Customer Reviews

Why Black Men Love White Women: Going Beyond Sexual Politics to the Heart of the Matter

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1 star:		(9)

 

 

Before you read this book, know that the author is a stand-up comic. He slyly presents his opinion as researched fact and draws conclusions based on these "facts." Rajen Persaud begins with a supposition--black men "love" white women--that may have been backed by some study that some sociologist has already conducted but is absent from this text; in the end, we just have to believe him. That's page one. Persaud continues the trend of faux-scholarship, trashing Phillis Wheatley's historical worth based on ONE POEM and painting Condoleezza Rice as a traitor to the African American community simply because she studied Russian. He calls Alan Keyes a "self-serving ingrate" for describing slavery (not the American history of slavery, but slavery in general) as "in violation of the fundamental premise of human dignity... not a racial issue." Valuing black lives over those of others is inherently racist, Rajen Persaud--shame on you. The author seems unsure whether this book is supposed to be a scholarly work or a work of humorous observation like that of Chris Rock or Richard Pryor, who are cited frequently. The biggest difference between Rock and Pryor and Persaud is two of them are funny, and the other one wrote this book. Unfortunately, "Why Black Men..." is either a sociological study that doesn't hold up to basic principles of proof and argument or a funny book that, frankly, is too pretentious (and un-funny) to be comedic. Rajen Persaud doesn't know which it is, and neither do I.

The title "Why Do Black Men Love White Women?" is only an attention grabber for a 264-page rant. Understand before going in that the author's opinion was the major source of fodder for this book--don't let the wealth of fancy quotations fool you.

Why Black Men Love White Women by Rajen Persaud is an outdated take on interracial couples. I was surprised when asked to review this book for my book club, but eager to see what the buzz was about once I got my hands on a copy. I struggled to maintain an open mind, but Peraud's shallow argument made it difficult to do so. Sad to say, I found it to be a two-hundred page history lesson on slavery and the misconception of the black man.

Persaud went on a tirade discussing slavery and how black men felt overpowered and useless when it came to dealing with black women. He states how black women make their men feel; "For black men, everything has been taken away his entire life: dignity, power, self-respect, and masculinity, the ability to earn a living, and too many times, his freedom as well as his life." Persaud's claim to Why Black Men Love White Women is because white women make black men feel whole, complete, and comfortable. Once a black man has conquered the heart of a white woman he feels as if he is being accepted into "White Society". Another example of how a white woman makes a black man feel: "a white woman rejuvenates his personal and financial capital, because of circumstance; she may also give the appearance of being more supportive, and, more often than not, may also have or be able to access resources because of a stronger support system."

Empirical Studies are used in science or to prove any theory; any theory worth noting should be backed by empirical evidence. Rajen Persauds' claim to "Why Black Men Love White Women" holds no validity; he did not have any statistics, claims, interviews or social experiments. His sensational claim is not supported by any scientific data. All he did was use a catchy picture on the cover with a reach out and grab you title. He is said to be a stand up comedian, but sadly enough his jokes were as tired as this book.

I personally interviewed 10 people while reading this book to see what their take on his theories were. And believe me I went from the mailroom, to the security guards and finally the Vice President of Marketing and they were just as upset as I. I think it is safe to say the Persaud achieved what he wanted; to stir up some controversy and get people to buy his book.

Reviewed by: Cheryl H

APOOO BookClub

Finally, someone took the time to lay this issue out the way it should be. This brother hit it from all angles, from the historical to the social, and even to the religious. While much of the content was a bit disturbing, it was good to know. And it made me feel a whole lot better about myself. At least I know why now and I know I'm not the only one who feels this way.

Rajen Persaud suggests that (only) white men have the answer to the following question: "Why Do Black Men Love White Women?", which is incongruous, revisionist nonsense. Every man has their own preferences of women and it's no different than women who have preferences of men. So, first off, to put a blanket statement on a certain group of people who fall in this category is just superficial. This book is not at all about interracial relationships between black men and white women. Instead, this book is more about black men dealing with power struggles, how black people are portrayed in American media, ignorance in modern urban culture and how some black men try to regain their masculinity, after they've had it taken from them by scared, racist white men.

