economist** several months (maybe a year?) ago. To me, it reeks of “let us observe these strange creatures known as black women,” similar to zoo animals.

Plus, the author’s subtext is disturbing: more black women should marry out, to potentially improve the rates of black marriage. To me, marriage is a non-sequitur in this context, particularly given that some serious cultural issues aren’t magically repaired by marriage (i.e. ability and desire to provide, being an effective father, knowing HOW to maintain a relationship). I mean, I’d hate for a black woman to have her black man propose primarily because he’s afraid of her being taken off the market rather than….wait for it, actually wanting to be married and prepared for that stage. Not to mention how unfair it is for a non-black man to be a consolation prize because a black man isn’t available or willing to marry. But hey….as long as they’re married, I guess.

I get the supply/demand, economics side of it: more black women date out, fewer are available to black men, black men step up their game. Which is fine, for future generations, I suppose. But for the women NOW who want the best partner for them, it’s entirely possible that even willing black men aren’t the best partners because of the aforementioned cultural issues.

I also give the side-eye to any author who misuses statistics, which the WSJ author did in a major way. That 70% of unmarried black women? Includes widows and the divorced. It is also includes age 15 and up. You would think a law professor would either dig a little deeper with the stats or be more more precise in using them.

Now, I’m not denying cultural differences between whites and blacks with the marriage rate. But it’s certainly convenient for these article to throw out that 70%, as if nobody wants da po’ black woman. Not to mention using the quotes of THREE black women as representative of the majority. And when you correct for college education, the marriage disparity between black and white women is significantly smaller.

Thank you for the contribution and sparking this post, Daphne.   -SOURCE

What explains this marriage gap? As a black man, my interest in the issue is more than academic. I’ve looked at all the studies—the history, the social science, the government data—and I’ve spent a year traveling the country interviewing scores of professional black women. In exchange for my promise to conceal their identities (in part by using pseudonyms, as I’ve done here), they shared with me their most personal experiences and desires in relation to marriage and family.

I came away convinced of two facts: Black women confront the worst relationship market of any group because of economic and cultural forces that are not of their own making; and they have needlessly worsened their situation by limiting themselves to black men. I also arrived at a startling conclusion: Black women can best promote black marriage by opening themselves to relationships with men of other races.

Audrey and other black women confront a social scene in which desirable black men are scarce.

Part of the problem is incarceration. More than two million men are now imprisoned in the U.S., and roughly 40% of them are African-American. At any given time, more than 10% of black men in their 20s or 30s—prime marrying ages—are in jail or prison.

Educationally, black men also lag. There are roughly 1.4 million black women now in college, compared to just 900,000 black men. By graduation, black women outnumber men 2-to-1. Among graduate-school students, in 2008 there were 125,000 African-American women but only 58,000 African-American men. That same year, black women received more than three out of every five law or medical degrees awarded to African-Americans.

These problems translate into dimmer economic prospects for black men, and the less a man earns, the less likely he is to marry. That’s how the relationship market operates. Marriage is a matter of love and commitment, but it is also an exchange. A black man without a job or the likelihood of landing one cannot offer a woman enough to make that exchange worthwhile.

But poor black men are not the only ones who don’t marry. At every income level, black men are less likely to marry than are their white counterparts. And the marriage gap is wider among men who earn more than $100,000 a year than among men who earn, say, $50,000 or $60,000 a year.

The dynamics of the relationship market offer one explanation for this pattern. Because black men are in short supply, their options are better than those of black women. A desirable black man who ends a relationship with one woman will find many others waiting; that’s not so for black women.

The Betty Chambers Has Spoken Response  

As you’ve noted, Daphne, the actual  purpose is: How do we eventually get black men to do X, Y, and Z? Because it always has to be

about them, beginning, middle and ending. People need to let that go and forget about closing the barn door.  The horse that ran out is

now a great-great-grand mare to her offspring. Black men cannot be cajoled, conned or bribed into marrying black women, especially

when they have no desire or interest to do so.. -SOURCE

If many black women remain unmarried because they think they have too few options, some black men stay single because they think they have so many. The same numbers imbalance that makes life difficult for black women may be a source of power for black men. Why cash in, they reason, when it is so easy to continue to play?

