Ralph Richard Banks, a Stanford law professor, published a book with this 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 statistics are stark. African American marriage rates have fallen sharply since the 1960s, and the gap between black and white marriage rates has widened over the same period. Today, roughly half of African American adults have never been married, compared to roughly a quarter of white adults. Among college-educated black women, the marriage gap is particularly pronounced.

Banks argues that the shortage of marriageable black men — driven by mass incarceration, educational disparities, and mortality — has created a demographic asymmetry that distorts the marriage market in ways that particularly affect college-educated black women. He suggests, controversially, that black women should consider interracial marriage more readily than cultural norms have traditionally supported.

The book generated significant debate, some of it heated. 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.

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.