One of the more provocative book titles this year is Is Marriage for White People?: How the African American Marriage Decline Affects Everyone. Written by Stanford law professor Ralph Richard Banks, the book answers its own question with a depressing, “Mostly, yes,” but adds a slightly hopeful, “But it doesn’t have to be,” at the end. Somewhat surprisingly, it is the “hopeful” part that is causing the most controversy.

Banks says he got the idea for the book from a 2006 Washington Post article on the importance of fatherhood. In the article, a 12-year-old says, bluntly, “Marriage is for white people.” Banks went out and did the research, and his findings are grim. Among them:

• While the marriage rate has declined across the board for all Americans over the past half-century, it has fallen off the table for black Americans.

• Black women are half as likely as their white counterparts to be married, and twice as likely to never marry.

• There is a success gap between black men and black women that is widening with each passing year. Twice as many black women graduate from college as black men.

• Half of all college-educated black wives have less-educated husbands, and these husbands often earn substantially less than their wives.

Add to that the other widespread problems in the black community—the precipitous decline of the black nuclear family during the past 50 years; the fact that fewer than half of black males graduate from high school; that one in four black males will go to jail at some point in his life (one in 10 is in prison right now); and the bleak statistic that 70 percent of black children are born to unwed mothers—and a daunting picture emerges.

What makes the marital gap especially pernicious is that black women are the least-likely group to marry interracially. There is an undercurrent (often unspoken) among black women of a need to “rescue the brothers,” and in doing so, save the race. Banks, who is black and married (to a black woman), points out that this loyalty to race when it comes to marriage (or even relationships) is clearly a one-way street, because many black men show little or no racial preference when it comes to women. As Cleavon Little stated so eloquently in Blazing Saddles, “Hey, where da white women at?”

Nobody really disputes Banks’ evidence. Where he is getting heat is in his proposed solution to the situation: Banks suggests that black women should cast a wider net. Marry down, providing you can find a guy who isn’t perpetually butt-hurt because his wife earns money than he. (This is probably easier said than done, considering the fragility of male egos among all colors.) Or marry a white guy.

Responses range from suggestions that white men don’t find black women attractive to charges that black women who marry white men are race traitors. There are even claims that interracial marriages rekindle visions of master and slave.

I gave Banks’ book to one of my former players, whom I will call Maria to protect her identity as best I can. She’s half-black and half-Hispanic, and she grew up in one of the meaner parts of Tucson. To say that she has had a hard life would be a massive understatement. There are some people who will ultimately fail in life, no matter how many breaks they get along the way. And there are others who will succeed, no matter how many obstacles are placed in their path. Maria is the poster child for the latter group.

After graduating from Green Fields Country Day School, she got a scholarship to a good college in one of the Four Corners states. She never came within a mile of having a boyfriend when she was in high school, but I used to joke with her that when she went away to college, all the cowboys would be buzzing around her, finding her … exotic. I even made up an imaginary boyfriend for her, a guy named Colt. (I then added a rival for her affection, this one named Cody.)

She read the book, and we talked about it. She had heard some of the stats before in one of her sociology classes. (Oh, yeah, she graduated in four years—which is a feat in itself—and she did it despite changing her major halfway through. She’ll be starting graduate school in the spring.)

I had given her the book out of genuine concern, not because it would have a definitive impact on her life, but so that she would be informed about what she might face. She nonchalantly mentioned that when she was away at college, she met a guy who happens to be black and who is also an Air Force pilot.

I asked if he’s the one, and she smiled.

“He might be. I know he’s no scrub.”

I made her give the book back.

This article appears in Dec 1-7, 2011.

9 replies on “Danehy”

  1. To me it seems the obvious problems with this analysis are self evident. When you are a disenfranchised underclass in your country the opportunity to rise upwards is a lottery ticket. In this article and book you are speaking of households supported by a single mother. Those households leave unattended teenage males rudderless as more often then not a single mother struggles to sustain fiscally. Then the young male and often female children fail to achieve educationally from lack of support. This then feeds into increased chances for criminality. Once that criminality has occured and is punished with documented bias they are pushed farther out of the system. With a criminal record the right to vote, ability to obtain college funding, and job prospects become unreachable. This then only leads the disenfranchised into more criminality or underclass status.

