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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   26704 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024

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Being a liberal, this might blow your mind, but states with higher rates of integration have higher rates of intermarriage. Contra the popular narrative, New York and California are substantially more segregated and stratified than states like Florida Alabama and Georgia are these days.

Is this true? This is what I could find online:

  1. (via Wiki) This paper from the 90s claims based on census data that between the 60s and 80s intermarriage rates between blacks and whites were much higher in the Western US than in the South. In 1980, 16.5% percent of all marriages involving a black person were with someone from another race on the West Coast in comparison to just 1.6% in the South.
  2. This map by Pew shows no obvious trend in the South. Metro areas in Texas and Florida have high rates, but basically the same as SF or LA and not that far above Chicago or NY. Elsewhere in the South it looks like average or slightly below to me. (caveat: this is for all races, not just black-white, and it's just urban areas)
  3. As a proxy for intermarriage, although 56% of all black Americans live in the south, just 41% of mixed-race Americans with black heritage do so. Naively, this seems to point to higher intermarriage rates outside the South, although this might be skewed by internal migration.

Is this true?

Anecdotally, as in go to a middle-class sportsbar in Atlanta or Gulfport during football season and compare the demographics of the patrons to a similarly middle-class sportsbar in Boston, Denver, or Sacramento, absolutely. It is not even close, and I would be deeply skeptical of any source claiming otherwise. As the old saw goes, there are three sorts of lie, lies, damned lies, and statistics.

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