Black-white marriages are on the rise, a sign that those racial barriers are slowly eroding, but they still lag far behind the rate of mixed-race marriages between whites and other minorities.

"It does suggest that the social distance between the two groups has narrowed," says Zhenchao Qian, a sociology professor at Ohio State University and lead author of a new study on interracial marriages. "The racial boundary is blurred, but it is still there."

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"Blacks are still the least assimilated," says Roderick Harrison, a demographer at Howard University and the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington. "It does suggest that the divide in this country remains between blacks and everybody else."

Read more at USA Today.

The most successful blacks and Hispanics are more likely to have poor neighbors than are whites, according to a new analysis of Census data.

The average affluent black and Hispanic household — defined in the study as earning more than $75,000 a year — lives in a poorer neighborhood than the average lower-income non-Hispanic white household that makes less than $40,000 a year.

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Affluent blacks are more exposed to poverty than the average non-Hispanic white in all but two of the top 50 metro areas with the most black households: Las Vegas and Riverside, Calif.

"Newer growth is less segregated," says Roderick Harrison, sociologist at Howard University and at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a Washington, D.C., think tank. "People are coming into neighborhoods that have not become characterized as black or white or Hispanic. They're moving in on a more equal footing."

Read more at USA Today, or Hispanic Business.

This article was previously available at livingstondaily.com.

Despite increased racial and ethnic diversity, American neighborhoods continue to be segregated and some of the progress made toward integration since 1980 has come to a halt this decade, according to an analysis of Census Bureau data released Tuesday.

“This is a surprising result,” said Brown University sociology professor John Logan, who analyzed 2005-09 Census numbers. “At worst, it was expected that there would be continued slow progress.”

The five-year data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey provide the first opportunity to gauge post-2000 demographic trends all the way down to small neighborhoods.

Logan and his co-author, Florida State University sociologist Brian Stults, also head the US 2010 research project, which examines changes in American society. They found:

•The average non-Hispanic white person continues to live in a neighborhood that looks very different from neighborhoods where the average black, Hispanic and Asian live. Average whites in metropolitan America live in a neighborhood that’s 74% white — although it’s not as segregated as in 1980, when the average was 88% white.

Even if segregation had continued to slide this decade at the same rate as in the previous 20 years, “It would take into the middle of the century for black segregation rates to come down to the Hispanic level,” says Roderick Harrison, a demographer at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies and at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and a former chief of racial statistics at the Census Bureau. “(The decline) was very incremental.”

This article was previously available at The Tucson Citizen.