    The current economic climate suggests even more indicators of that bias. The unemployment rates of non whites are very much a cautionary indicator. I am not sure how to break the cycle. I don’t think anyone knows until it is attacked on multiple fronts. In this age of rising libertarian and corporate oligarchy the safety net to combat it is being ripped open. It is a chicken or the egg dilemma. The correlations are obvious to the causation. In this summary there are only offered band aid fixes for jugular cuts. As the United States continues to thrive on the backs of its underclass the minorities who overwhemingly make it are forced into social decline.

    I haven’t read the book but after your review Danehy I am now going to. The idea though that everyone has the opportunity to live out a sports movie coming of age success story is unrealistic. I am certain you are proud of your former student. I myself even from this small blurb in her life am as well. The realities though are much more bleak then “cast a wider net.”

  2. “The precipitous decline of the black nuclear family in the last 50 years” ties directly to LBJ and the Great Society. That’s not my bright idea. It’s what a great raft of studies establishes.

  3. It seems that if you look at it from the angle of keeping blood lines “pure”, it’s a bad thing that mixed marriages are skyrocketing. I’m old enough to remember when it was shocking to see a black/white couple openly walking down a sidewalk holding hands. It was downright dangerous for couples to do that back in the day! Nowadays, it’s very common to see race mixed couples. They no longer garner any more attention than anyone else. I thought that this was progress. This was society openly accepting what was once taboo. We all now can choose partners based on the content of their character, and not the color of their skin. If this leads to the demise of the “African-American family unit”, I think everybody, regardless of race, will be better off for it. Race becomes inconsequential, the quality of home life becomes paramount. This book reminds me of the books written in the sixties lamenting the demise of the full blooded american indian and how all native american tribes are now “tainted” with european DNA. It’s a good thing we keep them on reservation so that their blood lines are “preserved”. The arguments were bogus then, and they’re bogus now.

  5. FYI, for what it’s worth:
    Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a liberal Democratic senator, intellectual and adviser to the LBJ Administration, noted in a policy report in the mid-60s that the increasing fatherless rate in the black community (which at the time was relatively low) would have dire consequences. He was soon vilified by the media and university elites, who claimed he was “blaming the victim”. The report was quashed and the Welfare State bloomed, as we now know, to the detriment of the black community. I’m sure the Moynihan report was referenced in the book Danehy is reviewing.

  6. TT seems to think the Welfare State, which he’s attacking, is about people receiving welfare payments . . .of course he’s wrong as it is mainly about charting strong public policies that provide social security, education and other absolutely necessary bits of public welfare and wellbeing. Had we had a strong Welfare State during the past 30 years we might very well have stopped the steady decline in personal income that has led to these dismal marriage statistics. The simple fact is that folks with decent jobs and a supportive community are much more likely to marry and create strong family bonds than folks with no jobs and poor education. It has little to do with race . . .IMHO.

  7. The terms welfare and Welfare State have more specific meanings than the dreamy ones Byron mentions. And I agree that in modern, complex societies there is a need – both ethical and practical — for certain forms of government-directed welfare. But had we had a strong Welfare State in the past 30 years we would be more like Greece – paying outsized salaries and benefits to workers and the unemployed with money borrowed from other countries or from producers of capital and hard working people (as opposed to our own productivity) – eventually finding that the Welfare State is unsustainable. When the money train stops arriving, teachers and cops start burning down the Agora, kinda like what we’ve seen lately in Wisconsin. The simple fact is that the government cannot create decent jobs, at least not without fleecing the populace to do so, and that can’t go on forever without a Grecian-like meltdown. I don’t think the breakdown of the family in the black community is about race per se, but about a negative trend that owes its existence to racial politics, the welfare state, and a sleazy popular culture. Welfare State proponents like Byron are well intentioned, but they often refuse to look history honestly. They need to get out more in the intellectual sense and read people whom they’ve been told are evil or sellouts – Thomas Sowell, for example.

  8. It seems that the point of this article/book review is that marriage has outlived its usefulness. Marriage was invented because women need some sort of assurance that they would have help in raising the child that the man fathered. Pretty much a necessity since humans take a relatively long time to mature. Now that assumption is being challenged in two ways. First, the mother may be more intelligent and affluent than the father and she may not want a father who doesn’t share her income level or aspirations around the child. Second is the fact that the state will help raise the child if the father is unwilling. Not sure if this is what other folks in this post define as a welfare state, but the fact remains that the state will bail out a disinterested father.
    The welfare state has been around since at least the 60’s , so it would seem that the ” news” of this article is that women now have the means to ” fire” the father who doesn’t live up to their child rearing expectations. That would seem to put some pressure on the Mr. Moms of the world.

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