They dismiss the shortage of marriageable black men as a myth and the marriage decline as an overhyped nonproblem, the discussion of which is depicted, as one New York Times essay put it, as “part of a persistent historical and present-day attack on black people in America, with black men made into deviants and black women into problems.”
That’s just one example among many hostile reactions to my recently published book, “Is Marriage for White People? How the African-American Marriage Decline Affects Everyone.” Some commentators, without even reading the book, have characterized me as self-hating, if not outright racist.
No wonder some whites too are hesitant to venture onto the terrain of race and marriage.Banks ends his commentary by calling on the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. and imploring that we “have the courage to look unflinchingly at societal trends that some others would prefer not to acknowledge.”
I found Banks’ article uncharitable and frustrating. He dismissed very real criticisms of the way the media talks about black relationships and marriage and alluded that black folks would rather watch communities fail than air the dirty laundry of high incarceration rates and success gaps between black men and women. This, in my observation, simply isn’t true. What critics like myself are hesitant to buy into is the sexist and racist framing of cultural shifts surrounding marriage.
According to a recent report by the Pew Research Center, barely half of adults in the United States are married. That’s a record low. And similar shifts are happening around the world. So, while black men and women marry less than their white counterparts, I resist viewing this fact as simply evidence of African American dysfunction.
But here is my other complaint: The current conversation about black marriage utterly fails black women. Why, for instance, is the conversation hyper-focused on the singleness of black women, when black men are equally unmarried? Forty-nine percent of black men age 15 and older have never married, but that statistic is rarely front and center in reports about the sorry state of black matrimony. Just as the point is rarely made that most black women do marry. Instead, the media seems invested in the meme of the pitiful, unmarriageable black woman. And we are treated to endless advice as to what we need to be doing differently to better snag a partner. Even Banks’ book, which I thought did a good job of researching the factors that contribute to lowered African American marriage rates, ultimately prescribed a simplistic solution for black women--date non-black men.
The result of all this is a lopsided and unnuanced conversation that reduces black women to their marital status, but also ignores the experiences of married women, divorced women, women who prefer not to marry, women in non-traditional committed relationships, lesbian women, trans women and others.
That is the problem with talk about the so-called black marriage crisis. It is the problem highlighted, in part, by Angela Stanley, a researcher at the Kirwan Institute of Race and Ethnicity and herself an unmarried black woman, in The New York Times. Banks quotes and brushes off Stanley’s voice, though, and does not even do her the honor of even linking to her complete work. That is another problem with these discussions--they seem dominated by black men, while the input of black women is waved away.
On the eve of MLK Day, Banks calls on the black community not to shy away from acknowledging and taking responsibility for the problem of its low marriage rate. Respectfully, Mr. Banks, we are not reluctant to speak about marriage in the black community, but many of us refuse to sign on to sexist, racist and heteronormative messages while doing it.
Photo Credit: weddingssc1
