Trends in Black/White Intermarriage

Abstract

I examine annual marriage license data for 33 states from 1968 to 1986 to assess how the role of the black/white color line in marriage choice has changed. The analyses generally show that black/white intermarriage has increased rapidly since the U.S. Supreme Court lifted the legal ban on intermarriage. I further show that this trend is especially pronounced among black males and that the status characteristics of these marriages have remained traditional in the sense that intermarriage still occurs primarily when the white woman marries up in socioeconomic status. In my conclusion I offer several interpretations of why the link between status and interracial marriage persists and discuss what this implies for the nature of racial differentiation in contemporary American society. (EXCERPT)