Is Marriage for White People? How the African American Marriage Decline Affects Everyone

Is Marriage for White People? How the African American Marriage Decline Affects Everyone Ralph Richard Banks Dutton, 2011 Ralph Banks, a black professor at Stanford Law School, opens this book with a recounting of a discussion on marriage in a class of black primary school children in Washington, D.C. While the children voice their eagerness to be future good parents, at the same time, they voice reluctance of getting married - one of the boys asserts: "Marriage is for white people. " Thus Banks sets up a tour of the institution of marriage from the perspective of the African American community. He draws on interviews he conducted with a wide range of middle class black Americans to place the grim statistics cited in the book into a human context and to illustrate contemporary thinking within the black middle class with respect to marriage and family. In the mid-twentieth century, nearly all black women were married, whereas today, most black women are unmarried. Fewer white women are married compared to 1970, though not quite to the extent of black women. Other tendencies that have usually been characterized as common in blacks, such as multiple sexual partnerships, unintended pregnancies, unmarried mothers and high utilization of abortion have spilled over to non-black groups -"white follows black". Thus, Banks warns that the disintegration of the black middle class would not be a localized event. The sense of imperilment emanating from the book feels all the more compelling because the people behind the data could indeed be one's coworker or neighbor. At the same time, it is also clear throughout the book that the author believes that the "black race" (his term) and black culture should be preserved as distinct entities. The numbers in the book lucidly indicate the scale of the problem, and Banks stresses that the issue is not restricted to poor blacks. Compared to women of other races, college-educated career-minded black women are the least likely to be married. Similarly, college-educated and economically stable black men are more reluctant to marry than white men of similar socioeconomic status. Higher income levels for whites correspond with an increased likelihood to be married, but for black men of similar income, such is not the case. Given the high incarceration rates of black males, declining economic prospects for men (but not for women) and the fact the few black men complete higher education, college-educated black women outnumber college-educated men by 2:1. If high status black women do marry, then they are likely to "marry down," that is, marry a black man of lower socioeconomic status, more so than women of other races. Educated and careered women in general have low levels of fertility, but for black women, they are twice as likely as white women to be childless. Without an increase of numbers for the black middle class, Banks suggests that the "fragile" black middle class faces the prospect of losing its recently acquired economic clout, with the prospect of dragging blacks as a group into lower socioeconomic status, to the detriment of the next generation of blacks and of other races as well. Banks explores a number of potential causes of the decline of marriage in America, which include changes in the social definition and expectations of marriage, the loosening of restrictions for getting a divorce and the advent of birth control. As to changing perceptions of the importance of marriage, Banks points out that in Sweden, co-habitation may be as stable as marriage and that most children (60 percent) are born to unmarried parents. Similar trends are observed in other European countries. Many Europeans have skipped the formality of marriage to have children. Americans, however, still view marriage as a "sacred" institution and regard being married as a social distinction and a prerequisite for having offspring. To have children outside of wedlock is particularly shameful to high status black women. …