Speaker
Deirdre Bloome
Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy
Professor of Sociology
Harvard University
Abstract
People's life outcomes are rooted in their parents' and grandparents' experiences; these experiences, in turn, are rooted in the places where parents and grandparents grew up. In the United States, Black (grand)parents are more likely than White (grand)parents to have grown up in the South, due to the economic geography of slavery and its aftermath. Intergenerational theories predict that this racial difference in southern family lineages will shape racial differences in many life outcomes. We test this hypothesis, using marriage as a case study. Linking data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to external sources, we document that southern family lineages positively predict marriage. We trace the implications of this prediction for marriage inequalities within and across birth cohorts, whose exposure to southern family lineages differed due to the Great Migration of Black families out of the South. We also provide some insights into the factors driving southern lineage's positive association with marriage. We show how family dynamics channel historical place-based inequalities into contemporary racial inequalities, by combining intergenerational and contextual approaches. Other researchers could employ this combined intergenerational--contextual approach to further illuminate how the past shapes the present.