African-American men and women

Here’s a fascinating NPR radio story about relationships between African-American men and women:

A clip from the upcoming film Diary of a Tired Black Man is generating a great deal of buzz in the African-American community. The scene features a man arriving at the house of his former spouse with a new partner: a white woman.

The clip has been e-mailed around the country and featured on blogs and on nationally syndicated, black-oriented radio shows. It has sparked a heated debate over the many issues it raises, from interracial dating to whether many black women are simply “too angry” to be datable.

It’s not something I ever thought about.  However, I will say that part of the humor in “Everybody Hates Chris,” one of the few situation comedies I enjoy, is how angry his mother his, and how undeserving his father is of this anger. Of course, the bottom-line point in Everybody Hates Chris is that, while his parents have their meshugas, they are bound together by a fundamental respect each holds for the other, and by their belief in their responsibilities toward their children.  That underlying respect is what makes the show work, and what makes the angry woman and martyr-like man humorous and not painful.