As someone who works in IT, it blows my mind that people still send dumb*ss offensive emails that surely will get them into trouble. And double down bonus dunce points for Morehouse College administrative assistant Sandra Bradley for thinking the email would remain within her circle of homophobic girlfriends. (Southern Voice):

Morehouse College President Robert Franklin is promising to take “prompt and appropriate action” after two members of his staff forwarded an email of a stylish gay wedding ceremony and one made anti-gay comments.

The email, sent to Southern Voice after making the rounds through Fulton County government, included the following lines from Sandra Bradley, an administrative assistant who works in Franklin’s office. The email includes more than a dozen pictures that show a lavish wedding ceremony between two unidentified black gay men earlier this month.

“I can’t believe this wedding. It’s 2 men. They don’t smile in a lot of pictures and they look like a few brothers I’ve seen in the streets looking STRAGHT. Black women can’t get a break, either our men want another man, a white woman (or other nationality that’s light with straight hair), they are locked up in jail or have a “use to be” fatal disease. I’m beginning to believe Eve was a black woman and we Black women are paying for all the world’s sins through her actions (eating the apple),” Bradley wrote.

Bradley appears to have received the email from a coworker at Morehouse, both of whom used their work email addresses.

The two men in the photos, Michael Cole Smith and Jamil Smith Cole, posted the pictures on Facebook and the images were downloaded and added to the chain mail.

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While this is obviously a story about homophobia, it’s also an illustration of the level of desperation out there of a slice of black women who are weary of the lack of available “marriage-worthy” black men. It doesn’t mitigate the above incident, but it does give an opening for discussion of the latter issue, which was covered by NPR earlier this week — “Black Women: Successful And Still Unmarried.” It notes that if you are a black woman with an advanced degree, statistically the odds are that you’ve never married.

New research from Yale University suggests that highly educated black women are twice as likely to have never been married by the age of 45 as white women with similar education.

Hannah Bruckner, who leads the Center for Research on Inequalities and the Life Course at Yale University, says the disparity can be partly explained by a difference in dating preferences between some black men and women.

“Black men are more likely to marry outside of their race, and black women are more likely to marry outside of their education,” she says.

Bruckner says that is compounded by tough competition for a smaller pool of highly educated black men.

So many of these women, if they do marry, may marry a blue collar man, but for others, like Sandra Bradley, they hold onto their anger with a level of toxicity that is directed at all of the real and perceived obstacles for black women re:obtaining a wedding ring.

One may wonder why these successful women just don’t expand her conceptual dating pool? There are reasons for that as well, according to the article.

Niambi Carter, 31, has a Ph.D. and is an assistant professor of political science at Purdue University, admits that she has been hard-pressed to find a black mate with a similar level of education.

But she says it may be just as hard to find an interested man who is not black.

“Black women are not seen as marriageable by those outside of their race,” she says. “We are not seen as adding status.”

Ah, there’s the rub. Even with an advanced degree and polish, many black women do believe the deck is even stacked against them if the expand their color horizons.

The women interviewed also mention something that rings true for me as a woman of color — that for many of us (regardless of sexual orientation), we have been raised with a sense of obligation to pursue excellence to overcome the racial and economic barriers faced by our predecessors. That all-consuming pursuit for some comes at the expense of cultivating relationships — particularly if one has to work through school rather enjoy the freedom of undergraduate college life for those who have more time (and fewer personal obligations) to do so.

It’s a quandry to say you can be happy single when all the social and media signals are blasting heterosexual images of marriage. It’s probably as irritating as being gay and having to endure the endless imagery as well. But you see how this despondency turns pathological and hateful.

Ms. Bradley needs to take a look in the mirror and re-evaluate the negative, ignorant and hateful energy she typed into that email because it reflects such poor self-esteem; does she really think black women would be better off marrying some closeted SGL man who won’t tell her about his same-sex encounters but will treat her with a nice big rock on her finger?