* Professor of Law, Rutgers University School of Law at Newark. This essay is a slightly expanded version of my panel presentation at the First National Meeting of the Regional People of Color Legal Scholarship Conferences, on March 26, 1999, at The John Marshall Law School in Chicago. The panel was entitled, “Celebrating Our Emerging Voices: People of Color Speak—Coherence or Tower of Babble?”
1 See M. Belinda Tucker & Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, Trends in African-American Family Formation: A Theoretical and Statistical Overview, in The Decline in Marriage Among African-Americans: Causes, Consequences and Policy Implications 12 (M. Belinda Tucker & Claudia Mitchell-Kernan eds., 1995) (noting lower rates of marriage and higher rates of divorce for Black women); M. Belinda Tucker & Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, Marital Behavior and Expectations: Ethnic Comparisons of Attitudinal and Structural Correlates, in The Decline of Marriage, supra, at 167 (noting lower rates of remarriage for Black women).
2 Precise statistics on rates of exogamy of different ethnic groups are hard to find because of factors such as issues of racial self-identification, different definitions of race and ethnicity (particularly in the case of Latinos), and diverse countries of origin (i.e., statistics differ for different groups among Asian-Americans); but some information is available. See, e.g., Richard D. Alba & Reid M. Golden, Patterns of Ethnic Marriage in the United States, 65 Social Forces 202, 202–06 (1986) (stating that the 1980 Census indicated rates of exogamy of approximately 30% for Latino women born after 1950); D.Y. Yuan, Significant Demographic Characteristics of Chinese Who Intermarry in the United States, 3 Cal. Sociologist 184, 186 (1980) (noting rates of exogamy of Chinese women at approximately 12% in 1980); Gary D. Sandefur & Trudy McKinnell, American Indian Intermarriage, 15 Soc. Sci. Res. 347, 347–56 (1986)(stating that in the 1980s, Native American exogamy rates were 40% in states with large concentrations of Native Americans, and over 60% in states with small dispersed populations). In 1990, approximately six percent of African-Americans were married to partners across racial lines, with Black men two and one-half times more likely than Black women to enter into such unions. See Andrew Billingsley, Climbing Jacob’s Ladder: The Enduring Legacy of African-American Families 245, 247 (1992).