Comment
Comment
OK, here’s something to talk about:
Stanford Law School professor Ralph Banks’s Is Marriage for White People? is essentially about a black American interviewee he calls Audrey. She’s 39, graduated from prestigious black college Spelman, and has an M.B.A. She has travelled the world and has a plush job with a multinational consulting firm. She is also unmarried and sees few signs that that will change.
What interests Banks is that Audrey is, in this last detail, typical. Seven out of ten black women are unmarried, and college-educated black women are twice as likely as their white female peers not to be married by their thirties. That is, they’re no more likely to marry or stay married—black divorce rates are also twice as high as white—than white women with only a high school diploma. The picture is little better for black men, fewer than half of whom are husbands. (Affluent black men, in fact, become less likely to marry the more money they earn—the reverse of the trend for white men.) Moreover, neither Africa nor slavery is the culprit here: as late as the 1950s, nine in ten black women married.
Banks’s book focuses mostly on black women, partly because their rates of singlehood are higher, partly because they were more forthcoming in interviews, and partly because he sees them as the ones who could solve the problem. “For black women, being unmarried has become the new normal, single the new black,” he writes.
It’s now standard to point to the high incarceration rates of black men, which render the ratio of women to available men unsuitably high, as a main cause of the black marriage crisis. But Banks focuses on educated black women, whom we would not expect this problem to affect. Audrey’s singlehood owes to other factors. One is that black men “marry out” of their racial group (about one in five) more than black women do (fewer than one in ten). Asian and Latino women are over three times as likely to marry out of their group as black women.
