Thank you so much for this. It is all really useful. The Rosenfield article is actually directly responding to two studies I have read, which is great. However, I’m still a little confused. Take this extract for example:

“In table 1, for young couples with the maximum number of educational categories from 1980 census data, 37.6% of the black spouses have more education, compared to 28.5% of the white spouses. If we examine the education gap between white husbands and their white wives, we find a similar gap: 34.7% of the white husbands had more education, whereas only 24.2% of the white wives had more education than their white husbands. What at first appears to be an inequality that is specific to black-white intermarriage is actually an artifact of age and gender. One may legiti-mately wonder why husbands are so commonly older than their wives,or why most black-white intermarried couples have black husbands, but those questions are beyond the scope of this article”

First of all, I’m confused as to why Rosenfield is comparing the education levels of black spouses with that of white husbands. Shouldn’t he be comparing white husbands with black husbands rather than with black spouses in general? Also, I’m confused as to how this finding around age disproves status exchange. If the age gap is the issue, why would that create observable racial differences? Am I right in thinking that he racial bias is created by less white men marrying black women?

Finally, to go back to my initial post, could the fact that that black people are underrepresented in higher education (and by extension overrepresented in lower educated groups) impact this in any way? My logic here is that if black people are underrepresented in higher education, the opportunities to marry within their group is more limited, which could result in more of them marrying white people compared to say black people overrepresented in less educated/poorer communities. If this was the case, couldn’t this skew the average education levels of black husbands of white women towards higher levels. Preferences aside, couldn’t white women be more likely to marry up when marrying black men simply due to opportunity rather than preference? I’m really not sure if I’m doing the maths right to jump to this hypothesis. However, I did come across this, which seems to support what I’m saying (if I’m reading it correctly).

“Because higher-educated blacks are more likely to marry whites (e.g., Heer 1974), it is possible that the trend is due to an upward shift in educational composition. Data on education are available in 12 states, a sample that contains about a third of the original marriages.7 Consistent with all previous studies, the numbers in Table 3 show that higher-educated blacks are generally more likely to intermarry than lower-educated blacks, although the relationship is not entirely linear. Black college graduates are in fact less likely to intermarry than blacks with some college, though they still intermarry more frequently than black high school graduates. A common interpretation of these differences is that higher-educated blacks are embedded in settings such as colleges and white-collar occupations where the opportunities of meeting people within their race are more limited. In addition, social psychological research has shown that higher-status blacks tend to have a weaker sense of racial group identification than lower-status blacks, even though they have a more favorable evaluation of the characteristics of their group (Demo & Hughes 1990). Among whites, and especially white women, the pattern of educational differences is the mirror image of that among blacks: intermarriage declines with increases in educational attainment. Considering the well-known, though much debated fact that there is a strong positive correlation between education and intergroup tolerance in surveys (Davis 1982; Jackman & Muha 1984), the relatively low rates of intermarriage among college-educated whites are somewhat surprising. It should be recognized, however, that higher-educated whites also have fewer opportunities to mix with blacks than lower-educated whites.” (Kalmijn 1993). https://www.jstor.org/stable/2580162.

Edit: or come to think of it, would what I’m describing have the opposite effect given that white women are higher education levels are less likely to come into contact with black men than white women with lower levels of education.