ABWW Hater of the Day: Jimi Izrael and The Denzel Principle: Why Black Women Can’t Find Good Black Men
I really don’t understand why black males who finally find bliss in the arms of a non-black women are obsessed with putting down black women. Here is another fool to add to this growing rouges gallery. Jimi Izreal
is twice-divorced black male, who fails to accept accountability for his own failings with respect to past romantic involvements. He further absolves his gender of any responsibility of the dearth of strong, healthy, stable marriages in the black community.
This book suffers from an embarrassing number of typos yet this dolt was booked at an expert on a Nightline special on black women. He has also appeared on the Fox News Network’s “Hannity & Colmes” and “The O’Reilly Factor” if those are not credentials to make shudder I don’t know what will. Like Steve Harvey he didn’t note anything profound or insightful, his book is basically a diary of all the misfortune he has experienced dating sisters. In one portion of the book he chastises black women for having high standards and he then in another berates us for having low standards, WTF??? Anyone who uses Too Short as an example what as defense against dating black women is truly a sad case. Black men are choosing jail over relationships and out-marrying at an alarming rate, yet according to Israel it is all our fault. He wraps the book up with news of his joyous union with a white woman, but of course you knew that was coming. I am really amazed how many brothers are making money off a plight that they have a great deal of responsibility for creating. Why do they have such a need to attack is when they are supposedly happy? Were they raised by wolves or what it black women who raised them, taught and supported until they were ready to hate on their own? Is this book catches you eye run in the other direction! If you want to read how far this man’s delusions go here is an excerpt. I sent an e-mail to the dude to see what he thinks of day’s honor let’s see if he responds. Judging from the size of this guys ego, you might think he would , but I am betting he won’t, since there is there is no filthy lucre involved.
Angry Black Woman Watch 
Hi all. My name is jimi izrael, the dolt in question.
I’m grateful and humbled to have my book be the topic of discussion, even if I am saddened by the tenor of the conversation. I’m sorry you felt the need to insult me personally, when you don’t, in fact, know me personally. I’m not going to enter in any great debate about my expertise, the typos in the book or the like. I wrote an unconventional memoir absent of advice but full of explicit and not-so explicit lessons for thoughtful readers willing to read it from cover to cover. Not everyone has that time, or is willing to be particularly thoughtful. The book is not for everyone.
If your presumptions about who I have found “conubial bliss” with are any indication, clearly, you did not read the book. Or at least, you did not read it well. I don’t purport to have any expertise that you don’t, and I say that. I just told part of my story. My book flouts the statistics, which don’t really tell us alot. People aren’t numbers — I just suggest that happiness is where you find it.
Thanks again for thinking of me. As best as I am able, I will answer any questions you may have.
You are absolutely right, I didn’t read the book from cover to cover. I saw the Nightline piece and I took the Amazon reviews to the book store and read portions in the store. I am not going to pay for a book that puts black women down on a wholesale basis. I live in rural college town and the public library does not stock books that cover issues around black folks. So I could not borrow it.
If you have read any other entries of this blog you will notice a pattern. There seems to be a growing trend of black men who out-marry and blame black women for their choices. You are in the company of Slim Thug, Tim Alexander, Toure and Taye Diggs. Why are men who have chosen their non-black partners for life act out on this compulsion? I feel that black women have a right to be angry about this trend. Of course, some women are just plain angry, obnoxious, aggressive, materialistic and fat, but these are not identifying traits of black women. I continue to find examples of women of all races and ethnic groups who are exemplars of these traits. So if you are down I would love to have a conversation.
I am an academic like you and I have spent a great deal of time researching this phenomenon. I contend that this issue has historical, psychosocial and economic roots that go back to when the first Africans were placed on the auction block and to make assumptions about black women without taking these things into consideration is just an exercise in malice.
Here are some questions I would like you to address:
Black women are raising children alone and a significant portion of black men are choosing criminality over their partners and children. Why do you think that is the case?
How to you think centuries of propaganda around ideal white womanhood has effected marital choice for black men?
How do you think the fact that black families have never been able to model themselves after pre-feminist middle class due to economic racism and paramour rights?
