Black women are getting to the best universities, strongest corporations and top ranks of government offices.

But not to the altar.

A provocative new book by Stanford law professor Ralph Richard Banks examines why black women are so unlikely to marry — and proposes a solution that is arousing controversy in the African-American community: Cross the color line.

“Don’t marry down. Marry out,” says Banks in his campus office, busy with phone calls, emails and preparation for the new semester. The shared experience that once bound blacks together — segregation — is gone, he asserts. “So it all coalesces around this …: whether black women will continue to be held hostage to the failings of black men.”

Particularly in California, where only 6.2 percent of the population is black, “conditions are very conducive to interracial relationships,” he says. “African-Americans are a very small group here. And everyone’s moved away from home, so they’re more likely to form nontraditional bonds.”

Some welcome his book, “Is Marriage for White People?” because it has started an uncomfortable conversation they say is long overdue.

But others contend that he denigrates men and dispirits women, calling him a profiteer, a “racial pimp” and other names he says “that I can’t repeat.”

He speaks from a position that seems rarer every day: a black male who is highly educated (bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Stanford, ’87, and one from Harvard Law, cum laude, ’94), professional (14 years at Stanford Law School), married to a black woman (Stanford social psychology professor Jennifer Eberhardt, whom he calls “the most brilliant and beautiful woman I have ever met”).

The project grew out of an intellectual journey that is part of his scholarship at Stanford Law School, focusing on two long-standing interests: racial equality and discrimination, and family and children. Many Stanford-based colleagues and friends helped him refine his arguments, and Stanford students helped with interviews.

“It’s a good thing to get married, I think, if you find someone you want to be with,” says Banks, who attended elementary school with Eberhardt in inner-city Cleveland. “I did find that person.”

But most black women face a big problem, he asserts. High rates of incarceration and job-market discrimination against black men have created a gender imbalance. Then women confront the venerable economic model of supply and demand — scarcity creates excess demand for black grooms, tilting the terms of courtship to men’s favor. Many simply sidestep commitment.

Yes, there are exceptions, he concedes — fairy tale couples such as Barack and Michelle, or Will and Jada, dubbed “nuptial eye candy” by Essence magazine.

Personal experience

He speaks from personal experience; two of Banks’ three sisters — “intelligent, beautiful and educated” — are unmarried. In fact, black women are the most unmarried group of people in our nation. They’re only half as likely as white women to be married, and more than three times as likely as white women never to marry, according to his analyses.

“Black women face the thinnest pool of same-race partners of any group in the country,” he says.

It wasn’t always so. Through the middle of the 20th century, about nine out of 10 black women married. Now black women are about half as likely to be married as their 1950s counterparts. White adults are also more likely to be single today than in the past. But marriage has diminished more among African-Americans than among any other Americans.

And when they do marry, black women are more likely to marry men with substantially less education or less income, Banks says.

His message to black women: Stop settling for less than you deserve. Forget race loyalty. Quit thinking that white, Asian and Latino men don’t find you attractive; it’s not true. (Exhibit A: Beyoncé, Halle Berry, Jennifer Hudson.) Yes, there’s a lot of bad history, but a modern white man’s intentions may be entirely honorable.

He writes with a tone of encouragement, not blame or finger-pointing. Think Oprah, not Dr. Laura.

“It’s not an advice book,” he cautions. “The goal is to enable a conversation that has been squelched. And expand the freedom of black women to make choices that are right choices for them.

“A Stanford student will find more in common with the guy sitting next to her in a seminar, than some working-class guy in Oakland,” he says.

“But there is a lot of policing of black women,” he adds, “controlling them through pop culture messages — that you should ‘stick with the black man first,’ that ‘the black man needs your help.’ That leaves people feeling less free than they need to be.”

Analysis rings true

Oakland-based L. Jeanine Phillips, 28, who has a bachelor’s degree in biology, a passion for reading and a rewarding career as an operations manager for an upscale firm, says Banks’ analysis rings true.

“I have dated and even married a black man in the past,” says Phillips, vice president of the Bay Area chapter of the Sistas Book Club. “After endless bad relationships — all seeming to stem from black men’s egos and inability to keep their penis in their pants, also coming from broken homes — I have decided to go on hiatus from black men and only date out of my race.

“And thus far it has been a success. I am currently dating a great white man” with a degree from UC-Davis, she says, “who seems to appreciate me, respect me, and we match equally educationally and culturally. We have the same religious beliefs. And it’s a major bonus that we share the same family values.”

Jethroe Moore, president of the San Jose chapter of the NAACP, also agrees with Banks — but says that efforts to improve the fate of black men could help solve the problem.

Experienced through his work with at-risk youth at San Jose’s East Side Union High School District, Moore says that “the African-American man is endangered before he can get out of high school — either through incarceration or because he is his family’s provider, and continuing school is not an option.”

