Page 403 - Essencials of Sociology

376 CHAPTER 12 Marriage and Family

and whose parents are on welfare is likely to fall in love with and marry a
man who comes from a background similar to hers.
Sociologists use the term homogamy to refer to the tendency
of people who have similar characteristics to marry one another.
Homogamy occurs largely as a result of propinquity, or spatial near-
ness. This is a sociological way of saying that we tend to “fall in love”
with and marry someone who lives near us or someone we meet at
school, church, work, or a neighborhood bar. The people with whom
we associate are far from a random sample of the population, since
social filters produce neighborhoods, schools, and places of worship
that follow racial–ethnic and social class lines.
As with all social patterns, there are exceptions. Although most
married Americans choose someone of their same racial–ethnic
background, 8 percent do not. Eight percent is a lot of people.
With 60 million married couples in the United States, this comes
to close to 5 million couples (Statistical Abstract 2013:Table 60).
One of the more dramatic changes in U.S. marriage is the increase
in marriages between African Americans and whites. Today it is dif-
ficult to realize how norm-shattering such marriages used to be, but
they were once illegal in 40 states (Staples 2008). In Mississippi, the
penalty for interracial marriage was life in prison (Crossen 2004).
Taye Diggs and Idina Menzel are Despite the risks, a few couples crossed the “color line,” but it took
an example of the most common the social upheaval of the 1960s to shatter this barrier. In 1967, the U.S. Supreme
pattern of marriages between African Court struck down the state laws that prohibited such marriages.
Americans and whites.
Figure 12.3 shows this change. Look at the race–ethnicity of the husbands and
wives in these marriages, and you will see that here, too, Cupid’s arrows don’t hit
homogamy the tendency of
people with similar characteristics
to marry one another FIGURE 12.3 Marriages between Whites and African Americans:
The Race–Ethnicity of the Husbands and Wives

Read on MySocLab
425
Document: Breaking
the Last Taboo: Interracial 400 White husband, 390
Marriage in America African American wife
375
African American
350 husband, white wife
325
300
275 268
Total in Thousands 225
250

200
175
150 150 168
125 122
100 95
75
61
50 41 45
25 24
0
1970 1980 1990 2000 2010
Year
Source: By the author. Based on Statistical Abstract of the United States 1990:Table 53; 2013:Table 60.