Loosening Boundaries, Persisting Hierarchy and the Changing Color Line: Minority-Minority Intermarriage in the Contemporary United States

• In Event: 054 - Section on the Sociology of the Family Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 13. Marital Timing and Intermarriage

Abstract

Using Stereotype Ordered Regression (SOR) models and data from the 5% Public Use Microdata Sample of the 2000 U.S. census, I examine intermarriage pairings among non-Hispanic Whites, non-Hispanic Blacks, East Asians, Puerto Ricans and Mexican Americans. I find that Whites occupy the top position in the status hierarchy, Puerto Rican and Mexican Americans the bottom, and Blacks and East Asian Americans the middle. These results contradict the idea that the Black-non Black color line is the strongest in the contemporary US and instead suggest a combination of a strong White-non White color line and a revised version of a “tri-racial hierarchy.” Furthermore, the White-non White divide is much more salient for men, than for women. I further demonstrate that the contemporary U.S. racial/ethnic intermarriage is characterized by status-exchange, rather than endogamous intermarriage or in-group preference. Congruent with previous findings, among the five racial/ethnic categories investigated, non-Hispanic Blacks and East Asians have the lowest tendency of out-marrying, which points to relatively more rigid group boundary for those two groups. However, non-Hispanic Blacks and East Asians do not occupy the lowest position on the racial status hierarchy. Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans show highest tendency of out-marrying, yet both groups fall on the lowest end of racial status ordering. Intermarriage patterns of Puerto Ricans and Mexican Americans illustrate a loosening of group boundary, coupled with the persistence of status hierarchy. These findings illustrate the disjuncture between group boundary vis-à-vis status hierarchy and further call for the conceptual distinction between the two.

Author

• Yun Zhou, Harvard University