I find it interesting that none of the top articles have actually challenged the veracity of this question. And I have to wonder why? The statistics show that most black men date and marry black women. Most of them prefer black women to white. Over 90% of relationships are same race relationships, this is actually true of any community not just black. Most people tend to marry within their race.

There is a difference in the number of black men dating/married to white women, compared with the reverse combination. This I presume is where the idea that black me prefer white women comes from. One interesting note, is that in a society which is supposed to be becoming more racially tolerant, the number of interracial relationships with black women and white men has been steadily decreasing over the years, it used to be roughly equivalent to that of black men dating interracially.

So the answer to the question “why do black men prefer white women?” is simple, they don’t. This is hardly surprising as most black men live in communities with a multitude of black women, they go to church with them, are raised by them and live and work along side them. Thus it makes sense that most of them would meet, fall in love with black women.

However, black communities are also part of the greater American community, which is still mostly run by white America. This greater community values women predominantly on their looks and determines which ‘looks’ are the most desirable. While many would like to think that what and who they find attractive is not influenced by culture the truth is that culture can have a great influence on what is considered beautiful.

You can see this if you look back in time at the changing norms for beauty among both men and women. These changes are not just over time, but also vary from culture to culture. I find that I as a black women can travel to different countries and sometimes to different areas or communities within the same country and be considered fantastically beautiful, or very ugly.

What this leads to is the idea for some men that certain types of women are more attractive because they fit the cultural norms of attractiveness. Weight is a good example of this. The current penchant for ultra thin women in the US, would have been found rather odd 50 years ago where men liked women with a little meat on their bones. There was a time when white women were considered beautiful if they never went in the sun and their skin was so white you could see their veins, these days if you don’t have a good tan you are not considered as beautiful.

So for some men, white women are considered to be more of a catch as society tells them so. To show you are successful our society tells us that if you are a man you should have a fast car, designer clothes, large house and a pretty blond wife. For men, who feel that looking important is very important, having a white blond wife may be a status symbol. There is also a tendency in our culture to devalue black women, there are so many negative stereotypes and so few positive ones that many young black men grow up bombarded with media images of beautiful women of many races, but relatively few of black black women.

I noted with interest that while a number of TV series started placing women in leading roles as the love interest of the main character, many of those stories ended up having the white male select a white female over the black female, killing off the black female or making them otherwise unavailable for that relationship. None of them actually ended up as a happy successful relationship. There are very few celebrity couples where the wife is black and the husband is white that are followed with any interest and black celebrities wed or in relationships with other blacks are also not given the same media spotlight.

So while a few black men might think that white women are ‘better’ than black women I suspect that the number of men that do this is very small. I think that most people in interracial relationships simply fell in love with someone of a different race.

I think the interest in the issue is very much a reflection of the insecurities and biases of people of all races, of white women wanting to feel superior to black women, of white men wanting to feel superior to black men, of black men wanting to show that they are just as good as whites, and to black women who also feel that they are not appreciated as women.

The truth is that there are attractive, wonderful people of all races, black men as a group do not prefer white women, all black women are not sitting around seething because they are jealous of white women, there are white men that find black women attractive and there are white women that fall in love with black men.