Do you think there should be laws against marriages between (Negroes/Blacks/African-Americans) and whites?
By Daniel Miessler on May 2nd, 2009: Tagged as Culture | Sociology
This isn’t me asking; this is a question asked on the GSS, which, according to the website:
The General Social Survey (GSS) conducts basic scientific research on the structure and development of American society with a data-collection program designed to both monitor social change within the United States and to compare the United States to other nations.
Basically, this is the largest and highest quality dataset we have on how Americans feel about things, combined with other information about those answering the questions. What this provides us is the ability to learn from correlations that exist between various data points.
So, for the question at hand–whether you think there should be a law against interracial marriage between blacks and whites–a few things jump out immediately. Here’s the chart for age of the interviewee.
Old people are stuck in the past, basically, and I look forward to their viewpoints losing hold of public discourse.
Then we have education:
It doesn’t get much clearer than that.
Next we look at the breakdown by belief in the Bible:
Startling. No, just kidding.
Here’s another education/intelligence correlation: this time based on number of correct vocabulary words:
And then here’s by region, with this being the breakdown:
Again, not surprising. The south leads the pack, followed by the midwest and northeast. So basically, all the stereotypes are correct: people who oppose white/black marriage tend to be old, religious, uneducated/unintelligent, and from the south.
What I’d really like to see is this same survey asking the question: “Can a black man do as good of a job as president as a white man?” I predict that this would yield almost identical results to the current question, and I think this explains the 2008 election more than any data we’ve seen previously.
Anyway…extremely interesting stuff. I found this story, and the images, over at Gene Expression. If you’re not following that blog, you really should be. ::
Links
[ Gene Expression | http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/ ] [ General Social Survey | wikipedia.org ]