Why should a sister who has completed her education, financially stable with no children, in other words completed the requirements of black middle class respectability, lower their standards? Shouldn’t brothers step their game up?
Black women give black me life,we parent you, we teach you so how can we ALL be the antithesis of what a man of any race wants for a partner?
Your last blog discussed misogyny, but did not address the how hip hop has been corrupted from the music I loved as a child (I grew up two subway stops from 1520 Sedgwick Avenue) into the black-woman-hating-light-skin-fetishistic clap trap of commercial rap?
Why do black comedic actors dress up as black women and act out the worst stereotypes about black women?
I look forward to your answers.
>You are absolutely right, I didn’t read the book from cover to cover. I saw the Nightline piece and I took the Amazon reviews to the book store and read portions in the store. I am not going to pay for a book that puts black women down on a wholesale basis. I live in rural college town and the public library does not stock books that cover issues around black folks. So I could not borrow it.,
How can you, with any intellectual integrity, talk down a book you haven’t read? And here’s a hint? The “I don’t have to taste shit to know it’s not pancakes” defense doesn’t hold. Black people read books and weigh them on their merits. Telling other black people to run from a book you haven’t read is, in the words of noted social commentator Charlie Murphy — madd niggerish. Sad. Really.
Send me a copy and I will be happy to read it. As I said I don’t spend my hard earned money on these “beat a black woman down” books, movies or music.
Look forward to your answers with bated breath.
If you have read any other entries of this blog you will notice a pattern. There seems to be a growing trend of black men who out-marry and blame black women for their choices. You are in the company of Slim Thug, Tim Alexander, Toure and Taye Diggs. Why are men who have chosen their non-black partners for life act out on this compulsion?
Who is this non-black partner of mine? Can you introduce me?
> I feel that black women have a right to be angry about this trend. Of course, some women are just plain angry, obnoxious, aggressive, materialistic and fat, but these are not identifying traits of black women.
Do Tell
>I continue to find examples of women of all races and ethnic groups who are exemplars of these traits. So if you are down I would love to have a conversation.
We’ll see
>I am an academic like you and I have spent a great deal of time researching this phenomenon. I contend that this issue has historical, psychosocial and economic roots that go back to when the first Africans were placed on the auction block and to make assumptions about black women without taking these things into consideration is just an exercise in malice.
Here are some questions I would like you to address:
Great.
>Black women are raising children alone and a significant portion of black men are choosing criminality over their partners and children. Why do you think that is the case?
According to the Justice Department, Black women are being incarcerated at 7 times the rate of black men. So I can’t answer your question, because your premise is flawed.
>How to you think centuries of propaganda around ideal white womanhood has effected marital choice for black men?
I can’t speak for a race of men. No one can.
>How do you think the fact that black families have never been able to model themselves after pre-feminist middle class due to economic racism and paramour rights?
What is the question here?
>Why should a sister who has completed her education, financially stable with no children, in other words completed the requirements of black middle class respectability, lower their standards?
Standards are important. Be the person you are looking for. Be picky. But be reasonable
>Shouldn’t brothers step their game up?
There are more black men in college now than there has ever been in American history. So I’d say that they are.
>Black women give black me life,we parent you, we teach you so how can we ALL be the antithesis of what a man of any race wants for a partner?
Who said that?
>Your last blog discussed misogyny, but did not address the how hip hop has been corrupted from the music I loved as a child (I grew up two subway stops from 1520 Sedgwick Avenue) into the black-woman-hating-light-skin-fetishistic clap trap of commercial rap?
Since “Rapper’s Delight,” popular rap has been sexist and sexual. Not a lot has changed.
>Why do black comedic actors dress up as black women and act out the worst stereotypes about black women?
For the same reason ancient Grecian actors and Shakespearean plays included men dressed as women. It’s farcical. And it’s funny.
I look forward to your answers.
” Black women are being incarcerated at 7 times the rate of black men.” Reference URL Please?
