Cultural Tastes and Race: Interest- and Race-Based Boundaries Among Daters

• In Event: 170 - Section on Inequality, Poverty and Mobility Paper Session. Culture and Inequality

Abstract

Research on cultural tastes, and culture, more generally, often focuses on social class culture over other facets of culture, like race, to understand inequality. Yet sociologists of race argue that racial boundaries are a key mechanism for stratification in our society. Using network and regression analyses of a dataset of 8,083 users of the Match.com dating website, this study explores how daters’ expressed cultural tastes are associated with their racial preferences for potential partners. This paper reports that daters’ cultural tastes are associated with distinction making processes, irrespective of daters’ own race, that inform preference or exclusion of other racial groups. Specific cultural tastes are associated with both preferring and excluding Blacks, and to a lesser extent, Latinos, but only excluding Whites and preferring Asians. In particular, preference for and exclusion of Blacks is most strongly associated with daters’ tastes, suggesting that ideas about cultural distinctiveness play the strongest role in shaping racial boundaries for this group. These patterns illustrate how cultural tastes inform mate selection and complicate our understanding of race and social boundaries.

Authors

• Matthew H. Rafalow, University of California-Irvine

• Cynthia Feliciano, University of California-Irvine

• Thomas Alan Elliott, University of California-Irvine