'At this point in my life,' says Audrey, age 39, 'I thought I'd be
married with children.' A native of southeast Washington, D.C., and
the child of parents who are approaching their 50th wedding
anniversary, Audrey seems like the proverbial 'good catch'—smart,
funny, well-educated, attractive.
Audrey earns a good living, too, with an
income from management consulting that far surpasses what her
parents ever made. Her social life is busy as well, filled with
family, friends and church.
![[BMARRIAGE2]](http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/RV-AD855_BMARRI_DV_20110805183710.jpg "美国黑人女人的婚姻市场处境很不好")
Masterfile
Only about one in 20 black women is interracially married; they are
much less likely than black men to cross the race line.
What Audrey
lacks is a husband. As she told me, sitting at a restaurant in the
fashionable Dupont Circle neighborhood of the nation's capital,
'I'm trying to get to a point where I accept that marriage may
never happen for me.'
Audrey
belongs to the most unmarried group of people in the U.S.: black
women. Nearly 70% of black women are unmarried, and the racial gap
in marriage spans the socioeconomic spectrum, from the urban poor
to well-off suburban professionals. Three in 10 college-educated
black women haven't married by age 40; their white peers are less
than half as likely to have remained unwed.
What explains
this marriage gap? As a black man, my interest in the issue is more
than academic. I've looked at all the studies—the history, the
social science, the government data—and I've spent a year traveling
the country interviewing scores of professional black women. In
exchange for my promise to conceal their identities (in part by
using pseudonyms, as I've done here), they shared with me their
most personal experiences and desires in relation to marriage and
family.
I came away
convinced of two facts: Black women confront the worst relationship
market of any group because of economic and cultural forces that
are not of their own making; and they have needlessly worsened
their situation by limiting themselves to black men. I also arrived
at a startling conclusion: Black women can best promote black
marriage by opening themselves to relationships with men of other
races.
Audrey and
other black women confront a social scene in which desirable black
men are scarce.
Part of the
problem is incarceration. More than two million men are now
imprisoned in the U.S., and roughly 40% of them are
African-American. At any given time, more than 10% of black men in
their 20s or 30s—prime marrying ages—are in jail or prison.
Educationally, black men also lag. There are roughly 1.4 million
black women now in college, compared to just 900,000 black men. By
graduation, black women outnumber men 2-to-1. Among graduate-school
students, in 2008 there were 125,000 African-American women but
only 58,000 African-American men. That same year, black women
received more than three out of every five law or medical degrees
awarded to African-Americans.
These
problems translate into dimmer economic prospects for black men,
and the less a man earns, the less likely he is to marry. That's
how the relationship market operates. Marriage is a matter of love
and commitment, but it is also an exchange. A black man without a
job or the likelihood of landing one cannot offer a woman enough to
make that exchange worthwhile.
But poor
black men are not the only ones who don't marry. At every income
level, black men are less likely to marry than are their white
counterparts. And the marriage gap is wider among men who earn more
than $100,000 a year than among men who earn, say, $50,000 or
$60,000 a year.
The dynamics
of the relationship market offer one explanation for this pattern.
Because black men are in short supply, their options are better
than those of black women. A desirable black man who ends a
relationship with one woman will find many others waiting; that's
not so for black women.
If many black
women remain unmarried because they think they have too few
options, some black men stay single because they think they have so
many. The same numbers imbalance that makes life difficult for
black women may be a source of power for black men. Why cash in,
they reason, when it is so easy to continue to play?
Black women who
do marry often end up with black men who are less accomplished than
they are. They are more likely than any other group of women to
earn more than their husbands. More than half of college-educated
black wives are better educated than their husbands.
The prevalence
of relationships between professional black women and blue-collar
black men may help to explain another aspect of the racial gap in
marriage: Even as divorce rates have declined for most groups
during the past few decades, more than half of black marriages
dissolve.
Cecelia, a
corporate lawyer who graduated from Columbia Law School, married a
construction worker. When he relocated from Denver to her
brownstone in Harlem, it took him the better part of a year to find
work. 'It was a huge strain on the relationship,' Cecelia told me.
She didn't mind his being out of work, but he did. 'He was
uncomfortable living off me,' Cecelia said. The marriage didn't
last.
So why don't
more black women, especially the most accomplished of them, marry
men of other races? Why do they marry down so much and out so
little?
![[TOC6]](http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/RV-AD854_TOC6_DV_20110805183851.jpg "美国黑人女人的婚姻市场处境很不好")
Getty Images Black
women are the most unmarried group in America.
Black women
lead by far the most segregated intimate lives of any minority
group in the U.S. They are less than half as likely as black men to
wed across racial lines. Only about 1 in 20 black women are
interracially married.
Part of the
reason, again, is the market. Numerous studies of Internet dating
confirm that black women are the partners least desired by
non-black men.
But that's
not the whole story. Even if a majority of white men are
uninterested in dating black women, that still leaves more than
enough eligible white men for every single black woman in America.
Moreover, many major urban areas have large numbers of Asian,
Indian, Middle Eastern and Latino men, some of whom, according to
at least one study of Internet dating, are more responsive to black
women than are black men.
To understand
the intimate segregation of black women, we must go beyond the
question of whether black women are wanted and look instead at what
they want. For some black women, the personal choice of an intimate
partner is political. They want to help black men, not abandon
them. As one woman told me, 'If you know your history, how can you
not support black men?'
Others prefer
black men because they don't think a relationship with a non-black
man would work. They worry about rejection by a would-be spouse's
family or the awkwardness of having to explain oneself to a
non-black partner.
As one
31-year-old schoolteacher in D.C. told me, 'It's easy to date a
black man because he knows about my hair. He knows I don't wash it
every day. He knows I'm going to put the scarf on [to keep it in
place at night].' Discussions about hair may seem trivial, but for
many black women, just the thought of having the 'hair talk' makes
them tired. It's emblematic of so much else they'd have to
teach.
Some black
women resist interracial marriage for a more primal reason. Long
before Cecelia began her ill-fated relationship with her now
ex-husband, she dated a white law-school classmate. They broke up
because she couldn't imagine having children with him. 'I wanted
chocolate babies,' she explained to me.
Given her
milk-chocolate complexion, green eyes and curly hair, Cecelia
worried that a biracial baby might come out looking white. Cecelia
wanted chocolate babies not just so they would stay connected to
black culture, but for another reason as well: So that no one would
ever question whether they were hers. With biracial children, she
feared that she might be mistaken for the nanny. Many black women
share her anxiety about having a biracial child.
What would
happen if more black women opened themselves to the possibility of
marrying non-black men?
To start,
they might find themselves in better relationships. Some
professional black women would no doubt discover that they are more
compatible with a white, Asian or Latino coworker or college
classmate than with the black guy they grew up with, who now works
at the auto shop.
By opening
themselves to relationships with men of other races, black women
would also lessen the power disparity that depresses the
African-American marriage rate. As more black women expanded their
options, black women as a group would have more leverage with black
men. Even black women who remained unwilling to love across the
color lin
