My earlier comments were not unmotivated, but preparation for this.

Let me begin by asserting my credentials in a backwards kind of way: Most of the public claims of racism are malicious lies. When I hear Jesse or Al complaining that some hapless bystander is racist, I assume they are lying and that the rest of their complaint may be safely discarded. The term has been so abused at the hands of the politically correct and the professional victim class that it has essentially lost all meaning except as unrefutable abuse.

This loss of meaning is dangerous, because there are racists: I've met some--both black and white. While pretending that there hasn't been progress in race relations is culpably deliberate blindness, there's still some attitudes that need some work.

One of them you can see in just about any high school. Count the number of white girls with black boyfriends, and compare that to the number of black girls with white boyfriends. In a big enough school you'll find a few of the latter, but a lot of the former.

Why would black boys be in greater demand in the dating whirl than black girls?

• Girls are held to much tighter standards of physical beauty than boys, and the female standard of beauty is strongly northern European. You may remind me that some high-paid models are black, but notice how many are of East African ancestry, with facial features much closer to Caucasian than West or Central African. It isn't racist to have single standard of beauty, but it isn't terribly clever, given how dramatically beatiful women can differ.
• Women are often attracted to the "bad boy" types, and a stereotypically rebellious/dangerous teenage boy stands a fair chance of attracting girls. Here we start getting into racist stereotypes--or sort-of stereotypes. Given the relative rates at which black boys wind up in conflict with the law compared to other groups, it is an easy stereotype to maintain. (In some places the rates are higher than 1 in 3. Not here, AFAIK.)

  Why women are interested in "bad boys" I can't say for certain: maybe it is the same general principle as that behind the "trophy wife," just transposed into an "I'm good enough to tame the very worst." Maybe the "bad boy" is a budding alpha male and she wants a strong protector. Maybe I should ask a couple of women to review this for me...

  At any rate, insofar as the "bad boy" effect applies, it worries me that the black boy can be so easily considered a "bad boy."

• Our society has a history of the myth of the super-sexual black man. This is somewhat related to the "bad boy" effect, but I think it different enought to deserve its own category. This component is very worrisome, because it springs out of the attitude that the other is inferior, as I described in a previous post. Not just unruly, inferior.

So far so no good. However, there is another effect at work, rather more benign. Both men and women can be attracted to "the girl/boy next door" or "the exotic stranger." The advantage of the familiar is having a stable home life for the kids, and the advantage of the stranger is adventure and mixing up the gene pool a bit. The black boy comes from a different enough environment, even if local, that he qualifies as "the exotic stranger." So should the black girl--but she doesn't seem to. Is this because a super-sexual man is "admired" but a super-sexual woman is "a slut?" Or am I missing something obvious--like social pressures in the black community suppressing black-girl/white-boy combinations? I hope I'm missing something obvious here, otherwise we have a longer way to go than we think.

FWIW, evidence that police stop black men more often than other groups is NOT convincing evidence of racism. Irritating as the policy undoubtedly is, it is merely an efficient use of the limited police resources to target a group much more likely to actually be criminals. Whether police resources ought to be used efficiently is perhaps a political question.