This book never gives anyone an answer or even an excuse as to why black men "love" white women, at all. This book also fails to answer this question properly, honestly or respectfully. The author has a habit of going off-topic and off-the-wall many times. In fact, the only chapter in this book that really brings up the subject about interracial relationships is the chapter entitled "White Women Are Just Stupid". If anything, this book mainly discusses how the black community has been destroyed thanks to white male ego/insecurity, along with how black men and women are degraded in Hollywood. Rajen Persaud discusses how black people are painted in films such as "Pulp Fiction", "Monster's Ball", "Barbershop" (a movie he personally dislikes), etc... The author states that black people suffer from power struggles based on how much they've endured from white America, slavery, Jim Crow and the legacies of rape, fear and injustices perpetuated by white men. However, none of these things have anything at all to do with why black men "love" white women.

The author does call out ignorant stereotypes about white women being "pushovers" and that this stereotype is only created to make certain people feel better about themselves. I will give him credit for this; it needed to be said a long time ago! Rajen tells it like it is when he admits that black women are just as "soft" as white women and that regardless of how angry, demanding or pissed off a woman can be, a man is going to be a man and does what he wants to do in the end.

Black men aren't the only people in the world who are paranoid and dealing with power struggles. Black women stress over black men, for the fear of "losing" them. Rajen is a man who is obsessed with pop culture and street life. It's evident these are the main sources he gets his information from, which is why his book is so eccentric. If the author had picked a proper title for this book, representing what the content is really about, it wouldn't be so bad. I have read this book not too long ago and based on the author's writing skill and craft, it looks as if this book could have been written sometime in the 1990s. This isn't because the subject of "interracial dating" is old because it will never get old, but his writing skill & the subjects he touches are outmoded. This book should have been called "Paranoia in the Black Community", because that is what this book is mainly about: deep-seated paranoia and anger that sleeps in the minds of certain African-Americans. But if that was the title of the book, it probably wouldn't sell very many units. The choice title for this book is proof that Rajen Persaud just has an urge to sell books, just like Michael Eric Dyson and Karrine Steffans.

While the author has a few good points, don't waste your money on this off-topic & weak book. Many of these things have been said 10-20 years ago.

INSTEAD, READ: "White Men Can't Hump (As Good as Black Men)", by Todd Wooten or "Handling the Truth II", by Darrin Lowery-Smith.

I have reasd so many of these reviews and it makes me wonder WHO actually READ this book? 1. Rajen Persaud is a male - not a female. 2.The art on the cover of the book DOES NOT tell you what is in the book. Personally I would feel better if Mr. Persaud would disclose his own ancestry - I suspect from his photo that it plays into his decision to write the book.

3. This link [...] will take you to an interview with Persaud so you can hear him discuss what his reasons are for writing the book.

4. His primary reason appears to be that he found a subject that would get his sales up higher than his previous books.

5. There is little that is back up with empirical evidence or even can be shown to be factual in this book so if you want one (more) man's opinion on this subject spend your money.

Refreshing is the best word to describe Rejan's take on "Why Black Men Love White Women". For once a Black man discusses the topic from a neutral perspective instead of one that attacks and/or disrespects Black women. Conversely,his love and respect for Black women is evident. He is passionate, candid, and historical. He introduces a unique perspective and a wealth of new reading material for the thoughtful reader. The book is filled with useful information beyond the scope of the subject matter, such that he may have done himself a disservice by the title and cover of the book, both of which might discourage some readers. As does the Editor, I strongly encourage that the book not be judged by its cover nor by its title but that the reader instead first peruse the content. You will be pleasantly surprised. As Rejan exposes the reader to a variety of relevant issues, he brilliantly brings every chapter back to the topic at hand, BM/WW relationships. I HIGHLY recommend this book and encourage that astute book clubs that engage in post reading discussion, utilize the book as a catalyst for healthy and engaging dialog. Its a good book. Pick it up!

A satisfied NJ reader.

In terms of reading interesting cultural information, Mr. Persaud definitely presented it in this work. However, his opinions are a bit extreme to me and based on reading his book, I've concluded that the question asked cannot be answered, and I honestly think we need to advance enough as a people to not have to ask it. People are different, and to classify them, especially in the manner that he has, is just wrong and extremely judgemental.

no matter what some people say the curiosity of Love and in a Interrracial setting still makes heads turn and sparks debates and Opinions.Rajen Persaud gets dap from me for asking the question and given it a response that goes back to Slavery to now and everywhere else in between. so many topics and feelings are expressed in this book. the title of the book will throw you a curve ball because don't let the title fool you because Persaud cuts to the heart of the matter. a must read book.

