Black women have a great deal more say in family finances than White Women.
I have all this stuff in my head and I write bits and pieces of it down hoping to make a point and I go back and reread it and it frequently feels like it doesn't really cover what I imagined I covered.
The above quote is in the footnote of a piece about TERFs and White Women. Most White American women have no meaningful human rights and I've long read about and observed Black American women and Black American culture because within that culture, women are more meaningfully whole human beings than women in White American culture.
The reality is Black Americans survive their shitty shitty shitty situation because they are matrilineal and matriarchal.
In a subculture where Black men are frequently last hired and first fired, incarcerated excessively and actively encouraged by larger social forces beyond their control to NOT be the provider for their own children, like a lion pride, the backbone of the Black American family and community is the sisters, mothers, grandmothers and aunts. The women who are blood relatives hold it all together.
Some study suggested that the happiest couples in the US are mixed race heterosexual marriages with a White husband and Black wife. No one seems to know why and speculation I've read sounded like BS to me, so much so I can't recall what I read because why bother?
I think intelligent talented White men hoping for a modern two-career couple lifestyle in hopes of finding happiness with a partner they can TALK with and feel understood by typically fail to find it with a White woman. If they happen to marry a Black woman, she's probably more like what they imagined in a partnership of equals.
In White culture, the lack of real rights and real voice and real humanity of the women is so rampant that it's not enough for HIM to be pro women's lib and blah blah blah. If she's White, odds are extremely extremely extremely poor she REALLY has the makings of a hard charging career person with a mind of their own and all the personal attributes that go along with having a real career.
It's a chicken and egg problem. There's no way to easily sort out if taking your career seriously leads to those traits or if having those traits leads to a serious career.
It kind of doesn't matter and I think it can easily be that BOTH are true, but Black women don't get the Cinderella Story bullshit fed to them from birth that they need to be beautiful and LOVE their man and then all their needs will be provided for because LOVE.
White women are actively encouraged to be helpless but beautiful damsels in distress who see the love of a good man as the solution to all life's problems and to plan their lives around supporting his career and raising the children and making their paid jobs a secondary consideration even if they come from an upper class family and have substantial college education because daddy paid for it while they were waiting to meet Prince Charming.
I was a military wife for two decades and that superficially looks like the Cinderella Story but it's not.
First, I had rights granted me by the Army that civilian wives don't get. Second, he was gone a lot and my job was really to keep the home fires burning in his absence, not be his personal servant.
There's more to it than that but I don't want to go on a long tangent here. I want to mostly talk about Black American women and I think that statistic that the happiest marriages in the US are between a White man and Black woman are because Black American culture produces women who expect to work by default and expect to have a real say in their lives including in details like family finances and they aren't the helpless damsels in distress unable and unwilling to have an opinion and voice it that White women seem to frequently be.
They are more self sufficient, less entitled, and not some giant god damned parasite who believes that if they are beautiful and get married, they are supposed to have life handed to them on a silver platter by a man "because LOVE."
They are probably more interesting to talk with and better in bed because a lot of White women view sex primarily through a lens of prudishly proving how virtuous and pure they are. That's part of the whole Cinderella Story bullshit, that you should be a virgin on the wedding night or at least low mileage and he will own your body and reproductive capacity and can feel confident you aren't unfaithful because honestly a lot of uptight White bitches seem to not like sex AT ALL.
Years and years ago when I used to read a lot of dead tree women's magazines, I somewhat often tripped across articles saying shit like:
1. All heterosexual sex is rape.
2. Men should be penetrated at least once so they can know how completely AWFUL it is for all women to have sex.
Yeah, you sound like fun in bed. /s
The narrative about women's rights as told by predominantly Caucasian women writers and editors frequently rails against what evil horny bastards men are as if all the problems of all women everywhere would be solved if only men didn't want sex from us.
Rather than talking about "I want good sex myself." or even "Like poor Black women in my country, I want a SAY in how the money gets spent."
They have a SAY because they work for a living and aren't pretty little baubles on some man's arm who feel ENTITLED to The Good Life for being pretty and married. So they don't put up with BS White women put up with because if its too ugly, they are walking out and paying their own way.
