by Dee Stewart
L-R: Sherri Shepherd, Jacque Reid, Vicki Mabrey, Steve Harvey, Jimi Izrael and Hill Harper face off. Photo courtesy of ABC News.
I recently attended ABC’s Nightline News Face-Off Debate “Why Can’t Successful Black Women Find a Man?” It was the second installment of a two-part debate and hosted in Atlanta, GA. In this session Sherri Shepherd, Emmy award-winning co-host of ABC’s The View, and Jacque Reid, star of VH1’s Let’s Talk About Pep, debated Hill Harper, CSI-NY star and author of The Conversation, and Jimi Izrael, author of The Denzel Principle. Psychologist and relationships expert Dr. Alduan Tartt and author/journalist Helena Andrews facilitated the town hall meeting aspect of the debate. Radio talk show host Steve Harvey andNightline’s Vicki Mabrey co-moderated.
With such a great roster of debaters I was excited to attend and meet the debaters. The fact that I am a single, successful, professional black woman who have felt the sting of this issue at some point in my life, I was curious about three things:
1. What would these men tell me that I don’t already know?
2. Was this issue less trivial than I had imagined?
3. Were we really living in an epidemic state of black male and female relationships, whereby black men didn’t want black women anymore?
