Even though the number and percentage of all black-white marriages remains relatively small (four hundred and three thousand marriages recorded in 2006, approximately 0.7 percent of all marriages) (U.S. Bureau of the Census 2006), the rise in the number of these marriages over the past forty years has nonetheless been noteworthy. Most noteworthy, and undoubtedly the newest emerging trend in interracial marriages in the United States, has been the growing number of black women who are marrying white men. An analysis of the number of marriages between black women and white men over the past forty years reveals that since the 1960s, this marital pairing has dramatically increased. In 1960, 26,000 black women were legally married to white men; by 1980 the number had grown only by a thousand to 27,000. However, by 1990 the number had more than doubled to 61,000 marriages between black women and white men. In the decade that followed, this number rose more than 50 percent, with more than 95,000 such marriages recorded in the 2000 Census (U.S. Bureau of the Census 2002). In 2006, 117,000 such marriages took place. Another way of analyzing the growth in this marriage pattern is to examine how the ratio of black women married to white men compares with the ratio of black men married to white women. When these two interracial marriage patterns were first recorded in 1960 (Romano 2003), it was estimated that black men married white women more frequently than white men married black women by a 9:1 ratio. This ratio has shifted downward drastically in four decades to the current ratio of 3.75:1 (U.S. Census Bureau 2002). In other words, the gap between these two marriage patterns has decreased by more than half (Chicago Tribune, March 27, 2002).
