Assimilation is also associated with a payoff of a different kind. In the United States the one factor that seems most strongly correlated with an ethnic group's assimilation is entry into the middle class. Similar developments are just now beginning to produce a slower-paced increase in marriages between black and white Americans. The point is not that status is for sale in any direct way. Assimilation is a simplifying label that observers apply to large-scale human interactions that are complex.
Interracial marriage is just one index of assimilation.
The intermarriage rate goes up when children of middle-class families meet each other in college, and come to know each other as whole persons. This knowledge replaces the abstract meanings their parents have attached, in a wholesale manner, to groups who are different in race or religion or ethnicity. Of course it is possible for a marriage to be the pairing of two abstract projected images-for some reason Madonna and Sean Penn come to mind. In a typical marriage, though, the reality of the whole person simply overwhelms the label. Lest this picture be too rose-colored, I concede that, in an indirect sense, status is for sale.