Banks states that for African American women, it is considered the
norm to go through life unmarried and to raise children as a single mother. Specially, he notes the statistics that nine in ten black women married in the 1950s while three in ten currently do so. He writes that this is largely because those women will not consider dating men of other races besides their own. He states that Asian and Latino women marry men of other races three times more than black women.
[1]
He writes about a variety of specific reasons that black women are so uninterested. He states that many women prefer the cultural "swagger" that they perceive only in black men, whereas other women idealize their fathers and can't imagine marrying a man who is particularly different. He recounts that some black women believe that non-black men are simply uninterested in them. He views this as important but partly dismisses it, citing a 2009 University of California–Irvine study of
OkCupid that found that some men of other races respond to black women's profiles at higher rates than black men.
[1]
He views the aforementioned trend as a serious problem for African Americans in general since this prevents solid, nuclear families from forming that strengthen both the parents and the children. Banks criticizes
feminists who believe that women forgoing marriage and raising children on their own is inherently good and represents a victory against retrograde
patriarchy. He states that people's desire to find a life-time partner to be intimate with is innate across race and culture, and he recounts that the black women without romantic success feel depressed, not elated.
[2]
He writes, "If fears of interracial intimacy keep people separate now, it is because those fears embody the echo of the past. Many of us continue to act out the roles we first began to inhabit long ago. We scarcely stop to consider that we might change the script."