“Changes in the incarceration rates for women were more distinct. At midyear 2000, black women were incarcerated at a rate 6 times that of white women (or 380 per 100,000 U.S. residents versus 63 per 100,000 U.S. residents). By June 30, 2007, the incarceration rate for black women declined to 3.7 times that of white women (or 348 versus 95). An 8.4% decline in the incarceration rate for black women and a 51% increase in the rate for white women accounted for the overall decrease in the incarceration rate of black women relative to white women at midyear 2007.”
Source:
Sabol, William J., PhD, and Couture, Heather, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Prison Inmates at Midyear 2007 (Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, June 2008), NCJ221944, p. 8.
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/pim07.pdf-t1/tab01.txt
If black women are not raising these children who is?
>I continue to find examples of women of all races and ethnic groups who are exemplars of these traits. So if you are down I would love to have a conversation.
“We’ll see”
Busted! You are guilty too, obviously you only read the blog entry that pertains to you.
>How to you think centuries of propaganda around ideal white womanhood has effected marital choice for black men?
“I can’t speak for a race of men. No one can”
Yet you presume to talk to a race of black women?
How do you think the fact that black families have never been able to model themselves after pre-feminist middle class ideology due to economic racism and paramour rights?
“What is the question here?”I left out the word “ideology” but I made an assumption that a man who chooses to lecture black women would know something about black middle class respectability. My bad!
>Black women give black we life ,we parent you, we teach you so how can we ALL be the antithesis of what a man of any race wants for a partner?
Who said that?
Do you know anything about black woman’s clubs, sororities, black female labor activity,anti-lynching politics, paramour rights, the history of denial of legal protections around rape, the Venus Hottentot? I could go on and on and on…
If you are not versed in any of this history how can you with any good conscience write amount black women. Your bio said you were in Mass Comm (like me) haven’t you heard of Ida B. Wells and her suit against the e Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad Company?
>Shouldn’t brothers step their game up?
“There are more black men in college now than there has ever been in American history. So I’d say that they are.” Reference URL?
That is wonderful but they are also out marrying at an alarming rate:
A new study shows that more and more black men are marrying women of other races. In fact, more than 1 in 5 black men who wed (22 percent) married a nonblack woman in 2008. This compares with about 9 percent of black women, and represents a significant increase for black men — from 15.7 percent in 2000 and 7.9 percent in 1980.
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1616/american-marriage-interracial-interethnic
>Your last blog discussed misogyny, but did not address the how hip hop has been corrupted from the music I loved as a child (I grew up two subway stops from 1520 Sedgwick Avenue) into the black-woman-hating-light-skin-fetishistic clap trap of commercial rap?
Since “Rapper’s Delight,” popular rap has been sexist and sexual. Not a lot has changed.
Please! You know as well as I do when hip hop left the east coast, the words B*tch and Ho became de riguer. You are not seriously trying to say that LL’s “I’m the Type of Guy” is the same as Tupac’s “Same Ho”or NWA’s “A B*tch Iz A B*tch? Sexual and sexist is not the same thing.
Are you telling me the Flip Wilson consulted the Lysistrata or Martin Lawrence the Twelfth Night before they put on a wig?
These stereotype of a shrewish, emasculating black woman who was unfit for matrimony was introduced into early cinema by white men with titles like The Wooing and Wedding of a Coon (1905) Wooing of Aunt Jemima (1916) and Coontown Suffragettes (1914) a “darky” version of the Lysistrata. Back then black newspapers mounted campaigns to censor those films, today most say that is exactly how black women act. How did we get from there to here?
Good counterpoints, all.
Sometimes people engage the opposite sex in pointless bickering because this is the only kind of attention they can get from them. Some people really want to build bridges. I wrote a book that some people enjoy. People who bring their blind anger in search of easy answers? Yeah, they skip around the chapters, see themselves in the book — or don’t– and don’t enjoy the book so much. I felt the same way about “Sense and Sensibilities.” But I read it all the way through anyways, just so i could discuss it intelligently.
I don’t have the time for protracted arguing with people hiding behind clever screen-names about the thesis of a book you haven’t read and admonish others not to read, which is, I repeat, Madd Niggerish. Any black person –academic!?– telling you to run from a book they haven’t read, no matter what’s in the book they haven’t read, is an idiot.