Black women who do marry often end up with black men who are less accomplished than they are. They are more likely than any other group of women to earn more than their husbands. More than half of college-educated black wives are better educated than their husbands.

The prevalence of relationships between professional black women and blue-collar black men may help to explain another aspect of the racial gap in marriage: Even as divorce rates have declined for most groups during the past few decades, more than half of black marriages dissolve.

Cecelia, a corporate lawyer who graduated from Columbia Law School, married a construction worker. When he relocated from Denver to her brownstone in Harlem, it took him the better part of a year to find work. “It was a huge strain on the relationship,” Cecelia told me. She didn’t mind his being out of work, but he did. “He was uncomfortable living off me,” Cecelia said. The marriage didn’t last.

So why don’t more black women, especially the most accomplished of them, marry men of other races? Why do they marry down so much and out so little?

Getty ImagesBlack women are the most unmarried group in America.

Black women lead by far the most segregated intimate lives of any minority group in the U.S. They are less than half as likely as black men to wed across racial lines. Only about 1 in 20 black women are interracially married.

Part of the reason, again, is the market. Numerous studies of Internet dating confirm that black women are the partners least desired by non-black men.

The Betty Chambers Has Spoken Response  

However, making black women attractive, approachable

and normal was not the intention of the article.. -SOURCE

But that’s not the whole story. Even if a majority of white men are uninterested in dating black women, that still leaves more than enough eligible white men for every single black woman in America. Moreover, many major urban areas have large numbers of Asian, Indian, Middle Eastern and Latino men, some of whom, according to at least one study of Internet dating, are more responsive to black women than are black men.

The Betty Chambers Has Spoken Response  

Breaking It Down

You did a terrific job of nailing what’s wrong with the WSJ article. It’s not doing us any favors,

but it wasn’t meant to anyway. This article insults a number of people, but the main recipients are black women and white

men.

Imagine if there was a shortage of marriageable partners for white men, and black women were offered up as the last

choice, second rate hope for them, because it would improve their group’s prospects with other, or the same race of,

women? Even though they purportedly have a white woman shortage. -SOURCE

To understand the intimate segregation of black women, we must go beyond the question of whether black women are wanted and look instead at what they want. For some black women, the personal choice of an intimate partner is political. They want to help black men, not abandon them. As one woman told me, “If you know your history, how can you not support black men?”

Others prefer black men because they don’t think a relationship with a non-black man would work. They worry about rejection by a would-be spouse’s family or the awkwardness of having to explain oneself to a non-black partner.

As one 31-year-old schoolteacher in D.C. told me, “It’s easy to date a black man because he knows about my hair. He knows I don’t wash it every day. He knows I’m going to put the scarf on [to keep it in place at night].” Discussions about hair may seem trivial, but for many black women, just the thought of having the “hair talk” makes them tired. It’s emblematic of so much else they’d have to teach.

Some black women resist interracial marriage for a more primal reason. Long before Cecelia began her ill-fated relationship with her now ex-husband, she dated a white law-school classmate. They broke up because she couldn’t imagine having children with him. “I wanted chocolate babies,” she explained to me.

Given her milk-chocolate complexion, green eyes and curly hair, Cecelia worried that a biracial baby might come out looking white. Cecelia wanted chocolate babies not just so they would stay connected to black culture, but for another reason as well: So that no one would ever question whether they were hers. With biracial children, she feared that she might be mistaken for the nanny. Many black women share her anxiety about having a biracial child.

What would happen if more black women opened themselves to the possibility of marrying non-black men?

The Betty Chambers Has Spoken Response  

The key ingredient missing from the entire WSJ article is, What makes a black woman

happy? What would make her feel good? What are the ways to approach her if she appears socially

remote? Examples of their femininity, their normalcy, or exotic allure, would be enticing to the non-black  men reading

the WSJ to look at black women positively. It would peel away at least one thin layer of separation between black women

and non-black men. -SOURCE

To start, they might find themselves in better relationships. Some professional black women would no doubt discover that they are more compatible with a white, Asian or Latino coworker or college classmate than with the black guy they grew up with, who now works at the auto shop.

