Still Unmarried: Black Women and Relationship Advice Literature

Abstract:This article examines the ways in which racial patriarchal tropes from E. Franklin Frazier's The Negro Family in the United States (1939) and Daniel Patrick Moynihan's public-policy report The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965) have been reconstructed for the present via relationship-advice literature marketed to heterosexual black women under the guise of love and increasing the rate of black marriage. A close analysis of the connection between historic pathological narratives of the black family and the current self-help genre exposes racial and gendered politics, concessions, and negotiations within the black community. Utilizing popular relationship-advice literature that achieved New York Times bestseller list status—Steve Harvey's Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man (2009), Tyrese Gibson and Rev. Run's Manology: Secrets of Your Man's Mind Revealed (2013)—this article focuses on the culturally embedded linkages among the concepts of worthiness for respect, sexual propriety (chiefly in heterosexist terms), and behavioral decorum—especially when directed at women. It also looks at the gate-keeping function these norms serve in regulating and limiting black women's right to full political and social recognition. In so doing, this article reveals the ways in which relationship-advice literature maintains black women's subordinate position within the black community, as well as within the dominant white society.