The Family - Racial Differences On Marriage

The chart shows the number of adults (defined here as anyone over 15) who have never been married. The figures for white and black males and females are charted. Changes in the percentages of adults never married over the last half of the 20th century are much greater for blacks than for whites, although for all categories there are more of us who have never married at the end of the period than at the beginning.

As we saw in the previous panel, much of this change can be attributed to later entry into a first marriage. But the striking rise in the number of black men and women who have never married is worth further exploration.

A look at demographic data by gender shows a large difference between whites and blacks in the age range at which most of us marry. There are fewer black men in the age range 20 to 53 than there are black women. This fact, in combination with higher rates of murder, accidental death, incarceration, and chronic unemployment for black men as compared with white men accounts to some extent for the difference in the numbers of blacks and whites who have never married. However, because almost the same sex ratios existed in the year 1950 as did in the year 2000, these gender balance differences alone do not explain the sharp increase in never-married blacks versus never-married whites in the last 50 years of the 20th century.

Explanations for the rapid decline in marriage among blacks come in two primary flavors: economic and cultural.

In his influential 1987 book, The Truly Disadvantaged, Dr. William Julius Wilson presents the economic argument. He makes the case that the truly disadvantaged (the new underclass made up primarily of black unmarried mothers and the jobless fathers of their children) are largely the result of the deindustrialization of the inner city. As high-paying manufacturing jobs left the urban centers, young unskilled men were left with few employment opportunities and young women refused to marry financially unstable men.

The cultural argument is one that associates the decline in the marriage rate to a breakdown of social norms, expectations, and institutions generally. The fact that the black community has seen its rate of marriage decline faster than rates overall merely means that the social norms and expectations supporting marriage in the black community have deteriorated more quickly than they appear to have done so in the society at large.

Some proponents of both economic and cultural causation point to 40 years of social welfare policies as an additional cause for the decline in marriages among the poor. It is said that social welfare policies intended to assist single mothers inadvertently served to encourage single motherhood and further undermined the institution of marriage.

In 1998 a group of prominent black leaders gathered at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, to confer on the subject of African-American fathers and families. The resulting statement paper entitled Turning the Corner on Father Absence in Black America rejects the economic versus cultural dichotomy in favor of a call to action. Co-author of the statement, Enola G. Aird, put it this way: "The heartrending crisis of black father absence that African-American children suffer has cultural, economic and spiritual roots. Addressing all of these to strengthen marriage and fatherhood in the Black community should be our most urgent priority."

Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census. Marital Status of the Population 15 Years Old and Over by Sex and Race: 1950 to Present. Online. June 29, 2001; Race and Hispanic or Latino Origin by Age and Sex for the United States: 2000. Online. Available: http://www.census.gov/population/www/cen2000/briefs.html. The quote from Enola G. Aird is from a press release issued by the Institute for American Values. Their web site is accessible at http://www.americanvalues.org/index.html