What’s Love Got to Do With It?: Understanding and Healing the Rift Between Black Men and Women

Relationships between black men and women in America are in crisis--it’s time to figure out what’s gone wrong and start the healing process.

The current divorce rates for black couples have quadrupled since 1960 and is now double that of the general population; rates of domestic violence in black marriages are skyrocketing; and nearly half of married black men admit to having been unfaithful. In What’s Love Got to Do with It? Donna Franklin, one of the country’s leading African American sociologists, speaks out on these painful, complex issues, providing an incisive and riveting analysis of the gender tensions that are the legacy of slavery and its aftermath.

Franklin breaks new ground in explaining why black men and women have trouble relating to each other, and examines their profoundly different starting points, which are influenced by generations of racism and injustice. She shows how black women’s strength and self-sufficiency can be used to nurture relationships. Likewise, she teaches black men how to support one another and their relationships with women without excluding women, as has happened with the Million Man March.

The challenge of mending the rift between black men and women is formidable but can be made easier. Understanding is the first step on the path to healing.

Donna L. Franklin is the author of Ensuring Inequality: The Structural Transformation of the African-American Family, which won the American Sociological Association’s Goode Distinguished Book Award for ＂outstanding contribution to family scholarship.＂ She has held faculty appointments at the University of Chicago, Howard University, Smith College, and the University of Southern California. She lives in Los Angeles, California.