Pew has a new report out, Almost All Millennials Accept Interracial Dating and Marriage. Pretty straightforward. But one thing that I found interesting, if not surprising, was that the gap in black-white attitudes had basically disappeared over the generations. I made a chart to illustrate this:
In fact, in more recent generations whites seem somewhat more accepting of interracial marriage within the family than blacks. I suspect that the black-white gap for Millennials and Gen-Xers is within the margin of error, but it’s suggestive that the gap grew from the latter to the former.
Also, Pew has been tracking attitudes by generation for 20 years, and all have become more tolerant of intermarriage. But what’s up with the change around 1990? I don’t see it noted within the Pew analysis, so I wonder if they reworded the question and massaged the responses inadvertently, and don’t want to revisit that error.
Finally, I think it is important to remember that though most young people tolerate interracial relationships and marriages, there are very strong same-race preferences on an individual level in regards to choices. This is probably important to keep in mind if you’re an ethnic minority and looking to use a dating service or site, especially if you’re a male, as women tend to be pickier on these sites than men already. There is a disjunction between broad public acceptance in the abstract for mixed-marriage and dating, and concrete preferences for someone that matches one’s own phenotype personally (not to mention realities such as residential, social and cultural segregation which are strongly correlated with race). I think that explains the whiteness of The Bachelor & The Bachelorette reality dating shows, which ostensibly end in a marriage proposal. If the bachelor and bachelorette exhibited normal American preferences their immediate elimination of individuals who were of other races would be evident, and probably embarrass everyone involved.
H/T Inductivist
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