What is the consensus on interracial dating and marriage among blacks and whites?
A. Although the past several decades have witnessed dramatic changes in opinion on this issue — particularly among white Americans — public opinion is still too divided to permit description as a consensus. In our 1997 social audit of black-white relations in the United States, we asked both black respondents and white respondents, “Do you approve or disapprove of marriage between blacks and whites?” In that survey, 64% of all respondents said they approved of interracial marriage (61% of white respondents and 77% of black respondents). Even though this level of approval falls short of a consensus, and shows significant divergence of opinion between black Americans and white Americans, it is a much higher level of approval (and a narrower gap between black opinion and white opinion) than we measured 20 years ago. In 1983, overall approval of interracial marriage was 20 percentage points lower (at 43%), and the gap between levels of approval was twice as large (38% of whites approved,