I’m happy that you are trying to be a part of the solution here on Angry Black Woman Watch. But this conversation will have to continue… without me.
All my best,
j—
>Send me a copy and I will be happy to read it. As I said I don’t spend my hard earned money on these “beat a black woman down” books, movies or music.
Stay Classy, Baby.
It is very hard to build bridges when some don ‘don’t even have the tools. I’d rather spend my money on material that poses real solutions. A half an hour in a book store and your inability to answer any of my questions is enough proof for me that you are using your own failed marriages to smear black women.
Stay pitiful,baby.
Because of the nature of statistics, you can find stats to prove any thesis you may have. I could do that. But it’s not the lack of ability to answer. It’s an unwillingness and ugliness of bickering with an Angry Black Woman. I refuse to affirm the cult of victimology and due and entitled anger many black women mire in. If you want to be angry — that’s great. You and your anger go to the movies together, and have a good time. Impress us all and write a book and make your argument for it. But for God’s sake, don’t make yourself look like an idiot by critiquing a book you have not read and attacking someone you do not know. I’m not going to trade punches. But I think you MAY deserve a better answer. My time is limited, but I’ll give it a shot.
According to the US Census, eight-seven percent of men marry black women. According to a Pew Studies, 22% of NEW MARRIAGES (I think, the last three years) were interracial, not marriages overall. Black male/white female relationship divorce at twice the rate of of the average marriage, while black female/white male relationships stay together longer than all other unions. Make of that what you will, but most black men are married to black women, no matter how you slice it. Some are making other chloices. But I wonder if the media antagonism and desparaging of black men from black women in the last 15 years has anything to do with the spike in numbers. If you tell a dog he ain’t shit long enough, he’ll find a way out of your house onto another home. I don’t know if we have coincidence or correlation, but I think it’s worth considering. I’m a writer, not a social scientist.
I don’t know why you emailed me to alert me of this honor of being Hater of The Day, but I am truly honored. But I have failed twice at something once that most black women have not even been honored to try. You learn alot of important lessons from trial and error — more than from numbers, “experts” or Oprah. I don’t know who is more pitiful — the writer brave enough to be honest about his failures and tell you what he learned, or the nameless angry black female blogger obviously in need of some attention willing to do anything to get it. I won’t try to figure that out. But my name and number is all over the internet — I’m not an enigma. If you think you want to engage in something like a fruitful dialog, I’m happy to oblige. But this internet sniping is cowardly.
Now. I’m done.
best
j-
(216) 236-3975
I thought you were done before, dude. But I knew your ego wanted to have the last word.
As Aunt Ester would say on such an occasion – I sent you the e-mail from my personal account with my government name, fool! All you had to do is write me back in private. You chose to do this on the blog.
If I am such a bitter black woman who won’t spend her money on your book why would think I would want your your phone number?
If you wanted you write about your failures you should have done that rather than bash sisters as a whole. Learn something about the history of black relationships before you regale anybody else with your expertise.
Start With :
I Will Wear No Chain!: A Social History of African American Males by Christopher Booker
Women, Race and Class by Angela Davis
Cool Pose : The Dilemmas of Black Manhood in America by Richard Majors and Janet Mancini Bills
The Silencing of Ruby McCollum: Race, Class, and Gender in the South by Tammie D. Evans
These will give you an idea of how hard black folks have tried to find love. Add in deindustrialization, the crack epidemic, the cult of ideal white womanhood, and the backlash against civil rights, and you may be able to make a statement that applies to black folks as a whole.
Lastly, if you are really going to teach film, use Donald Bogle’s book Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films it is a must for a novice.
As your fellow hater Westley Snipes said as Nino Brown: See ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya!
Sister, why did you even waste your time with this trash? Why even try to reason with someone who obviously feels the need to rub his wish-he-could-be-a white-supremacist-but-is-regretfully-not-white in your face? He hates Black women, and guess what? We hate you too. So we’re even, and end it at that. Take your white trash and leave us alone.