Low educational attainment among African American men stacks the deck against well-educated African American women who prefer to marry within their own ethnicity. “There’s almost a triple dimension of issues [African American women] have to deal with. One, they have a low, and I quote this, ‘out-marriage’ rate. And two, if they do marry an African American man, they’re more likely to marry someone less educated than themselves. And the other thing that’s interesting is that [African American women] … are much more likely to not marry at all.” Real structural issues, such as higher rates of poverty, 17 times lower wealth compared with Whites, as well as higher rates of incarceration set the stage for this challenge. “African Americans by and large attend the country’s worst schools, and are likelier to drop out before graduation, which has contributed to an environment where African American children are more likely to be born into poverty and where they are much less likely to escape it.”
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