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

AuthorMurray, Melissa
PositionBook review

Is Marriage For White People? How The African American Marriage Decline Affects Everyone. By Ralph Richard Banks. New York: Dutton. 2011. Pp. 189. Cloth, $25.95; paper, $16.

Introduction

A staple of mystery novels, the red herring is a clue that misleads or diverts attention away from the actual issue. For example, in Agatha Christie's The Mysterious Affair at Styles, (1) the fractious relationship between the deceased's widower and the deceased's maid is meant to distract the reader from discovering that the two are not enemies, but lovers who have conspired to poison the deceased.

Ralph Richard Banks's Is Marriage for White People? (2) is worlds away from Agatha Christie's novels. Decidedly a work of nonfiction, Banks's book considers the plight of middle-class African Americans who, according to statistics, are the least likely of any demographic group to get and stay married. Despite these obvious differences, Is Marriage for White People? shares some important commonalities with Agatha Christie's mysteries. Banks seeks to solve a mystery, but red herrings draw attention away from the true issue that should be the subject of Banks's concern.

The mystery, of course, is the black marriage decline. In 1950, 78 percent of black families were headed by married couples. (3) In 2007, only 33 percent of black women and 44 percent of black men were married. (4) Though marriage rates are declining across the board, the point remains: African Americans are among the most unmarried racial groups in the United States. (5) Banks asks: How did this happen? How did marriage go from being almost de rigeur among African Americans to being anomalous? Why do African Americans continue to lag behind other demographic groups in marriage rates? And what are the costs of this decline--for blacks and for everyone else?

Focusing on middle-class African Americans as a microcosm of the larger black community, Is Marriage for White People? attempts to solve the mystery of the black marriage decline by identifying its causes and consequences. Drawing from over one hundred interviews completed for the project, Banks concludes that the marriage decline and gap are the products of a skewed marriage market in which there is a surfeit of marriageable middle-class black women and a scarcity of similarly situated black men. To correct the market and increase marriage rates, Banks encourages middleclass black women to expand their pool of dating and marriage prospects to include nonblack men. Doing so, he argues, will, in the short term, help middle-class black women find the stable relationships they want. In the long term, this move will help ensure more black marriages (and all of marriage's benefits) in the future.

The trouble is that the book presents numerous red herrings that preoccupy the reader and divert attention from the real issue that should be of concern. The pressing public policy issue is not the black marriage decline, interracial marriage, or whether marriage is for white people. Rather, it is whether marriage should be the normative ideal for intimate life and the vehicle by which we confer a range of important public and private benefits. Banks's narrow focus on the black marriage decline prevents him from considering how the naturalization of the marital family as a privatized system of social provision impedes imagining new possibilities that better provide necessary social support and economic stability.

This Review proceeds in three parts. Part I provides a more detailed description of Banks's project. Part II focuses on the core of Banks's argument: his critique of economically "mixed" marriages and his interracial-marriage prescription. Part III shifts to consider how Banks's project would have benefited from greater engagement with marriage's institutional role in society. To this end, Part III considers what is lost in focusing narrowly on marriage and the marriage decline.

  1. The Problem of Black Marriage

    Only a generation ago, almost everyone got married. (6) After all, marriage was the only legitimate--and legal--way to have sex and raise a family. (7) Today, as Banks notes, many Americans have put sex and the baby carriage before marriage. (8) But even as marriage rates have declined in the United States, not all groups have retreated from marriage at the same rate. Even in this modern moment when marriage matters less for everyone, African Americans are the least likely of all demographic groups to get--and stay-married (p. 7). Today, nearly 70 percent of black women and more than 50 percent of black men are unmarried. (9)

    Many commentators have noted both the marriage gap between blacks and other demographic groups and the black marriage decline. (10) Some of these commentators have viewed the disparity as a legacy of slavery. (11) More conservative pundits have attributed the trend to governmental welfare programs, which are thought to weaken incentives toward marriage. (12) Others attribute the decline to a more pluralistic family tradition that dates back to Africa--one in which the marital nuclear family is merely one option for organizing kinship structures. (13)

