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Presentation by Ralph Richard Banks, Stanford Law School

February 15, 2012, 4:00-6:00pm

Faculty Club at the University of California Berkeley

Ralph Richard Banks is the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. He is an expert on topics related to race and inequality. His research addresses race and inequality issues across a variety of domains, from criminal justice to employment to the family. He has written and lectured widely in each of these areas. Professor Banks teaches equal protection law, family law, employment discrimination law, and race and the law. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and the University of Virginia Law School. Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 1998, Professor Banks was the Reginald F. Lewis Fellow at Harvard Law School and an attorney with the firm O’Melveny & Myers. He was a law clerk to Judge Barrington D. Parker, Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Excerpt from Richard Banks' book:

"Over the past half century, African Americans have become the most unmarried people in our nation. By far. We are the least likely to marry and the most likely to divorce; we maintain fewer committed and enduring relationships than any other group. Not since slavery have black men and women been as unpartnered as we are now.

Although the African American marriage decline is especially pronounced among the poor, it is apparent as well among the affluent: doctors, lawyers, corporate professionals. Black women of all socioeconomic classes remain single in part because the ranks of black men have been decimated by incarceration, educational failure, and economic disadvantage. In recent years, two black women have graduated college for every one black man. Two to one. Every year. As a result, college-educated black women are more likely than college-educated women of other races to remain unmarried or to wed a less-educated man who earns less than they do. More than half of married black women who have graduated from college have a less-educated husband who did not. Yet despite the shortage of black male peers, black women do not marry men of other races. Black women marry across class lines, but not race lines. They marry down but not out. Thus, they lead the most racially segregated intimate lives of any Americans.

Why? Why are black women the least likely to marry out? What are the consequences of the unprecedented rates at which they marry down or remain unmarried? These are the questions at the heart of my inquiry. I find the answers in two very different types of evidence. For more than a year, I traveled the country interviewing scores of professional black women at length about their relationships with men. Their stories, told with courage and candor, are certain to resonate deeply with some readers and to surprise or even shock others. Before I conducted my first interview, I devoted several years to the study of the black marriage decline. I began, as law professors typically do, with judicial decisions and legislative enactments but soon found myself immersed in history, social science, and government data about the United States population."

For more information on Richard Banks and his newest book, click here.