Aaron Gullickson

Education and Black-White Interracial Marriage

This article examines competing theoretical claims regarding how an individual’s education will affect his or her likelihood of interracial marriage. I demonstrate that prior models of interracial marriage have failed to adequately distinguish the joint and marginal effects of education on interracial marriage and present a model capable of distinguishing these effects. I test this model on black-white interracial marriages using 1980, 1990, and 2000 U.S. census data. The results reveal partial support for status exchange theory within black male-white female unions and strong isolation of lower-class blacks from the interracial marriage market. Structural assimilation theory is not supported because the educational attainment of whites is not related in any consistent fashion to the likelihood of interracial marriage. The strong isolation of lower-class blacks from the interracial marriage market has gone unnoticed in prior research because of the failure of prior methods to distinguish joint and marginal effects.

Black/White Interracial Marriage Trends, 1850–2000

This article traces the trend in black/white interracial marriage between 1850-2000, using microlevel Census samples. The results show that the frequency of interracial marriage has been highly responsive to the dynamic nature of broader race relations. The growth of the Jim Crow racial state in the South and segregation in the North led to a drastic decline in the frequency of interracial marriage from 1880 to 1930. The frequency of interracial marriage increased with the waning of this system between 1930 and 1940, but only began to increase at a steady and rapid rate in the post-civil rights era. When disaggregated by region, the results suggest a process of “latent” racism in the non-South, and one of unequal gender suppression in the South. Results by nativity and education are also discussed.

Comment: An Endorsement of Exchange Theory in Mate Selection1

Status exchange theory has long held a central position in the study of interracial marriage between blacks and whites. Originally proposed by both Merton (1941) and Davis (1941) independently, status exchange theory predicts that interracial unions between blacks and whites will often involve an exchange of racial status for some other status characteristic, generally operationalized in research as education. Because whites may see marrying across racial lines as marrying “downward”, they must be compensated by marrying up on some other dimension. Therefore, status exchange theory predicts that whites in interracial marriages will be more upwardly mobile (hypergamous) and less downwardly mobile (hypogamous) in terms of education than if they were in a racially endogamous marriage. The opposite would be true for blacks in an interracial marriage.

A “Mulatto Escape Hatch” in the United States? Examining Evidence of Racial and Social Mobility During the Jim Crow Era

Racial distinctions in the United States have long been characterized as uniquely rigid and governed by strict rules of descent, particularly along the black-white boundary. This is often contrasted with countries, such as Brazil, that recognize “mixed” or intermediate racial categories and allow for more fluidity or ambiguity in racial classification. Recently released longitudinal data from the IPUMS Linked Representative Samples, and the brief inclusion of a “mulatto” category in the U.S. Census, allow us to subject this generally accepted wisdom to empirical test for the 1870–1920 period. We find substantial fluidity in black-mulatto classification between censuses—including notable “downward” racial mobility. Using person fixed-effects models, we also find evidence that among Southern men, the likelihood of being classified as mulatto was related to intercensal changes in occupational status. These findings have implications for studies of race and inequality in the United States, cross-national research on racial classification schemes in the Americas, and for how demographers collect and interpret racial data.

Racial boundary formation at the dawn of Jim Crow: the determinants and effects of black/mulatto occupational differences in the United States, 1880.

This article examines variation in the social position of mixed‐race populations by exploiting county‐level variation in the degree of occupational differentiation between blacks and mulattoes in the 1880 U.S. census. The role of the mixed‐race category as either a “buffer class” or a status threat depended on the class composition of whites. Black/mulatto occupational differentiation was greatest where whites had high occupational prestige and thus little to fear from a mulatto group. Furthermore, differentiation increased the risk of lynching where whites had relatively low status and decreased the risk of lynching where whites had relatively high status.

Patterns of Racial and Educational Assortative Mating in Brazil

Exchange of racial for educational status has been documented for black/white marriages in the United States. Exchange may be an idiosyncratic feature of U.S. society, resulting from unusually strong racial boundaries historically developed there. We examine status exchange across racial lines in Brazil. In contrast to the United States, Brazil features greater fluidity of racial boundaries and a middle tier of “brown” individuals. If exchange is contingent on strong racial boundaries, it should be weak or non-existent in Brazilian society. Contrary to this expectation, we find strong evidence of status exchange. However, this pattern results from a generalized penalty for darkness, which induces a negative association between higher education and marrying darker spouses (“market exchange”) rather than from a direct trading of resources by partners (“dyadic exchange”). The substantive and methodological distinction between market and dyadic exchange helps clarify and integrate prior findings in the status exchange literature.

Essential Measures Ancestry, Race, and Social Difference

Race and ancestry are both popularly viewed in the United States as different but intertwined reflections on a person’s essentialized identity that answer the question of “who is what?” Despite this loose but well-understood connection between the two concepts and the availability of ancestry data on the U.S. census, researchers have rarely used the two sources of data in combination. In this article, drawing on theories of boundary formation, I compare these two forms of identification to explore the salience and social closure of racial boundaries. Specifically, I analyze race-reporting inconsistency and predict college completion at multiple levels of racial ancestry aggregation using Census data. The results suggest that, while much of the variation in these measures corresponds to popular “big race” conceptions of difference, considerable variation remains among individual ancestries.

Comments on Conceptualizing and Measuring the Exchange of Beauty and Status

In this comment, I identify two methodological issues in McClintock’s (2014) article on beauty exchange. First, McClintock’s difference models, which find no evidence of exchange, are poor measures of exchange that fail to account for important confounders and rely on an overly narrow conceptualization of exchange. Second, McClintock codes her log-linear models to find a difference in the effect of men’s and women’s beauty in exchange rather than the total effect of women’s beauty, which is both statistically significant and substantively large.

The Racial Identification of Young Adults in a Racially Complex Society

Quantitative studies of racial identification have commonly focused on the identification choices of children and adolescents living in the parental home. Less is known about the racial self-identification choices that individuals make as they develop into independent young adults. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, I compare the racial self-identification of respondents when they were aged 18–23 to their biological parents’ racial identification. Results suggest unexpected effects of individual development-related and socioeconomic characteristics. Measures of greater independence from parents and communities of adolescent development were associated with both greater and weaker consistency between self-identification and parental identification, and measures of parental socioeconomic status were associated with weaker consistency. The results across racial parentage groups conform to historical norms for Whites, Blacks, and American Indians, while the results for biracial respondents, Asians, and Hispanics are less clearly guided by these norms.