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 has 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.

This book analyses the evolution of the contemporary African American family from historical cultural and social policy perspectives in an effort to understand why marital ties have weakened among poor African Americans and why mother-only families have increasingly become a normal feature of ghetto poverty. Franklin argues that the cumulative effects of slavery, sharecropping, and urbanization significantly weakened African American family ties and that mother-only families emerged in the early 20th century as a response to the instability of wage labour for African Americans.