Not Simply Black and White: An Analysis of Attitudes Toward Interracial Relationships

• Activity Number: 421
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 3, 2010 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Social Statistics Section
• Author(s): Simone Anke Robers*+
• Companies: American Institutes for Research
• Keywords: Race ; Gender ; Interracial ; Marriage ; Tradition ; Attitudes

Abstract

The United States is a country composed of immigrants from a variety of different countries of origin.Over time the lines of racial and ethnic divisions have slowly blurred,altering the initially established order of white versus non-white;'whites against the rest'(Bonilla Silva, 2004).The traditional racial boundaries developed and maintained in the United States prohibited interracial unions and restricted general interactions between the races (White, 2001). This research effort seeks to understand attitudes about interracial marriage with a focus on the impact that race and gender have on those attitudes.The research question is whether there is a statistically significant difference between blacks and whites in their attitudes toward favoring or opposing a law against interracial marriages and whether or not this relationship remains constant when gender is accounted for.