Finally!!! The hard truth can no longer be ignored."Why Black Men Love White Women proves that Rajen Persaud is at his controversial best. This book is a thought provoking must read that provides substantial fact after fact laced with innovative ideas. Black men, I don't want to give up on you. After you've read this book, there might be some hope for us yet!!

This is a devilishly clever "Black woman-centric" book that everywhere shines a new interesting light in the four corners of the American disease of racism. In doing so, this author brings vividly into focus a new more honest historical picture of that disease. And the results aren't pretty.

While it is a mostly heartfelt anecdotal presentation of a rich selection of vignettes and nuggets taken from his own personal experiences as a filmmaker and comedian, there is also a great deal of passion, wisdom and a mountain of common sense folded into these stories. They don't just cover ordinary people but also celebrities and similar structures of psychosexual habits in races in other countries. But however clever, honest and heartfelt, sadly it is not to be mistaken for serious social science research. Yet, it must be said that in any case this is almost beside the point since everything he says here is said with such devastating clarity, with no small amount of wit, minces no words, protects no sacred cows other than black women, and most importantly, even though it cannot be taken as serious social science research, has the full ring of truth. That is a lot for one book published in the USA.

My first criticism of the book is that the author failed to take even the minimum time to survey the social science literature, or even the Bureau of Labor social statistics, or new developments in social psychology, and most egregiously of all, not even elementary Freudian psychology, to see what they all had to say about the issue of cross racial sexual behavior, or about the psycho-dynamics and pathology of the sexual mentality and habits of peoples in race-sensitive cultures. Had he done so, a whole new world of data would have opened up to him and he might have been able to jump some of the many landmines and hurdles that I believe in the end finally did his ad hoc and impressionistic analysis in. The author is much too bright not to have known that he was sitting on booby-trapped terrain with landmines everywhere. This is so for many reasons; the least of which is not the fact that it is an extremely sensitive issue on both sides of the racial divide. But more importantly, because psychosexual sensitivity is one of the many residual and secondary effects of America's number one disease: racism. And in this case, it is almost a truism that these secondary diseases all tend to be much worse than the original disease itself.

My second criticism is a much more serious one. Implicit in the author's intellectual posture is a failure to realize that his "black worldview" is a wholly owned subsidiary of the same "racist white worldview" that he criticizes. Both greatly diminish our humanity. He seems to think that the artificial split of the "racist white worldview," into two improper mutual exclusive equally racist immoral subsets of "white" and "black" is all there is to our humanity; that there is no way to escape this existential trap. So all that is left is to choose one side or the other? And of course since the white side is by racist definition, a moral atrocity: therefore nothing is left but to choose the black side.

However, this deeply embedded "dead man's choice," between either "black racism" or its mother, "white racism" as an existential posture is just another hallucinatory byproduct of being embedded in a racist paradigm in the first place. It is another second order or residual effect of racism. Our humanity is larger than this implicitly constricted paradigm. It HAS to be larger than this constricted psychosexual madness, or else we are all lost to the madness. Otherwise there is no hope. And as bright as the author is, why he fails to see that there is a larger more human paradigm just above the madness (and apparently just above his head) is surprising. He unwittingly operates fully within the grip of the gravity of racism with no awareness that he is doing so. He is scarily comforted by working locked behind the screen of black racist (Black woman run) orthodoxy: believing that having the moral high ground in a cesspool of bifurcated racism has some intrinsic value and meaning? Yet, the truth is that it too is just another ghost of the slave plantation: a wholly own subsidiary of the racist madness of white supremacy.

Mr. Persaud is locked into the same racist jail he is flailing against. He is bumping his head against the walls and not hearing himself or seeing the blood of his own self-inflicted wounds.

As he delves into his subject matter the author sometimes is guided by intuition; at other times by his hip New York style and his passage into the ether of the literary and artsy world of comedy and filmmaking; and at still others times by his own innate and immense talent for unvarnished storytelling. I love the fact that he mines the comedians, the only real truth tellers left in America, especially my favorite Richard Pryor. Altogether it is an enticing smorgasbord that is both entertaining and enlightening. But all his talent and honesty does not render his task any easier. There are endless subtleties to issues such as cross-racial sex. One cannot mine just a few of ones own personal vignettes and hope to get it right. It is not possible. That is why, at the end of the author's many "streams of consciousness," his many vignettes seem to devolve into a can of worms that cannot be easily un-tangled. His collection of stories, beg the question of where is the over-arching theory? The one desperately needed to pull and hold together the many loose strains that seem to lead everywhere, which is to say, to nowhere? The larger "anti-racist" paradigm is where our collective humanity must lie.

