III. Black Marriage and Red Herrings
Recall the red herring, which writers purposefully deploy to divert the reader's attention. In Is Marriage for White People?, the title itself functions as the ultimate red herring, attracting attention and provoking the reader to consider its underlying inquiry: is marriage only for white people? As Banks acknowledges, he selected the title with the intent of turning heads and attracting readers. Though the title provokes attention, it does not succeed in the way most red herrings do. In fiction, the red herring creates a sense of suspense and surprise, ultimately enhancing the reader's enjoyment of the story. But in the context of a sociolegal inquiry like Is Marriage for White People?, the red herring is more problematic than pleasurable.
According to Banks, “The title asks not only whether marriage isn't for black people, but also whether it isn't for white people.” This suggests that Banks would agree that it is worth exploring whether the marriage decline indicates problems with marriage as an institution that go beyond race and failed romantic markets. It suggests that the question that should preoccupy us is not simply whether marriage is for white people but whether marriage is (and should be) for anyone.
But these are not the questions that concern Banks. In asking “Is marriage for white people?,” Banks assumes marriage's normative priority, and seeks only to include more black people in the marital fold. In some respects, this goal is laudable, if quite conventional. But one cannot help but be wistful for the revolutionary project that might have been. By focusing on the black marriage decline and increasing marriage rates among blacks, Banks forfeits the chance to launch a more ambitious project that confronts these issues and, in the process, interrogates marriage's position as the normative ideal for intimate life.
Critically, Banks's unquestioning acceptance of marriage is rooted in a choice that he makes in pursuing this project. In his prior work on the marriage decline, Banks adopted the standard posture of a legal academic, dispassionately parsing the data and offering observations and solutions. However, in Is Marriage for White People?, Banks was pulled in a different direction. As he acknowledges, his “conversations with black women transformed [his] vision for th[e] book” (p. 186). Responding to their “sense that their story had not been told,” Banks began to regard the book “as a small effort to remedy that” oversight, making their lives--and their intimate struggles--visible to the world (p. 186). Accordingly, Is Marriage for White People? does not simply analyze the black marriage decline--it is Banks's attempt to speak to and for black women.
In choosing to depict his subjects' romantic struggles authentically, Banks reflects--but does not challenge--his subjects' desire for marriage (or successful marriage-like partnerships). Consequently, Is Marriage for White People? is, by Banks's own admission, “much less normative” than it could be. And because Banks chooses to “meet [his subjects] where they are,” Is Marriage for White People? is less critical and transformative than it could be.
For example, a more critical eye toward marriage as an institution might have compelled Banks to deconstruct his subjects' desire for marriage. This inquiry would have complicated these desires, perhaps revealing them to be (largely) the products of a legal system that historically has channeled individuals into marriage for the purpose of disciplining sexuality and privatizing dependency, and modern sensibilities that link marriage with sexual respectability. Deconstructing the desire for marriage also would have presented Banks with the opportunity to craft an alternative portrait of black women's intimate lives--one in which marriage's priority was not presented as natural and inevitable, but as a choice that could be reevaluated and challenged.
More importantly, greater engagement with marriage as an institution would have spurred a broader discussion of marriage's role in society and the reasons why the declining marriage rate has provoked such deep-seated concern. Historically, marriage--the legal locus for sex--was a prerequisite for adult life. Though marriage is no longer a legal requirement for sex and family, society (and the state) persists in prioritizing marriage and the marital family above other forms of kinship and relationship.
And though much has been made of the shift toward viewing marriage as a means of personal fulfillment, marriage continues to ensure economic provision and security, relieving the state of this burden. The 1996 welfare reforms make this aspect of marriage clear. In addition to “ending welfare as we know it,” the reforms launched a broad effort to “promote marriage” among poor families, providing states with monetary incentives when beneficiaries of public assistance married. These efforts and incentives did more than provide poor families with the spiritual and moral benefits of marriage (though this was deemed a vital part of the project); marriage was expressly understood as a means of improving their material circumstances. As the logic went, in addition to its many personal benefits, marriage would provide an additional income, relieving the need for public assistance, and providing the family with economic stability.
Arguments offered in support of marriage equality for same-sex couples reflect this view of marriage as a vehicle for providing public and private benefits and social and economic security. Expanding marriage to include same-sex couples would improve health care coverage, as spouses are generally covered under most employer-provided health plans. It also would legitimize the children of same-sex couples, ensuring that, among other things, they would have intestate rights to their parents' private and public benefits. Likewise, expanding marriage would provide certain immigration benefits to the same-sex spouses of American citizens.
With this frame in mind, the LGBT rights movement's prioritization of marriage equality is sensible--marriage is a crucial conduit to a wide array of public and private benefits. But importantly, all of these ends might be achieved--for same-sex couples and everyone else--without marriage. Instead of providing health care access to spouses through marriage, we might simply reform health care to provide greater coverage to all citizens (and noncitizens). Instead of relying on marriage to ensure the economic security of children, we could think about a more robust system of public support for children and families. Instead of relying on marriage to convey the fruits of citizenship, we might invest in more coherent immigration reform. Instead of acceding to marriage's role in privatizing dependency and conferring much-needed benefits, we might begin a more transformative discussion about other public interventions that could address these questions.
To further illustrate marriage's role as a vehicle for providing social and economic security, consider a comparative perspective. In the United States, new parents immediately face the challenges of reconciling work and parental responsibilities. Even before their children are born, they begin the quest for the parental Holy Grail: quality, affordable child care. Countless hours are spent researching child care options, and eventually, parents “choose” between either spending a small fortune on paid child care or having one of the parents (usually the mother) leave the workforce to provide (unpaid) child care. The quotidian challenges of child rearing are organized and managed privately within the family unit with minimal assistance from the public sector.
