Is Marriage for White People?

Ralph Richard Banks, a Stanford law professor, published a book this month with a provocative title examining a phenomenon that is genuinely significant and genuinely underexamined: the dramatic decline in marriage rates among African Americans, and what that decline means for the community, for individuals, and for the long-running debate about family structure and economic mobility.

The short answer: Banks argues that mass incarceration, educational failure, and economic disadvantage have decimated the ranks of marriageable black men — and that black women, rather than "marrying down," should be free to "marry out." His paradoxical claim: if more black women married men of other races, more black men and women might end up marrying each other.

What do the numbers actually show?

The statistics are stark. Black women are three times as likely as white women to never marry, and college-educated black women are twice as likely as their white peers never to marry — so African Americans are, as the book's publisher puts it, "the most unmarried people in our nation." Contrary to public perception, the racial gap in marriage is not confined to women or the poor; black men, particularly the most successful and affluent, are less likely to marry than their white counterparts. (Penguin Random House)

What is Banks' argument?

Banks argues that the shortage of marriageable black men — driven by incarceration, educational disparities, interracial dating patterns, and a lack of economic opportunity — has created a demographic asymmetry that distorts the marriage market in ways that particularly affect black women who have surged ahead educationally and economically. His prescription, delivered to the San Jose Mercury News: "Don't marry down. Marry out." He hopes the book will, in his words, "enable a conversation" and give black women the freedom to feel they can marry whomever they choose. (ABA Journal)

Why did the book stir controversy?

Critics argued that framing the problem as one of women's choices obscured the structural conditions — incarceration, education inequality, economic marginalization — that created the shortage in the first place. Others welcomed the directness with which Banks addressed a subject that too often gets processed through euphemism, noting that he grounds statistically driven arguments in personal interviews with women across the country. (Kirkus Reviews)

What is not in dispute is that the decline in black marriage rates has real consequences for family stability, child wellbeing, and economic mobility. Whether those consequences are best addressed through cultural change, structural reform, or both is the more complex question — and the one this book, whatever you think of its answer, forces into the open.

Frequently asked questions

Who is Ralph Richard Banks? A professor at Stanford Law School and author of Is Marriage for White People?: How the African American Marriage Decline Affects Everyone (Dutton, September 2011). (Wikipedia)

What is the book's most controversial claim? That black women should more readily consider interracial marriage — summarized as "marry out, don't marry down" — and the paradox that more interracial marriage by black women could ultimately strengthen black marriage overall.