Trends in Black/White Intermarriage

Although black/white intermarriage was a prominent indicator of race relations in the 1960s and early 1970s, the topic seems to have been low on the academic agenda during the 1980s. Many studies are currently being on done on black/white differences in income, employment, education, and residence, but there is insufficient recent information on intermarriage. To fill in this gap, 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.