Joined: 24 May 2007 {Posts: 130 } Location: Danville, VA
Posted: Wed 30 May 2007 21:25 Post subject: Statistics on interracial marriage BY STATE?
Hi,
Recently I read a news story that mentioned a particular state's ranking in prevalence of interracial marriage. Unfortunately I did not note the source at the time. Now after reading Frank's book I'm especially interested in finding out which states are strongholds of the endogamous color line and where it might be gradually dissolving. But after googling every permutation I can think of and looking at the census website I have yet to come up with any stats comparing states.
Your best bet for anything along those lines is the ipums.org website. They have the raw datya from every census since 1850 (except for two censuses). They provide a couple of interfaces where you can construct a select query and download just the data items of interest from whatever years you want. You can then tabulate and summarize the data using commercial software or just write an Excel macro. The initial learning curve is a bit steep, but once you have done it for one tabulation, you can then do it for anything in the census.
I did something like what you want for the 2000 census. Here is the Excel spreadsheet that I came up with. (You can sort it on any column.)
After digging around a while, I found the article that inspired my question. It said that Mississippi had the lowest percentage of *individuals who identify as multiracial*-- which I misremembered as the lowest number of interracial marriages because that was the subject of the article.
Joined: 24 May 2007 {Posts: 130 } Location: Danville, VA
Posted: Tue 05 Jun 2007 13:44 Post subject: Expected and unexpected results
Dear Frank,
Thanks for pulling this data. Ordered from highest to lowest exogamy rates, the eight highest states (UT, NM, OR, MN, ME, WA, CO, AZ) all have substantial Native American populations which probably accounts for their rankings. While it's not surprising that the South generally remains a bastion of endogamy, I was surprised to find NC third from lowest, with only .75% exogamy. MS was lowest with .23, then SC with .57. LA and GA were the only others under 1%, at .76 and .87 respectively. VA's rate of 2.86% was twelfth lowest but even so, higher than MD and almost four times NC. This does not correspond with my observation of race relations in the two states, as I've lived along the VA/NC line all my life and never imagined such a large difference in intermarriage. Especially since NC has the largest Native population east of the Mississippi, and this factor seems to have caused high rates in the West. Highest of the former slave states was KY, higher than states further north like PA, NJ, OH, IN, MI, WV. Wonder what accounts for this anomaly.
Posted: Tue 05 Jun 2007 14:20 Post subject: Re: Expected and unexpected results
kpauljohnson wrote:
Wonder what accounts for this anomaly.
I think that there is a stronger correlation with the Black population fraction itself. With a few exceptions (like Hawaii), exogamy is highest in those states that have a very small Black population and lowest in those states with a large Black population. This may be because where African Americans are few and far between, they have little choice but to outmarry (as Jaime pointed out earlier). But I suspect that it is because the absence of a large cohesive Black community enhances both willingness to reach out socially on the part of Blacks and social acceptance by Whites. For example, James E. DeVries, Race and Kinship in a Midwestern town: The Black Experience in Monroe, Michigan, 1900-1915 (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1984) documents the latter situation in great detail, where not only were the few African Americans in the region accepted into White society, but their mixed children were accepted as fully White in a "racial" sense.
But I suspect that it is because the absence of a large cohesive Black community enhances both willingness to reach out socially on the part of Blacks and social acceptance by Whites.
Yup, this goes hand in hand with my suspicion that the relative softness of jim crow in the northern states was due to a fairly small black population which needed to be controlled. It seems in general the fewer and smaller the black population is, the more harmonious ( to an extent ) the racial relations are with the mainstream society.
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