AFP AUDIO INTERVIEW
Stanford Law Professor Ralph Richard Banks has a solution for the demise of marriage in America’s black community: interracial marriage.
Banks explains his strategy, formulated after conducting over 100 detailed interviews with professional black women, in this 34-minute interview.
New Book Uncovers, Promotes, Demise of Black Race in America
• Black Law Professor’s Marriage Study Advances Interracial Marriage as the Cure for Decline
By Dave Gahary
While the rapid demise of the white race in America cannot be disputed, a recently released book by a black Stanford Law School professor predicts and even promotes the destruction of this country’s black race. The book, Is Marriage for White People?: How the African American Marriage Decline Affects Everyone, reveals that if current trends continue, a viable pure black race in America will go the way of the Woolly Mammoth, although the author is at odds with this conclusion without offering up any evidence to counter this claim.
AMERICAN FREE PRESS sat down with Professor Ralph “Rick” Banks for an exclusive interview to discuss his book and expound on some of the more startling findings. Professor Banks, an expert on race and inequality, has written and lectured widely on these topics. His book was picked as one of the top 10 in 2011 by The Wilson Quarterly, a magazine published by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., “noted for its nonpartisan, non-ideological approach to current issues, designed to make the research and debates of scholars and intellectuals accessible to a general audience.”
Professor Banks writes that, “Throughout the middle of the twentieth century, approximately nine out of ten black women married.” Now, that number is three out of ten.
AFP asked what accounts for the stark decline.
“Marriage has declined throughout American society,” explained Professor Banks, “but it has declined the most among African-Americans. Black men are incarcerated in unprecedented numbers, they’re unemployed in unprecedented numbers and they are lagging behind black women educationally. Only 50% of black boys graduate from high school. There are fewer men now who are able to fulfill the role of a husband.”
Simply put, the biggest factor for the decline comes down to supply and demand. Fewer black men equal fewer marriages.
Compounding the decline is the fact that black women rarely stray beyond their own race when looking for a partner.
“Black women are the least likely of any group to marry someone of another race,” explained Professor Banks. “Only about one in twenty black women have a partner of another race.”
He writes, “As recently as 1988, 67% of black women at a Southern university said they would rather remain single than date outside their race.”
Additionally, the educational divide between black women and black men is large and growing.
“There are nearly twice as many black women as black men who graduate from college,” explained Professor Banks.
Consequently, he writes, “College-educated black women are twice as likely as their white counterparts to be unmarried,” and, he says, “Black women with advanced degrees are the most likely of any group of women in the nation not to have children.”
Since the pool of educated black men is so lacking relative to black women, and because black women rarely marry outside their race, when they do marry, the result is a stark mismatch.
“More than half of college-educated black women who are married have a husband who did not go to college,” explained Professor Banks.
As Professor Banks writes, “Black women marry down because they don’t marry out.”
“Marrying down socioeconomically and marrying out racially,” said Professor Banks.
A passage from the book illustrates the lengths black women will go to ignore a similar non-black partner and secure an inferior black partner. Professor Banks examined personal ads placed by black women and found “The criteria that many ask for set a very low bar: no drugs, no jail, employed.”
The biggest losers here are undoubtedly the children. “70% of black children are born to unmarried parents,” explained Professor Banks.
Adding further to the decline is the fact that black men are in no rush to get hitched, as the numbers are in their favor.
“Even those black men who do have good jobs and who are college-educated and earn a nice amount of money,” explained Professor Banks, “even those men are much less likely to be married than their white counterparts, at every income level. And part of the story there I think is that there’s just less incentive to get married because remaining single has a lot of appeal.”
So what does the future hold for America’s black race? The book offers some insight.
“As the educational and economic gap between black women and men continues to widen, they will become ever more culturally dissimilar. Over time, barring a dramatic change in either the labor market or public policy with respect to education, many black men will seem more and more alien to those black women who have moved ahead.”
“Over time,” explains Professor Banks, “I think it is the case that more black women are going to marry men of other races. We see that happening already. If you look at recent marriages, about one in ten black women are married to men of another race, which is a big increase from prior years.” Also, “Based on recent data, about one in five black men last year married someone of a different race,” said Banks.
Although interracial marriage will lead to a decrease of the black race in this country, Banks welcomes it.
“That will be a good development. We shouldn’t think that’s a bad thing for black women to find the partner who’s best for them, even if he’s not African-American. We shouldn’t think it’s a bad thing for black women to have children who are biracial. We shouldn’t think those are bad developments. We should encourage that, in fact, because that leads to black women having better relationships, it leads to more stable situations for black children, and it even helps relationships between black men and women to the extent that black women gain more power in their relationships with black men. So we should encourage and applaud, not simply accept the fact of black women finding relationships with other races.”
AFP asked if his prescription for increasing black marriage rates will lead to the destruction of the black race.
“A lot of people have suggested frankly, ‘Hey, Professor Banks, you’re promoting black genocide and self-annihilation.’ Interracial marriage “does not lead to the genocide or the disappearance of the black race,” explained Professor Banks. “There are thirty to forty million black people in the United States. We are not going to disappear. That will not happen anytime in our lifetime.”
It may not happen in our lifetime, but if current trends continue, the black race in America will be a whole lot less black in a few generations.
Dave Gahary, a former submariner in the U.S. Navy, is the host of AFP’s ‘Underground Interview’ series.
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