By opening themselves to relationships with men of other races, black women would also lessen the power disparity that depresses the African-American marriage rate. As more black women expanded their options, black women as a group would have more leverage with black men. Even black women who remained unwilling to love across the color line would benefit from other black women’s willingness to do so.

It’s hard to resist the paradoxical possibility that, if more black women married non-black men, then more black men and women might, in time, marry each other.

The Betty Chambers Has Spoken Response  

Say, what kind of logic is that?

1. Logic that reinforces a negative image of black women. So, no surprise a black man wrote that article for a major newspaper that reaches around the world. Anything for a couple of dollars to denigrate black women is not a hard task for some black men. Regardless of how well meaning he thinks is.
2. The logic is to continue presenting black women as racially, socially and bizarrely backward thinking: we’re worried about our HAIR, the complexions of our children, and our inability to be comfortable with non-black men. Oh, what superficial, silly, non-normal, non-female creatures we are. We are still “othering” ourselves. Those selected black women presents an image of people living in a self-imposed prison who lack any sense to free themselves of it.
3. The logic used is a sneaky backhanded method of blaming black women for the lower rate of black marriage compared to other racial groups. The author cannot directly say that black women must do the asking, since to a mainstream audience it would be outside the norm and viewed as ridiculous. Instead, he indirectly makes the case for marrying non-black men, again like we could make them marry us somehow, to prompt black men into asking. -SOURCE

—Mr. Banks is the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. Adapted from “Is Marriage for White People?: How the African American Marriage Decline Affects Everyone” by Ralph Richard Banks, to be published by Dutton on Sept. 1. Copyright © 2011 by Ralph Richard Banks.

Tags: #BettyChambers, #GoldenAh, #B.W.E., #IRDating, #Propaganda, #WSJ, #SomethingNew, #Economist, #DBR, #IRMarriage, #InternetDating, #BlackFamilyDecline, #ArrestedDevelopment, #ralphrichardbanks, #exposed, #mindcontrol, #subliminalpersuasion, #brainwashing, #waronblackwomen, #bwwm,

Febreze Finally Returns The Love To All The Dirty Hipsters Through Their Filthy NEW “Breathe Happy” Commercials via [#nyt, #febreze, #dirtyhipsters, #stankass, #fuckhygiene, #budussy, #funkitup]

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Febreze Breathe Happy “Experiment” 2011 Commercial

Diving Into Reeking Squalor to Test an Air Freshener

Participants in the commercial were guided into odoriferous settings that were shown to have been treated with a Febreze product.

By ANDREW ADAM NEWMAN | NYT

FOR all the freshening claims made by room deodorizer brands in commercials, the approach of the advertisements themselves can be pretty musty, following a predictable script.

 

Typically, an actress realizes that her immaculate suburban home has been fouled by the smell of cooked fish, her husband’s cigars or her teenage son’s gym bag. After she sprays air freshener, however, odors disappear, as evidenced by her ecstatic inhalations and, occasionally, by her being instantly transported to a flower garden or orange grove.

Febreze, the Procter & Gamble brand, is turning its nose up at that approach.

For a series of television commercials and online videos, the brand recruited subjects off the street, who agreed to be blindfolded for what they were told was a scent experiment. Then, in video captured by hidden cameras, the participants were guided into odoriferous settings, like a dilapidated motel room strewn with dirty clothes, a secondhand store filled with threadbare furniture and soiled stuffed animals, and a cramped Chinese restaurant kitchen with whole uncooked fish on counters.

In the commercials, each setting is shown being treated with a Febreze product, like fabric spray or room spray, before the blindfolded subjects are led in.

In one spot, two women approached on the street in the SoHo section of Manhattan are led blindfolded into an abandoned section of a building, where they are seated on an old, torn couch that has clumps of dog hair.

As two dogs dart around the room, they are asked by an off-screen interviewer to take deep breaths and report what they smell.

One of the women says, “Light floral, lilac,” and “Like when you have fresh laundry.” The other adds, “Maybe even a little bit of citrus,” “a little bit beachy” and “wispy white curtains.”