White women trend towards not arguing about "small stuff" because they make little to no money of their own, their husband makes more money than they have any hope of making and if he leaves, she has no hope of replacing that lost income. And not arguing about "small stuff" means letting their quality of life quietly erode because they don't want to rock the boat if it's not worth losing everything over.
The longer this goes on, the more vacuous the marriage is and it's got NOTHING to do with HIS behavior. There's probably nothing HE can do to MAKE his upper class White wife speak up, have a voice, take a chance.
Her daddy had money. Her husband has money. The dirty truth is she's probably a prostitute earning her living on her back and politely calling it marriage.
Black women are not earning their living on their back. They have real jobs, they have sex for some reason other than paying their bills and politely calling it marriage and they have minds and voices in a way White women typically lack.
The American welfare system is worth more to Black Americans than to White Americans because Black incomes generally trend lower, they have higher rates of unemployment and Black men are frequently incarcerated. This helps foster a situation where young Black women may choose to have a baby in their teens or twenties or choose to be sexually active and not really care if it leads to pregnancy.
White Americans have so much money that welfare is viewed as a horrifying pittance you can't live on. Black Americans may view it as having an income of their own at all which they might not otherwise have because good luck getting a job.
Research I have read indicates that an aspect of Black culture fostered by all this crap is that they cannot reasonably count on conforming to White middle class morality where children are supposed to be born to a married couple and raised by their biological mother and provided for by their biological father.
Black men cannot count on successful high paid careers and are at high risk of incarceration. So Black culture trends towards single moms who cuss the unemployed or incarcerated biological father for not providing for the child and are with a boyfriend because anything the boyfriend does for her children is him being nice and kind and generous and giving gifts to children he has no obligation to.
Years ago when I was subscribed to a financial magazine, they had a regular feature where financial experts advised someone on their financial stuff. Probably the only one I recall reading really stuck in my craw and I've never figured out what I want to say about it.
It was a Black couple where the husband was making an unusually good salary and could have supported a full-time wife. The wife had two or more seasonal businesses that weren't financially successful and were defacto bleeding the couple of the husband's income.
They had a child and she wanted to prioritize raising her child but was unwilling to just quit work and stay home, so she was pursuing this financial debacle of pretending to have a career while losing money. Because she nominally worked, a large share of their income went to restaurant meals and she didn't cook.
Neither financial advisor suggested she give up this farce, do the full-time wife and mom thing until the child was older and COOK to fix their finances. Instead, they politely tried to suggest how she could tweak her failing businesses in hopes of making them make financial sense, knowing it probably couldn't be made to work.
This is probably not remotely the norm for Black couples where the husband usually doesn't make enough to let his wife pretend to have a career while bleeding the family budget for two failing seasonal businesses. It's likely that it looks somewhat more like the nominal careers of a lot of White women who play at having a career because they don't want to identify as homemakers and want to sound interesting and empowered but don't really know how to make money or be taken seriously.
I didn't read up on Black culture hoping to help Blacks. I read up on it hoping to make my life work.
"Money" doesn't per se fix anything and for White women the lure of marrying well and getting the Cinderella Story ending apparently looks like The Easy Button in life and ends up being the ONLY option in their minds in too many cases.
Because once you have a husband with an excellent income and are a homemaker -- or playing at having a career -- the idea of losing his income knowing that you have no hope of marrying that well a second time or earning that much yourself seems to cause a lot of women to do everything in their power to stay married no matter how utterly miserable they are.
This is probably the real reason I was thrown off Metafilter when it was owned by Josh Millard, a White man with a nominally two-career couple lifestyle whose wife very much played The Little Wifey and was involved in Mefi Meetups solely to be the Christian helpmate to her husband and not in any meaningful way as a member in her own right.
I was a homeless divorced single mom with a mind and life of my own and I make people like them extremely uncomfortable.
A lot of White women may have job titles that sound like Real Careers (TM) but their bosses may know they can't really count on these women because her real income is from her marriage and she will prioritize keeping that income over this one, which may mean moving elsewhere to follow his career or quitting to raise the children. Either way, when push comes to shove, they probably know you can't count on most White women to stick around or to handle the dirty jobs involved.
In contrast, Black women need their jobs and take their careers seriously and seem more likely to eventually end up in middle management or whatever because the company can count on them. They may not become CEO, but they also aren't relegated to positions people in charge feel they can easily fill with any pretty little airhead.