COUNCIL ON CONTEMPORARY FAMILIES DISCUSSION PAPER
August 30, 2011

Why Interracial Marriage Is Good for Black Women - and the Best Hope for Restoring Marriage in the Black Community

A discussion paper prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families by Ralph Richard Banks, Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Law, Stanford Law School, August 30. CCF colleagues and senior scholars have written brief responses, and their remarks are available from CCF. The CCF press release isavailable here.

--More than 2 out of every 3 black women are currently unmarried, as are a majority of black men, and black women are 3 times aslikely aswhite women never to marry.

--College educated black women are twice as likely as their white peers never to marry, and a majority of college-educated black wives have less educated husbands.

These figures are often blamed on the shortage of stable and employed men in low-income communities, and there's considerable truth in that explanation. But racial gaps in marriage span the socioeconomic spectrum. At every income level black men are less likely than white men to be married. 

Indeed, by some measures, the racial gap is actually wider among affluent men than among their economically disadvantaged counterparts. In most racial-ethnic groups, increases in income consistently translate into a greater likelihood of marriage. But the most affluent black men-those who earn more than $100,000 a year -- are actually less likely to marry than their lower earning but economically stable counterparts, men who earn, say, $50,000 or $60,000 a year.

Council on Contemporary Families
Virtual Symposium: Responses to Banks' Marriage Proposal
August 31, 2011

Colleagues and senior fellows from the Council on Contemporary Families offered responses to Stanford Law Professor Ralph Richard Banks discussion paperpresented this week to the Council on Contemporary Families. Banks' discussion paper, Why Interracial Marriage Is Good for Black Women - and the Best Hope for Restoring Marriage in the Black Community is available from CCF, and CCF's news release is available here. Responses are detailed in full below.

Micere Keels (University of Chicago) does not think that Black women have been ruling out non-Black partners. "Dr. Banks correctly identifies the structural issue-there are significantly more marriageable black women than black men. But educated black women do not summarily reject suitors of other races. For a forthcoming book, I asked 200 college-going and college-educated black women, ages 18 to 51, what race/ethnicity of man they would like to marry and why. Although many stated a preference for a same-race spouse, this was usually a way of assessing probable compatibility. Once other measures of compatibility were evaluated, race greatly receded in importance.

"And black women are not the ones enforcing race-based matching in the world of online dating. Black women are more likely to include white men as possible dating matches than white men are to include them. Additionally, they receive the fewest online advances from men of other racial groups, and the most non-responses when they make online advances to men of other racial groups.

"Furthermore, telling black women to "marry out" rather than "marry down" ignores the fact that women of all racial and ethnic groups are outpacing their male counterpoints in educational attainment. The only viable solution for black women's low likelihood of marriage is to correct society's failure to educate all our boys."

From: Micere Keels, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Human Development, University of Chicago, and author of (forthcoming 2012) Societal Explanations for Personal Problems: The Decline in Marriage in America, and the Particular Case of College-Educated Black Women's Low Likelihood of Marriage, 847-409-2757, micere@uchicago.edu.

Belinda Tucker (UCLA) agrees Black women are way of white men, but ties this to a history of white men's attitudes towards them. "Our data from 21 large U.S. cities in 1996 showed that while nearly 90 percent of Black men would marry someone of another race, 71 percent of Black women also supported interracial marriage. When it came down to specifics, though, a differential reluctance emerged: only 57 percent of black women would marry someone who was white.

CHICAGO, IL, April 24 - In a discussion paper prepared for a panel to be held at the 11th annual conference of the Council On Contemporary Families, on April 25 and 26, 2008, University of Illinois, Chicago, Allen Li presents a new approach to researching the impact of divorce on children. Li argues that it is methodologically unsound to compare the outcomes of children of divorced parents with those of continuously-married parents. Instead, the proper comparison is between the behavior of children years before a divorce occurs and their behavior after the divorce. Only this can tell us whether children's problems after a divorce were a result of the divorce or were a continuation of prior problems attributable to pre-existing conditions of the child's environment. Arguing that previous studies have over-stated the impact of divorce by failing to control for both "observable" and "unobservable" differences in families prior to divorce, Li used longitudinal research and novel statistical methods to revisit the question. He found that the average effect of divorce was neither to increase nor decrease children's behavior problems. "It is possible that the dissolution of some marriages decreases some children's behavior problems and the dissolution of others increases children's behavior problems," Li writes, "so that they cancel each other out, creating the zero effect that I found when I totaled the average effect of divorce. However, for this to be true, one must admit that while certain divorces harm children, others benefit them. My findings contradict the widely-accepted claim that MOST divorces increase children's behavior problems and that only a tiny minority of divorces do NOT."

This discussion paper summarizes the findings of a more technical, unpublished paper that won the 2007 Graduate Student Paper Award in Social Demography from the Section on Population of the American Sociological Association. Li describes his methods and findings below. Following the appendix, several other scholars offer differing perspectives on his work and on the debate over the impact of divorce.

