Ralph Richard Banks on the the most unmarried group of people in America:
Nearly 70% of black women are unmarried, and the racial gap in marriage spans the socioeconomic spectrum, from the urban poor to well-off suburban professionals. Three in 10 college-educated black women haven’t married by age 40; their white peers are less than half as likely to have remained unwed.
What explains this marriage gap? As a black man, my interest in the issue is more than academic. I’ve looked at all the studies—the history, the social science, the government data—and I’ve spent a year traveling the country interviewing scores of professional black women. In exchange for my promise to conceal their identities (in part by using pseudonyms, as I’ve done here), they shared with me their most personal experiences and desires in relation to marriage and family.
I came away convinced of two facts: Black women confront the worst relationship market of any group because of economic and cultural forces that are not of their own making; and they have needlessly worsened their situation by limiting themselves to black men. I also arrived at a startling conclusion: Black women can best promote black marriage by opening themselves to relationships with men of other races.
(Via: The Corner)
August 9th, 2011 | 1:03 pm
[...] An Interracial Fix for Black Marriage. [...]
August 14th, 2011 | 3:20 pm
We don’t see as many black woman/white man couples as we see white woman/black man couples. This article places the blame for that in the narrow options black women will consider but doesn’t seem to recognize the fact that many white men, while not having any racial animosity, still nonetheless aren’t seriously considering most black women as options. I suspect that’s not going to change as rapidly as with white woman/black man options, in part because men are more taken by the artificial standards of beauty perpetuated in mass media than women are and in part because most white men don’t realize this about themselves, thinking that they are racially forward-thinking but not realizing that there’s progress that involves more than just theoretical views.
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