A new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper from scholars at Harvard University, Cornell University, and the U.S. Census Bureau has found that while increases in neighborhood integration have led to increased rates of interclass marriage, neighborhood integration does not lead to increased Black-White marriage rates.
Overall, rates of interclass and interracial marriage are low for both women and men. Among low-income families, 2.9 percent of men and 3.3 percent of women have a spouse from a high-income family. Among Black adults, 2.6 percent of men and 1.7 percent of women have a White spouse.
“People tend to marry neighbors, and neighbors are typically from the same race and class group,” the authors write. “This naturally raises the question: would intergroup marriage be more common if neighborhoods were more diverse?”
Over two-thirds of married couples in the U.S. had lived within 50 census tracts of each other at some point in their lives. Individuals are also nearly 20 times more likely to marry someone from their own tract than someone who lives 50 tracts away, even though this distance is often just a few miles. Among all census tracts, the median individual from a high-income family lives in a neighborhood where 33.6 percent of their neighbors also come from high-income families, whereas the median individual from a low-income family lives in a neighborhood where only 17.3 percent of neighbors are from high-income families. There is similar segregation by race; the median White young adult lives in a neighborhood that is 78.4 percent White, while the median Black young adult lives in a neighborhood that is 44.8 percent White.
The authors found that economically mixed neighborhoods result in an increase in cross-class marriage. However, racially mixed neighborhoods often do not lead to an increase in Black-White marriage rates. Currently, Black-White marriages represent just 11 percent of all interracial marriages — the lowest share of all interracial couples.
Although the authors cannot explain exactly why Black-White marriage rates are so low, their findings confirm that neighborhood segregation does not necessarily explain the pattern.
“A possible explanation is that it’s not enough to reduce segregation in neighborhoods because even when you have racially diverse neighborhoods, people still self-segregate in terms of their social lives and their own communities,” said co-author Benjamin Goldman, assistant professor at Cornell University, in an interview with the Harvard Gazette. “A different explanation would be that people have more ingrained views or preferences toward marrying across race lines.”
