I disagree. To say culture plays no role in finding a mate is just plain ignorant. Culture plays a role in partner selection with many different cultures (Indian, Chinese, Jewish, Korean, etc), to say it has no effect in American culture, black or white, is preposterous.
Black “culture” is going through an identity crisis. An example of these differences manifested at the beginning of the Obama campaign with “Is he black enough?” It seems that black culture in trying to not be white is screwing itself when it comes to education, crime, family, and marriage. Some in the black community (Cosby is the most notable) point out these cultural values are good because they are beneficial not because they are white values. Poverty and racism are always given as the reasons why blacks can’t get ahead and to say culture plays a role is taboo. Yet there are many groups such as immigrants (Hispanic, Asian, Indian) that come here poor, uneducated, and are not white and yet many of them and their children become financially successful, obviously it is not solely a poverty issue.
To dismiss culture so readily show me that you truly do not understand how social systems and social institutions work.

I think you are correct in saying that cultural values and institutions are not considered enough in this article. They do exist, they do influence behavior, and -- if you are economist -- they need to be assigned some value. Otherwise, the ideas in the article won't correctly predict future behavior.

Of course, its all an excercise in alternative thinking anyway.

What I have a problem with is the generalizations that are made in articles such as this. Reading this, one would think that there are no stable black-black marriages or black-black relationships. If marriage was so easy for white people, why the need for sites like match.com, eharmony, etc.? And why is the divorce rate still at 50%? Seems to me that being able to "get" married means nothing if the result is still the same across the board.

Quite right. In fact one could argue that the personal cost of a relationship tends to increase as one grows older, and this has the effect of making relationships harder to come by. Consider this - A man and a woman get hitched right out of high school. Neither one of them has any property or a career. They start out together, buy a house together, etc.... Now consider a childless man and a woman, each in their 40s. They already own houses which they live in alone, and their houses are located in near ideal locations for their own daily commutes, but far apart from each-other on the capitol beltway. One has cats and the other has a dog. Combining households would be very inconvenient and costly for at least one of those persons. And given the immense psycological inhibition to simply moving into the partner's house, (since the partners would be no longer on equal footing power-wise), it is likely that a combined household would involve both partners having to sell and buy a new house together. It should be no surprise that it is easier for either person to simply take in a younger partner with no property as a live in lover, if they can find one.

king charles I:

..... If marriage was so easy for white people, why the need for sites like match.com, eharmony, etc.? And why is the divorce rate still at 50%? Seems to me that being able to "get" married means nothing if the result is still the same across the board.