Genetically Lazy

I was watching Tribal Life on the travel channel (I think) earlier today. There were a couple of white american men who lived with a Samburu tribe in east Africa for (I'm guessing) a couple of months. They initially thought it would be an adventure, with one of their goals to learn how to stick fight. Through the course of the show, they got in there and did traditional male (hearding the cattle to & from the watering hole) and female work (cutting veggies w/ machettes, grinding corn, making beer, etc.). I found it to be pretty much the same stuff traditional Kikuyus would have done back in the day in my father's village. What I found most interesting was as the white guys (wg's) were working with the women, they noted that the men were off drinking. The wg's were comparing what the Samburu men do for work with what the Samburu women do for work. They noted that the men did a few hours of work, hearding the cattle to & from the watering hole, & then spent the rest of the day drinking beer, singing songs, and gambling, while the women worked from sun up to sun down. The wg's were outraged for the women & started telling them what the men were doing (or not doing) and encouraged the women to confront their men. The Samburu women didn't do anything during the show, but that's when I started having flashbacks.

I remember my father doing the outside work & my mother doing the inside work around our house. I remember my father saying, "It's bad luck for a man to see the bottom of a pot," when asked why he didn't cook dinner sometimes (and he's an awesome cook!). I remember my mother rushing home after work each day to cook dinner (7 days a week!) while working full time, and for a spell there, she would turn around and go right back to work for a night shift. I remember them fighting about it with my mom complaining that my father didn't help while she was off earning more money for the household. It was then that I decided that I would not cook dinner every night...PERIOD! To this day, the only meal I truly enjoy cooking is breakfast on Saturday morning and now I remember it's because that was they only day when my mom cooked that they didn't fight about my dad helping around the house, because after breakfast he'd go out and cut the grass.

So this leaves me wondering...are black men genetically lazy? When we were married, my ex-husband would strategically not do things around the house, knowing I'd eventually get sick of it and do those chores. He relied on me financially (and technically still is since he's again strategically refusing to do what he morally should for our son). Essentially, many of the black men that I know (including the father I grew up with) are just not as industrious or hard working as the women I know. Is there something in black men's genes that yields them less productive than black women?

My thoughts are that as those east African women who for centuries have been living with lazy & chauvanist men begin to see how men & women in the rest of the world live, they're going to start revolting against the way of life to which they've allowed themselves to be subjected for generations. Much the same has (IMHO) happened here in the US. After generations of working their butts off (including the proverbial delivery with the child picking cotton right next to the mother mere moments after birth), black women went through the sexual revolution of the 60s along with white women, but emerged more like their traditional African selves: proud, tired, and unwilling to take any more chauvanist b.s. Maybe that's why more than 60% of black women in America today have never married...they've wised up and don't want to go back.