“Growing up in San Jose, we used to be able to come out of high school and get a job at a manufacturing company and work our way up to a management position,” he says. “Now those possibilities are gone, because Silicon Valley has so little manufacturing.

“I can understand why women’s choices are limited,” says Moore, who met plenty of young women at college — but was introduced to his wife, Audrey, by her mother, an acquaintance at church. “No one wants someone who won’t be successful. You want him to have something in common with you. Just because he’s black — that’s not much of a choice.”

‘Marry for love’

Like Banks, Moore says, “I would tell my sister to marry for love,” irrespective of race. “If that person makes you happy, you should pursue that relationship.”

But the book’s assumptions have come under attack by Howard University professor Ivory A. Toldson and Morehouse College professor Bryant Marks. They say they’ve looked at the same data — from the census and American Community Surveys — through a different lens, and found it less gloomy.

If the analysis is limited to blacks over age 35, the number of single women drops, they say. And in major cities such as Washington, D.C., and Atlanta, women with doctorates are more than twice as likely to be married as those with a high school degree. Finally, although black women have more degrees, that doesn’t translate into high incomes: In fact, more black men than black women earn more than $75,000 a year.

“Entrepreneurial elements of America have found a variety of creative ways to benefit financially from black females’ anxieties at the expense of black male egos,” Toldson told the African-American online magazine the Root in a reference to Banks. “If you can show somebody that there is a really devastating problem, they’ll pay more attention to you.

“He’s not going to show you any evidence to the contrary because he wants his book to be found,” she said.

Journalist and Middlebury College graduate Dori J. Maynard, president and CEO of the Oakland-based Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, co-founded by her father, criticizes “a media-driven narrative — desperate black women seeking husbands — that flies in the face of a lot of people’s realities.” The widow of African-American architect Charles Grant Lewis, Maynard says, “This conversation would be a lot more helpful if we also included the experience of the 75 percent of black women who are happily married and raising children in two-parent families.

Conclusions challenged

“This picture distorts the picture of African-American women who are happy, fulfilled and living good and productive lives,” Maynard says. “It is also a distortion of black men, as well — portraying them as pathetic losers who we wouldn’t want to be married to — which has not been my experience.”

Banks’ solution was also challenged by African-American scholars in a “virtual symposium” held by the nonprofit and nonpartisan Council on Contemporary Families.

There, Professor Micere Keels of the University of Chicago argued that black women don’t rule out nonblack partners. Rather, studies show they receive fewer advances from whites, Latinos or Asians.

“The only viable solution for black women’s low likelihood of marriage is to correct society’s failure to educate all our boys,” she concluded.

Similarly, Kansas University professor Shirley Hill said in the same symposium that “dealing with structural issues” — such as high unemployment and incarceration of black men — “gets us closer to the root of the problem.”

There’s a reason that black women are wary of white men: white men’s attitudes toward them, said symposium participant Belinda Tucker, a professor at UCLA. “Media portrayals of black women as either hypersexualized or Big Mommas continue to encourage exploitative attitudes,” she said. By dating black men, women are “safe from societal rejections.”

And while interracial families are a potent symbol of a society that’s healing its racial divide, raising multiracial children is a challenge that Banks doesn’t address, said symposium participant Jenifer Bratter of Rice University.

“Biracial children often face racial difficulties from both sides of the racial spectrum, leaving parents to help their children to make sense of these experiences,” she said.

Taps into anxieties

Banks shrugs off such criticism with the confidence of an attorney used to sparring.

“There’s resistance to an issue that seems fairly simple: If there are two few men in your own group, why not consider men of other groups?” he asks.

But he concedes that his suggestion taps into deep-seated anxieties that people have about race.

It’s natural to fear assimilation, particularly if you’re from a marginalized group, he says. And women — of all races — have greater concern than men about perpetuating their culture.

“Black women are the most loyal of all,” he says. “But they pay a very high price.”

Racial identities change, over generations. “It’s fruitless to worry about it, as though you could preserve it,” he continues. “It’s like putting your finger in a dike. Your children will see the world differently than you or I do.

“The black experience is more varied now,” he says. “Our children have grown up in an integrated Palo Alto or Orinda. They don’t have the experience of living in the Jim Crow South.”

For Banks, the song “Lift Every Voice and Sing” still makes his skin tingle, evoking memories of hearing the “Negro National Anthem” while growing up in an all-black Cleveland neighborhood.

But it means nothing to his sons, he observes, now students at Menlo Park’s integrated Phillips Brooks School and Hillsborough’s college-prep Crystal Springs Uplands School.

And when they bring home a date?

“I want them to be happy, whoever they’re with,” Banks says. “It’s hard to make a relationship work. Compatibility now is more about class and background and experiences and aspirations and values than about race.”

“I’d tell them: ‘If you find someone who is purple, and it works, go for that.’ “

Contact Lisa M. Krieger at 408-920-5565.