Jason DeParle's article in the New York Times, "Two Classes, Divided by 'I Do,'" about a white woman who had three kids with her black boyfriend, who has now abandoned his offspring without a penny was interesting for multiple reasons. One is that out of the voluminous comments that were either NYT Picks or Readers' Favorites, very, very few, if any, mentioned that perhaps society ought to try to do a better job of letting young women know that black guys are, statistically speaking, more likely to:
Has anybody ever calculated the odds?
Smart girls seem mostly to figure this kind of thing out for themselves, but not so bright girls ... not so much. Women are pretty good at conforming to social norms, but when the smart people keep the norms a secret, the not-smart women (and, more importantly, their children) suffer.