The author's Story

What 400 years of racial madness has done to our culture is to send our collective humanity cascading downward -in a virtual tailspin into the bottomless pit of its least common denominator: psychosexual fears. And this ignominious end point is "scary unconscious sexual yearnings" at each of the four corners of our nation's psyche.

Black men hate black women because of what white men did to them in slavery, because of the power racism has handed over to them, because of their own impotence in a white run world. And as a consequence, they desire white women both because they are considered untouchable, and out of revenge for their own powerlessness, and for what white men have done to blacks and to our collective humanity as a whole.

Black women desire white men to improve the genetic characteristics of their offspring (especially their skin color and texture of their kids hair) and to be able to finally feel what "real masculine power" is like. They hate black men for not being able to protect them or being unable to provide for them, and for being little more than sperm donors; that is to say for their utter powerlessness in a world run on being powerful.

White women want to taste the raw savagery of the forbidden black buck: the ultimate fruit being the black phallic, and to free herself from the vise grip of the sexually insecure white male, and his smothering paternalism disguised as protection, but which is in fact just a ruse for his own immense sexual fears and insecurities.

And the final leg of this four-cornered stool of race-based sexual pathology is the white man, who wants a black whore behind every closet door, but also wants to keep the black man at bay, from reeking revenge and thus from the white woman's bedroom, where she sits there quietly like the Virgin Mary on a pedestal. But most important of all, at the same time, he wants to control the action going on in all four corners of the drama, making the world safe for white male sexual fears. This is basically a summary of the author's very entertaining but nevertheless rather convoluted set of stories.

Clearly the "grand Hotel" for all the machinations taking place at the four corners of American society, is white supremacy. Whenever sex is involved, white supremacy is quickly deployed and orchestrated by the white man like a demonic conductor of a symphonic orchestra. White supremacy becomes the evil gravity by which he succeeds in structuring a corrupt racist social reality and social order based on skin color gradations and hidden prohibited cross-racial sexual desires, including his own. According to this author, one of the many unintended consequences of this arrangement is the fact that inescapably (and unwittingly) we have all become actors in this low-level pathological psychosexual drama. Apparently (and this is where the author's story become murky for me), the white man's only objective is to maintain power over this, his own self-made creation? However, I believe that positing an implicit theory that maintaining power "in the abstract" is the reason for all this madness, drastically over-simplifies the problem, ceding in the process, too many godlike attributes to the white man and to the overarching paradigm of white supremacy. On the surface, the "pursuit of power in the abstract" may indeed seem like a worthy pursuit. However, why is the pursuit of power so important to the white man? How and from where did he acquire his godlike powers? Where is the humanity in such a pursuit? Are we then to deny that white men also have souls and are also motivated by normal human concerns? That he too is a fallible creature who in the end also seeks the same as the rest of humanity: nobility, honor and peace for his soul?

But clearly there is less humanity, honor, and peace in this "supposed" empty and abstract pursuit of power than there is in those being manipulated by it. Why is the white man taking the "moral low ground" in his own self-made drama? So something is missing from the author's loosely woven together paradigm based on the guiding principle that our humanity is about the white man's pursuit of power. To make sense of all this bottled-up unconscious circular pursuit of power and sexual activity in the abstract, the author's story begs for theoretical direction grounded in fundamental human instincts. Thus his collection of vignettes is missing a central organizing theme, a more secure theory to guide the plot other than just the white man's empty pursuit of white supremacy through maximization of his power.

I believe Ernest Becker's notion of a cultural "Hero system" answers all such questions, and it must be left as an exercise for the author to examine the rich implications of this paradigm. To wit: America is a stage where dramas of heroism are performed. Scripts are written, roles are assigned, and plots are played out in the racist theater in the grand ballroom of America's Grand Hotel. In the end, the reward is self-esteem based on authentic meaningfulness, not power. According to Becker, man is first a spider who spins webs of meaningfulness. He is thus first a "self-esteem machine," and then much, much later a "power maximizer." But still this is a ten star effort. Touché!