Kevin Hart supposedly has a very important message for black women. I say supposedly because according to the Clutch and other media outlets the following illustration was provided by Hart as a piece of advice for black women. The message: Black women need to stop with that ‘strong black woman’ mess, and stop being mean to the brotha’s who date non-black women after you refused to give those same black men a chance. I wasn’t able to find a direct link to the graphic on Hart’s website, but here’s what appeared on the web:

We’ve all already heard the ‘anti-strong black woman’ tirade directed at black women a thousand times, so I won’t touch on that aspect of the illustration. The first thing that popped out at me when looking at the picture was the way that the black women were dressed: two of the three women are wearing skimpy clothing; one has a protuberant belly that is hanging over her waistline. The white woman is dressed in normal, appropriate-for-any-casual-occasion clothing. The major difference between the black women and the white women in the illustration is not their color, but their class.

I’m not talking class as in “she dresses so classy,” but class as in “she is from the lower class, while I am from the middle-class.”

Why is the lowest common denominator of black women (i.e., black women who are black and are women but have little in common with your average middle-class black woman) being compared against a middle-class looking white women? A middle-class black women may have more in common with a middle-class white women than she will with a lower class black woman.

The main point of this graphic is not that black women are bitter, angry or resentful of white women for taking black men, although that may have been the point Hart was trying to suggest. What I took away from this illustration is that you should never date below your level–whatever you consider your ‘level’ to be–and then blame your failure to find an appropriate mate on the color of the people you were dating. Why? Because the real problem isn’t the low-class people who rejected you; the problem is you, because you were ignorant enough to try to date someone who was low-class in the first place.

UPDATE: Within the past hour, Kevin Hart has come out hard on his Twitter feed vehemently denying any association with the cartoon.

Published April 11, 2012

However, here’s a screen shot of the now-infamous Facebook update: