As Daniel Patrick Moynihan learned to his dismay, the topic of the black family is a minefield. In Is Marriage for White People?, Ralph Richard Banks, a Stanford Law Professor, goes where few dare to tread, seeking to
“[r]eexamine everything . . . and tell the truth about it,” in the words of the book’s epigram by James Baldwin. His candid treatment of this divisive topic casts a bold eye on uncomfortable truths, but the blinders of ideology ultimately defeat him. He succumbs to the reductionist shibboleths of social science, refuses to “blame the victim,” and resists explanations relying on cultural dysfunction. These defects mar his assessment of the black family’s dilemma and his proposed corrective.

Banks begins with the fact that blacks are “the most unmarried group of people in our nation.” Rates of matrimony have dropped steadily since the 1950s, with nearly 70 percent of black women and over half of black men failing ever to marry. This has resulted in a drastic increase in single-parent families, out-of-wedlock births, and children growing up without fathers. Though the marriage rate among less-privileged whites is also dropping, as recently noted by Charles Murray and Don Peck, these patterns generate stark racial disparities in family structure up and down the social scale.

In confronting these demographic facts, Banks insists that marriage matters. To his credit, he acknowledges the growing social-scientific consensus that married households provide the best environment for child-rearing, which means that too many black children