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i was bored at work yesterday and decided to peruse through Yahoo "personals", just for fun. i think it's interesting and fun to see who in my age group is desperate enough to use that service, and also who i may recognize. so i set the search options for male, 33-45 years old, african-american, portland-vicinity. i was shocked but no, not really that shocked at the prospects that came up.

the most interesting thing to me was that most of these black men lived in the outskirts, such as beaverton, tigard, and aloha. i didn't know there were that many black men living out there...but i guess with the gentrifying white yuppies taking over the inner northeast, there aren't a lot of choices left except for the outskirts for some blacks.

i also noticed that the prospects- about 108 of them, were pretty pathetic looking. i mean, i realize that not every black man in the portland area does yahoo personals, but the ones who do do it look pretty raggedy(sorry!). most of them were physically unattractive looking. a lot of them had pseudo-names like "sly" or "slick cat". some of them looked like thugs. one of them had a tag line that read: 'when i love, i love with my whole heart and when i hate, it's forever'. what the hell!!?? the rest of the tags lines from the other men weren't much better.

i looked at the ads objectively, like, if i were "looking", who i'd pick. not a ONE. they all basically looked raggedy. i know, i know, you can't judge a book by it's cover. but when people place those ads, the "cover" is what they're banking on.

my impression of those guys was that they were definitely the picked-over leftovers. although i didn't peruse the white guy ads, but i'd venture to guess it was the same deal. it made me really glad that i am married and NOT in the dating scene looking for a black man. i'd be pretty depressed if i were.

treyshauyn

why are black people STILL naming their kids these made up, hard to pronounce, hard to spell, and hard to understand names? we all know the stereotype- shaniqua, tyrone, latrell, and on and on. you'd think black people would stop. i'm not advocating for names like becky or meagan or amy or suzie. but what's up with these made-up black names with the apostophes (tra'shara)?

if you have a kid in school, you might see it on a daily basis like i do. just walking through the halls of the school i see names like Dontrayl, raykeshyia, shontayie,etc. i'm only partly knocking the name because of its stereotype ( i do realize that SOME black names have african roots. but come on-some of them are just ridiculous!). but mainly it's the spelling of it. why do these parents have to come up with the most nonsensical way to spell it? isn't the name itself already unique? does their child really need to go through life correcting everyone who tries to pronounce it?

my girlfriend i had had dinner the other night and discussed the fact that despite there being common jokes about black names, people are still naming their kids these names-well, as of 5 years ago, at least. and this the point of my post. who are these people?! do they live under a rock? is it just the uneducated black people? do they really still think that shameika is a good choice? haven't they heard about the studies conducted that show that people who submitted their resumes with weird, hard-to-pronounce names seldom got call-backs?

why would anyone still name their child a name like Devaste? (de-va'-stay)? no matter how professional you are, there are people in corporate america who wont even give a resume a second thought when they see a name like that. have we not learned anything by the year 2008 already?