The Romance of Assimilation?

Little research has been done on the role of intermarriage in the blending of peoples in the American past, and
even less has been done on the effect of past intermarriage on the ethnic identity of today’s Americans. Senior
Scholar Joel Perlmann sees value in studying intermarriage to show fault lines in society (social distance is
larger across some divisions than others) and to examine the effect intermarriage ultimately has on
assimilation. Perlmann asks, Is it assimilation that causes intermarriage or intermarriage that causes
assimilation? As he sees it, the causality works in both directions: weakened ethnic allegiances are a source of
intermarriage and intermarriage weakens ethnic allegiances./P>