Stanford Law Prof’s New Book Argues Black Women Should Consider Husbands of Other Races
A Stanford University law professor argues in a controversial new book that black women should consider marrying men of a different race.
The book is titled Is Marriage for White People? How the African American Marriage Decline Affects Everyone. The author, Ralph Richard Banks, is a black law professor who is married to a black social psychology professor, the San Jose Mercury News reports. Two of Banks’ three sisters, all “intelligent, beautiful and educated,” he says, are unmarried.
The statistics show the difficulties facing black women looking for a mate. Black women are only half as likely as white women to be married, Banks says, and more than three times as likely as white women never to marry. He hopes the book will “enable a conversation” and give black women the freedom to feel they can marry whomever they choose.
Banks’ advice? “Don’t marry down. Marry out,” he tells the Mercury News.
Banks elaborates in an adapted introduction to his book published by Fox News. “Black women of all socioeconomic classes remain single not because they want to be, but instead because the ranks of black men have been decimated by incarceration, educational failure and economic disadvantage,” he writes. He sees implications for people of all races as fewer Americans marry and women make up a majority of the nation’s college graduates.