Read The Impact of Divorce on Children's Behavior Problems here.

4-11-2012

WOMEN'S EDUCATION AND THEIR LIKELIHOOD OF MARRIAGE:

A HISTORIC REVERSAL

A FACT SHEET PREPARED FOR

THE COUNCIL ON CONTEMPORARY FAMILIES

Paula England and Jonathan Bearak, New York University

Historically, women who graduated from college were far more likely than any other group of women -- whether high school dropouts, high school graduates, or women with some college - to remain single their entire lives. As late as 1950, a quarter of white female college graduates 40 years of age had never married, compared to compared to only 7 percent of their counterparts without a college degree. (See this CCF Report.) But what has happened since women have been completing college and obtaining advanced degrees at much higher rates, and since divorce has become easier to obtain?

HOW COLOR-BLIND IS LOVE? INTERRACIAL DATING FACTS AND PUZZLES

A fact sheet for the Council on Contemporary Families

by Colleen Poulin and Virginia Rutter

March 30, 2011

How colorblind is love? In interracial and intercultural romances, color counts for less than ever. But when it comes to marital commitments, and even public displays of affection, barriers still remain.

The following fact sheet was prepared for the 2011 Council on Contemporary Families conference, "Tipping Point? When Minority Families Become the Majority" (April 8-9 at the University of Illinois Chicago),  by researchers at Framingham State University. CCF public affairs intern Colleen Poulin and FSU sociologist Virginia Rutter consider what's working and what remains challenging in interracial relationships.

Interracial dating has increased dramatically

• About half of Americans have dated someone from a different racial group. One study found that 36 percent of white Americans, 57 percent of African Americans, 56 percent of Latino Americans, and 57 percent of Asian Americans have interracially dated.
• Attitudes in every generation have become more accepting of interracial dating: millenials are the most accepting, with almost 90 percent approving.
• Experience makes all the difference: 92 percent of those who have dated interracially before will do so again; and attendance at a more diverse college or living in a multi-racial setting makes interracial dating more likely.
• Many people in today's dating pool are themselves children of parents of different races. According to estimates from the Census Bureau, the mixed-race population has grown by more than a third, from 2.4 percent of the population in 2000 to 3.5 percent today. Among children, the mixed-race population has grown by 50 percent in the same period of time.
• Diversity is complex. In one set of interviews at Framingham State University, we found 10 different types of interracial pairings in just 13 couples.

April 15, 2008

By Betsey Stevenson, Professor of Business and Public Policy, The Warton School of the University of Pennsylvania; betseys@wharton.upenn.edu; and Justin Wolfers, Professor of Business and Public Policy, The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania; jwolfers@wharton.upenn.edu

A new report,"The Taxpayer Costs of Divorce and Unwed Childbearing: First-Ever Estimates for the Nation and all 50 States", raises the question of how much divorce costs taxpayers. This is an intriguing question, but unfortunately this report falls short on providing the answer.

April 26-28, 2002
Prepared for the Fifth Annual CCF Conference

By Stephanie Coontz, Professor of History and Family Studies, The Evergreen State College; coontzs@msn.com; 360.556.9223; and Nancy Folbre, Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; folbre@econs.umass.edu

April 25-26, 2008
Prepared for the 11th Annual Conference of the Council on Contemporary Families

By Oriel Sullivan, Professor of Sociology, Ben Gurion University; sullivan@bgu.ac.il; 972.8647.2056; and Scott Coltrane, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Riverside; scott.coltrane@ucr.edu; 951.827.2443

For thirty years, researchers studying the changes in family dynamics since the rise of the  women's movement have concluded that, despite gains in the world of education, work, and politics, women face a "stalled revolution" at home. According to many studies, men's family work has barely budged in response to women's increased employment. The typical punch line of many news stories has been that even though women are working longer hours on the job and cutting back their own housework, men are not picking up the slack.

Our research suggests that these studies were based on unrealistic hopes for instant transformation. They underestimated the amount of change going on behind the scenes and the growing willingness of men to adapt to their wives' new behaviors and values. In fact, more couples are sharing family tasks than ever before, and the movement toward sharing has been especially significant full-time dual-earner couples.

May 10, 2009

By Judy Osborne, Psychotherapist and Director of Stepfamily Associates, Brookline, Massachusettes; judyosborne16@gmail.com; 617.731.5767

May 1, 2004

By M.V. Lee Badgett, Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; lbadgett@econs.umass.edu

Since the November 2003 court ruling allowing same-sex couples to marry in Massachusetts, a new debate on the consequences of expanding the right to marry has exploded across the United States. While the debate involves many issues, one particularly controversial question is whether heterosexual people would change their marriage behavior if same-sex couples were given the same marital rights and obligations.