Bryan R. Johnson and Dr. Mikaela Dufur and Cardell K. Jacobson, Sociology
On June 12, 1967, under the Fourteenth Amendment, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned all laws banning marriage between those of different races. Since that time, attitudes toward interracial marriages have become increasingly tolerant (Schuman et al., 1997). As negative attitudes toward intermarriage have decreased, rates of interracial marriages have increased (Qian, 1997; Kalmijn, 1998; Heaton & Jacobson, 2000). Nevertheless, inter-group marriage in the United States remains relatively low. In many ways intermarriage remains the ultimate break with traditional racial norms. For many minority groups, interracial marriage delineates one of the final boundaries to achieving racial assimilation. Thus, the examination of attitudes about interracial marriage provides a relevant perspective on the state of current inter-group relations. Social contact between groups is commonly viewed as a critical and ameliorative factor in improving relationships between groups. As stated by Allport (1954), the contact hypothesis claims that under specific conditions, contact with members of different racial groups can promote positive and tolerant attitudes toward other groups. Allport’s classic theoretical formulation argued that positive outcomes occur when the contact takes place (1) in cooperative events, (2) of equal status participants, (3) with common goals, and (4) with supportive authority. Likewise, Sherif (1958) found that group hostility lessened significantly when members of equal status were required to cooperate under these conditions. Applied to marriage, the contact hypothesis asserts that the chance for members of different groups to intermarry depends primarily on their opportunities to meet and interact socially. As Kalmijn and Flap (2001) succinctly state, “mating requires meeting.”
In this research, I use the contact hypothesis as a framework to examine attitudes toward interracial marriage in a recent national poll. I examine contact factors in five social settings: educational systems, religious institutions, residential neighborhoods, workplaces, and shopping establishments. The contact that occurs in each of these environments falls somewhere on a continuum with intimate, close, and personal relationships at one extreme and distant, superficial associations at the other. As a result of the variation that exists within each of these social structures, I expect religious and educational institutions to have the greatest potential to generate ameliorative attitudes toward interracial marriage. I anticipate that neighborhood and work environments will have mixed effects for approval of interracial marriage. Finally, I expect shopping to be unrelated or perhaps even negatively related to support for interracial marriage. The data for this analysis were taken from a national survey conducted by the New York Times (2000). The special topic poll was based on telephone interviews conducted June 21-29, 2000. The dependent variable was measured by asking: “Do you approve or disapprove of marriage between people of different races?” The independent social setting variables were measured by asking respondents about the degree of contact they experienced with those of other races in churches, neighborhoods, workplaces, and shopping settings. Education was measured as the highest level of education attained. In addition, age, sex, region, income, political party identification, and frequency of interracial socializing were included as control variables. I used logistic regression to analyze the data. This approach provided an assessment of the odds of an individual approving of intermarriage, as a function of both categorical and continuous independent variables. Logistic regression was more appropriate than ordinary least squares because the dependent variable was dichotomous instead of continuous.
As expected, college attendance was a significant predictor of favorable attitudes toward interracial marriage. When all variables are included in the analysis, the odds of approving of interracial marriage increase 31 percent for each additional level of educational attainment (p. < .001). The results for religion are even more favorable. The odds of approving of interracial marriage among those who attend with a few Blacks are about 79 percent higher than those who attend all White congregations. Furthermore, the odds of approving of intermarriage for those who attend with 50 percent or more Blacks are approximately 3.6 times the odds of those who do not attend church with any Blacks (p < .01). As expected, I found no significant results for residential neighborhoods or workplaces. Shopping with Blacks, on the other hand, was significantly and negatively related to approval of interracial marriage. Compared to those who shop with no Blacks, the odds of approving of interracial marriage were 38 percent lower among those who shop with a few Blacks and 76 percent lower among those who shop with 50% or more Blacks (p < .01). My primary conclusion is that attitudes toward interracial marriage are influenced differently in various social environments, and these effects occur even when friendship, a critical variable in the formation of racial attitudes, is controlled. These environments can be ordered in terms of the amount of intimate, personal, egalitarian contact and cooperation they likely have, and they appear to be related to Whites’ attitudes toward intermarriage. Such situations can also be exacerbated by potentially competitive atmospheres. In some instances countervailing effects likely operate. Future research that provides more detailed analysis of the context of contact may be able to tease out these effects.