http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/b...-by-ralph-richard-banks-book-review.html?_r=0
This leads to my primary criticism of the book. The prescriptive measure Banks concludes with is: Black women should be more open to marrying outside their race. Banks argues that to their detriment, black women will marry “down” but not “out” — they’re more likely to marry less-educated and lower-earning black men than to marry interracially. He treats black women’s resistance to interracial dating with great sensitivity (though he pays too little attention to the history of nonconsensual and exploitative sexual relationships between white men and black women that may be the root of many black women’s reluctance). And as a statement of values, Banks’s position is laudable: people should be open to forming relationships across ethnic lines in a heterogeneous society; after all, romantic love is serendipitous — it doesn’t neatly comport with expectations. But given that Banks identifies a devastating social reality for black men as the foremost explanation for low African-American marriage rates, you might expect a logical first-order solution to address
that reality. Attention to the abundant research on the discrimination faced by black men in schools, in the workplace and in the realm of law enforcement would have been useful here. A solution to the marriage question rooted in dating preferences treats the problem as an individual one rather than as societal or structural, which seems odd in a book about such a fundamental social institution.
