In their highly influential 1987 book The Truly Disadvantaged, sociologists William Julius Wilson and Kathryn Neckerman hypothesized that black women’s low marriage rates in the 1970s and 1980s were due to a deficit of marriageable men.18 An enormous decline in unskilled manufacturing jobs during the 1970s and 1980s hit black men particularly hard.19 The black-white unemployment gap grew rapidly, and by 1985 unemployment rates for black men aged 25–54 were two times higher than for white men in the same age range. Among men aged 16–24 the racial disparity was even greater, with the unemployment rate for black men three times that of white men.20 Black men were also much more likely to die or be incarcerated, and this (combined with low rates of interracial marriage) depressed the number of men available for black women to marry. Unemployment rates for black men continue to be much higher than for white men, and black men’s rates of incarceration have increased dramatically since 1980, suggesting that these factors are still relevant today. Indeed, in the early 2000s, more than one-third of young
