Book Review Race, Marriage, Markets, Choice, and Some Reflections on Is Marriage for White People?

Is Marriage for White People? How the African-American Marriage Decline Affects Everyone1 by Stanford Law School Professor Ralph Richard Banks tackles the controversial subject of the decline, in recent decades, of marriage rates among African-Americans. The book provides a detailed, comprehensive analysis of the reasons fewer African-Americans have been getting married in recent years. The book then offers a recommendation to address this state of affairs—one Banks considers a significant problem not only for AfricanAmericans but also for the entire nation. The book focuses on the middle class, especially professional and middle class African-American women. While substantial public attention is often focused on African-American women who are struggling with poverty, drugs, public assistance, domestic violence, HIV status, and the child welfare system, rarely is attention paid to the experiences and emotional lives of AfricanAmerican women who are educated, professional, and middle or upper-middle class.2 This book is a rare and welcomed attempt to explore an aspect of the lives of a group of women who have made substantial progress in the workplace in recent decades but whose prospects for forming successful intimate relationships is often seemingly complicated by their success. Is Marriage for White People? is anchored in demographic data focusing on the fact that there is a dearth of African-American men who have similar levels of education, income, and professional status. The result, according to Banks, is that the women face formidable challenges in finding compatible marriage partners among African-American men.3 Often these women do not marry at all. Those