Marriage Is for White People?
27 March 06
I’ve been puzzling over this article published in the Washington Post on Sunday.
The marriage rate for African Americans has been dropping since the 1960s, and today, we have the lowest marriage rate of any racial group in the United States. In 2001, according to the U.S. Census, 43.3 percent of black men and 41.9 percent of black women in America had never been married, in contrast to 27.4 percent and 20.7 percent respectively for whites. African American women are the least likely in our society to marry. In the period between 1970 and 2001, the overall marriage rate in the United States declined by 17 percent; but for blacks, it fell by 34 percent. Such statistics have caused Howard University relationship therapist Audrey Chapman to point out that African Americans are the most uncoupled people in the country.
The author goes on to cite several factors she sees as primarily responsible for the decline in the black marriage rate:
Sex, love and childbearing have become a la carte choices rather than a package deal that comes with marriage. Moreover, in an era of brothers on the “down low,” the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and the decline of the stable blue-collar jobs that black men used to hold, linking one’s fate to a man makes marriage a risky business for a black woman.
I think the phenomenon is less attributable to race per se than to class. My analysis here is admittedly unscientific, but those in my peer group who went on to college, stuck it out and committed themselves to careers were more likely to end up in stable relationships, regardless of race. And they’ve done so in roughly equal percentages. In fact, the only out-of-wedlock births among my diverse high school peer group involved white couples.
Not to gloss over the issue of race—the cycle of disenfranchisement, poverty and lowered expectations is certainly a huge factor here—but considering either race or class in a vacuum doesn’t yield much insight.
More: Relationships, Black, Racial Bias
# Hiromi 29 March 06
There is also a great deal of ideology involved in defining what exactly are “social problems” and what are “norms.” In this case, marriage + nuclear family are considered to be the norm, and “female head of household” (read: African-American families) is a deviation from that norm.
I object to the focus on marriage and family structure as the true problems. The fact that single mothers suffer economically is due to problems with economic and social structures, and it is these that need to be fixed.
If you define the problem as the range of economic opportunities available to children, rather than family structure, you’re getting away from ideology a little bit more. The authors of Freakonomics conducted a study in which they determined that the education level of the parents was the primary determining factor regarding the future economic peformance of their children. Not whether the family ate dinner together or whether both parents were present.
In short, I think you’re absolutely right in focusing on issues of class and economics