The European safety nets help contextualize the thin level of public support for American families. In France, new parents enjoy a wealth of public benefits intended to facilitate parenting and family life. French parents enjoy access to advice nurses, state-subsidized day care and preschool, paid parental leave, and state-subsidized health care. Scandinavian countries also boast a robust system of public provision that includes state-subsidized health care coverage, paid parental leave, state-subsidized child care, and state-provided cash allotments for children. This is not to say that these European models should be emulated in full. I mean only to suggest that in these European countries, the economic challenges of family life are not “private” problems to be handled at the level of the individual. Instead, the management and health of the family and its members are a matter of public concern and investment.
Tellingly, this robust system of public provision is not the only difference between American families and their French and Scandinavian counterparts. As Banks notes, marriage rates in these European countries are lower than they are in the United States (p. 23). But critically, this “decline is not perceived as a crisis,” as it is in the United States (p. 24). As Banks elaborates, the French and the Scandinavians “are untroubled by the marriage decline in part because, unlike in the United States, couples maintain long-term stable relationships without being married” (p. 24). This is a stark contrast to the United States, where nonmarital families (whether headed by single parents or cohabiting adults) are more likely to be unstable.
But these facts prompt another insight: the reason why the French and Scandinavian marriage declines do not result in unstable families, and thus do not provoke the same crisis mentality as the American marriage decline, is that marriage does not serve the same functions in these countries as it does in the United States. In the United States, less marriage equals greater familial instability because marriage is the social safety net--or at the very least, the means by which we patch what is left of the disintegrating social safety net. In the absence of state-supported child care, health care, and other social programs that address economic dependency, individual families must shoulder the burden of researching and paying for child care, foregoing a second income to care for young children at home, and maintaining employment to ensure health care coverage.
Certainly, none of this necessarily requires that individuals be married, but marriage does ease the burden of performing all of these tasks. Married couples benefit from either an additional income or an additional person to shoulder child-care responsibilities while the other spouse works. Married people are able to share health-care coverage, and other private and public benefits, with their immediate family members. Marriage provides a crucial means of accommodating familial dependency, absolving the state from responsibility for these obligations.
Accordingly, it is not hard to see why declining marital rates do not prompt the same kind of anxiety in France and Scandinavia. For these countries, less marriage does not inevitably lead to more fragile families. Their systems of social provision ensure that individuals and families are supported, whether married or not. For societies like our own that lack a robust public safety net, declining marriage rates are a threat to the assumption of privatized provision, portending unchecked dependency and vulnerability.
Given marriage's status as our de facto social safety net, it is no wonder that scholars like Banks take declining marriage rates so seriously, offering solutions to stanch the marriage decline and improve marriage rates within the black community and elsewhere. But it is not entirely clear that these are the public policy interventions that are needed.
The focus on declining marriage rates and the effort to reverse this trend echo the neoliberalist politics that have been ascendant in the United States since the 1980s. Neoliberalism “devolve[s] issues formerly considered collective, such as the management of economic risk, from government to individual families.” Insisting on a civil society “devoted to efforts to properly discipline the individual self, the ultimate locus of moral, economic, and political responsibility,” neoliberalism successfully dismantled key components of the New Deal / Great Society social safety net and replaced them with policies that emphasized personal responsibility and individual choice. Instead of public solutions to social ills, this neoliberalist turn looks to the private sphere--the family and the individual-- to remedy these problems.
In many ways, Is Marriage for White People?, with its focus on the intimate lives and choices of black women, recalls the neoliberalist appeal of private solutions for public problems. How do we fix the economic plight of the black community? Stabilize the black family by achieving more--and better--marriages. And how do we get more and better marriages amongst this beleaguered constituency? Focus on the individual and persuade black women to make better choices about how and with whom they partner.
Critically, reducing the problem to questions of individual choice diverts our attention away from a serious discussion of whether public interventions of the sort seen in France and Scandinavia might be necessary to supplement--or indeed, supplant--these private solutions. Though Banks acknowledges the links between mass incarceration, uneven educational and employment prospects, and the skewed marriage market (pp. 30-44), he does not explore solutions for these challenging issues. Instead of broad, systemic, and structural interventions for these problems (which are enormous problems irrespective of their effects on black marriage rates), Is Marriage for White People? aims to correct the black marriage decline by focusing on the private choices of individual black women.
Not only does focusing on individual romantic choices divert attention from broader structural reforms, it also forfeits an important opportunity to question marriage's already overdetermined position in our society. Is Marriage for White People? assumes that everyone who can get married should get married. In so doing, Banks reinforces the intuition that marriage is and should be the most valued form of kinship and belonging, and the principal way in which we accommodate the dependency of society's most vulnerable members.
The events of the last few years challenge this last intuition. As financial institutions have crumbled and markets have buckled, marriage has become an unreliable guarantor of economic security--for African Americans and everyone else. In this climate, marriage's inability to effectively serve its privatizing function has led many to question its relevance in their lives, prompting them to experiment with other structures for organizing intimate life. On this account, a retreat from marriage does not necessarily signal deviance or diminished marital prospects alone. Instead, it may be a rational response to the fact that marriage has lost its luster, becoming one of several options that individuals may pursue in constructing their intimate lives. Our preoccupation with marriage gives these other forms of kinship and belonging--friendship, extended family, networked families, nontraditional families--short shrift. More troublingly, however, our focus on marriage thwarts efforts to determine how these marital-family alternatives support intimate life, and to consider whether they should be publicly supported and prioritized.
