The Color of Law A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein (z-lib.org).epub

has helped delay first pregnancies. So have school programs that raise girls’
expectations about careers. But women of any race will not delay voluntary
pregnancy indefinitely; their childbearing goals cannot be suppressed by
moralizing or by education. Higher single-parenthood rates in low-income
African American communities mostly result from a shortage of marriage
partners for young adult women. Excessive incarceration and joblessness of
young black men bear responsibility.
We may think of marriage as a romantic commitment, but it is also an
economic institution. Two-parent families are likely to have a higher joint
income to support and nurture children. A recent survey found that 78
percent of never-married women of all races who hoped to be married were
seeking a spouse with a steady job; this characteristic was more important
than having similar religious beliefs, child-rearing philosophies, education,
or race. If a community’s young men have high unemployment (or only lowwage
work), the mothers of their children will have little incentive to marry
them. Today, among African Americans between the ages of twenty-five and
thirty-four who have never been married, there are fifty-one employed males
for every hundred females. For whites, Asians, and Hispanics, the number of
employed men is approximately equal to the number of women. Unless the
number of working, criminal-record-free men in African American
neighborhoods increases, we are unlikely to succeed in reducing the number
of women there who have children without the means to support and nurture
them well.
White women have rising single-parenthood rates, but they also
frequently have resources to hire assistance they need to raise children on
their own. Also, a larger proportion of white than black “single” mothers are
cohabiting with their children’s father; the institution of marriage has been
declining among whites faster than the rate of intact two-parent families.
A curious aspect of white racial bigotry—the greater tendency of white
women than men to marry black partners—exacerbates the problem. Of
African American men who married in 2010, 24 percent married a woman
who was not African American. But of African American women who
married in that year, only 9 percent married a man who was not African
American. This unique imbalance among race and ethnic groups has been
consistent since the early twentieth century, when interracial marriages were
even rarer than today. When gender-based intermarriage differences are