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Abstract: The purpose of this study is to investigate attitudes and actions of African American undergraduate students attending a southeastern HBCU toward interracial dating and marriage. Data collected from a sample of 224 students (38% males and 62% females) revealed that many students are confident of their parental approval if they date or marry a person outside their race; that those with rural backgrounds are relatively less approval of interracial dating and marriage than their urban counterparts; that black male students have higher rates of those who have dated-out, who would date-out, and who would marry-out than have black females; that black male students prefer white females when dating-out/marrying-out, whereas female students prefer Hispanic or Asian males in similar situations; and, that most students prefer to live in the South even after they marry-out, and in an African-American community.
Keywords: interracial dating; interracial marriage; miscegenation; marriage squeeze syndrome; social structural approach theory; racial motivation theory
This study aims to investigate the attitudes and actions toward (1) interracial dating, and (2) interracial marriage of African American students attending a public four-year Historically Black College and University (HBCU) located in the rural deep south. Interracial marriage herein is defined as a marital union wherein two spouses of different origins among the following U.S. census categories1: American Indian, Asian, Black or African American, White or Caucasian, Hispanic, or other. If a respondent reported "mixed race" or membership in some other racial or ethnic category such membership was acknowledged. The problem here, as other researchers have noted, is that throughout U.S. history, its census reports have drawn rigid distinctions between black and white, Indian and European, Asian and non-Asian, Latinos and Anglos. This conflation of "racial" and ethnic categories has made the definitions, incidences, and analyses of the phenomena comprising interracial dating and marriage very difficult (see Kreider, 2000; Cohen, N.d.; Elliott et al., 2012; Olson, 2002). However, because most research in this area relies on U.S. Census data, we utilize the U.S. 2010 Census racial and ethnic categories for classification purposes in this study with the following caveat. The U.S. Census distinctions have been rooted in the assumption that sharp genetic differences separate racial and ethnic groups; differences that shape behavior as well as physical appearance. However,...