    Banks considers, and quickly dismisses, these theories, shifting the discussion from the alleged moral and cultural failings of the black community to numbers and scarcity (p. 12). Focusing on the middle class, Banks reconceptualizes the black romantic landscape in market terms (Chapter Four). Incarceration and uneven educational and employment prospects continually plague black men, stymieing their opportunities for professional and personal success (p. 29). Black women have managed to avoid these obstacles. They complete high school and graduate from college at higher rates than black men, and they are more likely than their male counterparts to belong to the professional class (pp. 38-44).

    This results in an uneven marriage market with far more college-educated professional black women than similarly situated black men. Moreover, black men are more likely than black women to date and marry interracially, further reducing the already limited supply of middle-class black men available for marriage (pp. 33-38).

    The uneven marriage market creates a power dynamic that severely disadvantages black women. Cognizant of their own scarcity (and the demand for middle-class husbands), black men "dictate the terms of their intimate relationships," using "their disproportionate [market] power to establish relationships that are intimate but not committed, that entail sex but not marriage, and that offer benefits without responsibilities" (p. 62). Further, black men play the field as long as they can, deferring marriage to sow their wild oats (pp. 57-59). Relatedly, monogamy is elusive and "mansharing" is prevalent among middle-class blacks in dating relationships (pp. 50-54).

    Black women have responded to these market dynamics in a number of ways. Some accept these market conditions, choosing to either remain single or date men who they know to be dating multiple women (pp. 59-63). Neither choice, however, furthers their chances for marriage. Others do what Banks terms "marrying down"--partnering with men who are less educated and less economically successful (Chapter Seven).

    All of these responses concern Banks. According to him, remaining single deprives black women of the many joys of companionship and family, (14) as well as the economic benefits of pooling two middle-class incomes (pp. 10-11). Submitting to nonexclusive relationships permits some degree of companionship and intimacy--but with costs. As Banks documents, "mansharing" contributes to high rates of sexually transmitted diseases within the African American community (pp. 64-67). And though "marrying down" boosts marriage rates in the short term, these relationships are plagued with the problems caused by the disjunction between the partners' educational levels and economic prospects (pp. 93-102).

    Banks's assessment of black marriage market conditions recasts in academic parlance the "man shortage" theory that has been widely discussed in black popular culture. (15) But the book does more than simply render the marriage gap and decline coherent. Banks also reframes the marriage gap and decline in market terms and then proceeds to explain their costs.

    Obviously, a principal cost of the uneven marriage market and the marriage decline is that blacks are shut out of marriage's many benefits--whether salutary or practical. Blacks are less financially stable and secure than other racial and ethnic subgroups--a phenomenon that Banks partly attributes to low marriage rates. (16) Less obviously, the marriage decline exerts pressure on the black family. Black children are far more likely than their white counterparts to be born outside of marriage and raised in a single-parent family. (17) Further, the abortion rate among blacks exceeds that of other racial and ethnic groups--a fact that Banks associates with the stigmatic consequences of nonmarital births (pp. 81-82). Finally, the inability to forge lasting unions deprives African Americans of the personal fulfillment, satisfaction, and support that strong marriages provide. All of these issues, Banks contends, compound the black community's disadvantages.

    So how should this imperfect marriage market and its many costs be remedied, thus securing the many benefits of marriage for the black community? Banks's solution is simple but provocative. He encourages middle-class black women to exert their own power by considering the prospect of interracial marriage with similarly situated (nonblack) men (p. 120).

    Advising black women to exit the black marriage market is not something that Banks takes lightly. He candidly documents the many reasons why black women have resisted racial heterogamy, particularly with white men (pp. 121-69). Chief among them is the legacy of slavery and the (often) coercive sexual relationships that arose between...

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