Americans rarely marry outside of their race or class in a nation where residential segregation is relatively common. It is a dynamic widely viewed as a contributing factor to income inequality and intergenerational social mobility.
A new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper examines whether increased exposure to members of other race and class groups affects marriage rates between Black and white partners, based on an analysis of Census data and federal tax records. The overall rate has grown slowly over the years and currently stands at only 11 percent of intermarried couples.
The answer is mixed.
Greater exposure appears to translate into more marriages across class lines but “has no detectable effect” when it comes to race, according to the paper written by Benjamin Goldman, Ph.D. ’24, assistant professor at Cornell University, Jamie Gracie, Ph.D. ’25, a postdoc fellow with Harvard’s EdRedesign Lab, and Sonya Porter, a U.S. Census Bureau researcher.
In this interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, Goldman and Gracie spoke about the role of residential segregation in both interracial and cross-class marriages and the implications for continuing inequality.
