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How the African American Marriage Decline Affects Everyone
Penguin
April 2011
On Sale: April 14, 2011
288 pages
ISBN: 0525952012
EAN: 9780525952015
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
A distinguished Stanford law professor examines the steep
decline in marriage rates among the African American middle
class, and offers a paradoxical-nearly incendiary-solution.
Black women are three times as likely as
white women to never marry.
That sobering statistic
reflects a broader reality: African Americans are the most
unmarried people in our nation, and 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. College educated black women are twice
as likely as their white peers never to marry. Is
Marriage for White People? is the first book to
illuminate the many facets of the African American marriage
decline and its implications for American society. The book
explains the social and economic forces that have undermined
marriage for African Americans and that shape everyone's
lives. It distills the best available research to trace the
black marriage decline's far reaching consequences,
including the disproportionate likelihood of abortion,
sexually transmitted diseases, single parenthood, same sex
relationships, polygamous relationships, and celibacy among
black women. This book centers on the experiences not
of men or of the poor but of those black women who have
surged ahead, even as black men have fallen behind. Theirs
is a story that has not been told. Empirical evidence
documents its social significance, but its meaning emerges
through stories drawn from the lives of women across the
nation. Is Marriage for White People? frames the
stark predicament that millions of black women now face:
marry down or marry out. At the core of the inquiry is a
paradox substantiated by evidence and experience alike: If
more black women married white men, then more black men and
women would marry each other. This book not only sits
at the intersection of two large and well- established
markets-race and marriage-it responds to yearnings that are
widespread and deep in American society. The African
American marriage decline is a secret in plain view about
which people want to know more, intertwining as it does two
of the most vexing issues in contemporary society. The fact
that the most prominent family in our nation is now an
African American couple only intensifies the interest, and
the market. A book that entertains as it informs, Is
Marriage for White People? will be the definitive guide
to one of the most monumental social developments of the
past half century.
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