They are told to remove their blindfolds, and the squalor of the room registers on their shocked faces, with both saying, “Oh, my god,” before two members of the film crew approach them wielding Febreze.

One can of Febreze and box of incense later… and the entire place still reeks of chicken. The smell is sticking to the paint and embedded in my pores. I think the fumes got into my lungs. It’s still lingering in my hair after that shower. My damn closet smells like KFC. It would be cool if I was exaggerating   via Momma Mad

“Join us on Facebook for more experiments as Febreze sets out to make everyone breathe happy — no matter what,” says a voiceover, as the slogan for the campaign, “Breathe Happy,” appears on the screen.

The spots, by Grey New York, part of the Grey Group unit of WPP, are scheduled to be posted on YouTube and Facebook on Friday and to be shown on television beginning July 7.

“What we have done is put our products to the ultimate torture test,” said Jeff Pierce, a spokesman for Febreze. “If Febreze is so strong that it works in this dirty hotel room or on this gross couch, then it’s definitely going to work on my seemingly clean couch, blanket or any fabric in the home.”

•

Tor Myhren, president and chief creative officer at Grey New York, said the impetus for the campaign came from a consumer focus group.

“Someone said, ‘You can close your eyes, but you can’t turn off your nose,’ and that’s a brilliant insight,” Mr. Myhren said. “We said that’s a big, big, big idea that we need to bring to life.”

Members of Procter & Gamble’s research and development team were on the sets for the commercials, which were shot in New York and Los Angeles.

“The R.& D. team would be there with their clipboards and they’d walk in and would say that they thought the malodor was there,” said Elena Grasmann, a vice president at Grey who attended the shoots. (Ms. Grasmann’s own assessment: “It smelled.”)

After Febreze representatives sprayed the sets with the product, they, along with the director and representatives from Grey, huddled in a nearby trailer and watched the proceedings unfold on monitors.

“We all sat there watching and we were anxious and then we were amazed,” said Ms. Grasmann. For the scientists, it was particularly “rewarding for them given that they worked on these products,” she said.

On Facebook, Febreze, which has more than 262,000 followers, will show additional video, including interviews with the subjects, and will solicit suggestions for odorous settings for future commercials.

The brand is also setting up booths at events for blindfold tests, including one planned, appropriately enough, for the Gilroy Garlic Festival in Gilroy, Calif., July 29 to 31. (Among the festival sponsors is another Procter & Gamble brand: Scope.)

Introduced in 1999 as a fabric spray for items that could not be laundered, Febreze expanded into air fresheners in 2004. It has a 68 percent share of the fabric freshener market and a 12.5 percent share of the air freshener market in the United States, according to Euromonitor International, a market research firm.

The brand spent $132.3 million on advertising in 2010 and $25.6 million in the first quarter of 2011, according to the Kantar Media unit of WPP.

•

With consumers increasingly sharing unvarnished opinions of products in online reviews, and the popularity of reality television, it is fitting that marketers are using nonactors in commercials.

A successful 2007 Burger King campaign, “Whopper Freakout,” featured real customers who ordered a Whopper at the counter or drive-through window and were told — erroneously, of course — that the sandwich had been discontinued. Hidden cameras captured their reactions, which ranged from stunned sadness to rage. The campaign was by Crispin Porter & Bogusky, part of MDC Partners.

Commercials for air fresheners tend to have “an almost Victorian aversion to the unpleasant,” said David Vinjamuri, author of “Accidental Branding” and an adjunct professor of marketing at New York University.

Asked to review the new Febreze commercials, he said he was impressed.

“You have a visceral reaction to these commercials even before you see the reaction of the subjects, because you don’t see those kinds of environments in advertising in general,” Mr. Vinjamuri said.

“It’s a classic advertising setup in terms of showing a problem and solution, but in a much more credible format,” he continued.

Multimedia

Febreze Commercial

A version of this article appeared in print on July 1, 2011, on page B3 of the New York edition with the headline: Diving Into Reeking Squalor to Test an Air Freshener.

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