Blacks on Gay Marriage

by Paul Varnell

First published in the Chicago Free Press on February 15, 2006.

During the 2004 election campaign, the Bush administration hoped that its promotion of a Constitutional ban on gay marriage could help peel off 4 to 5 percent of the most theologically and socially conservative African Americans from the Democrats. But are African Americans as a whole more hostile to gay marriage than are whites?

Few if any recent polls on the issue offered a breakdown of data by black and white respondents. However, a recent report on black college freshmen provides some clues. The Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, which annually surveys freshmen, issued a report based just on data from freshmen at 440 colleges and universities in fall 2004 who designate themselves “African American/Black.”

The survey did seem to find evidence that black freshmen were somewhat more likely than white freshmen to oppose gay marriage:

• 47 percent of black freshmen thought that “same sex couples should have the right to legal marital status” (rounding to the nearest whole percent).

The separately issued comprehensive report on all freshmen, however, found that:

• 57 percent of all freshmen (90 percent of whom were white) thought gay couples should have “legal marital status”—a 10 point greater support.

On the related question of whether “It is important to have laws prohibiting homosexual relationships”—presumably interpreted as prohibitions on gay marriage:

• 36 percent of black freshmen agreed but only 30 percent of all freshmen agreed—a difference of 6 points.

So in the aggregate, black freshmen do seem more likely than whites to oppose gay marriage and to favor (although by a lesser amount) prohibitions on gay marriage. But when examined carefully, the data on black freshmen reveal some interesting subgroup differences.

It turns out that:

• Half (50 percent) of black freshmen at “predominantly white institutions” favor gay civil marriage.
  
  
• But only 42 percent of the black freshmen at “historically black colleges and universities” favor gay marriage, bringing down the average for black freshmen as a whole.

Similarly:

• Only 33 percent of black freshmen at mostly white institutions favor bans on gay marriage, a figure that is only 3 percentage points higher than the average for all freshmen.
  
  
• By contrast, 42 percent of the black freshmen at black colleges favor bans on gay marriage, a figure that is fully 12 points higher than the average for all freshmen.

It seems useful to try to determine reasons for these differences among black freshmen by college type. There are at least two obvious possibilities: location and religion.

First, the vast majority of black colleges are in the South, the most socially conservative section of the U.S. The main reason black colleges were founded in the first place was that state segregation laws in the Confederate south barred black students from attending white institutions. There are few black colleges in other parts of the country.

Second, freshmen at black colleges are more likely to state their religion as “Baptist”—-for many the conservative, black National Baptist Convention—than are black freshmen at mostly white schools:

• Only 39 percent of black freshmen at mostly white schools call themselves Baptist while 53 percent of black freshmen at mostly black schools say they are Baptist—a 14 point difference.

The other obvious subgroup difference is between males and females—a difference that parallels white freshman opinion:

• 40 percent of black freshman males support “legal marital status” for gays, but a significantly larger 51 percent of the black freshman women support gay marriage.

On the question about bans on “homosexual relationships:

• 46 percent of the black males support such bans, but only 29 percent of the black women—a 17 point difference.

And on both questions, among black freshmen at mostly white colleges both men and women are more pro-gay than freshman men and women at mostly black colleges.

What all this means for gay advocacy efforts—where gay groups should target their efforts, who can most persuasively represent gay concerns, what kind of arguments will be most persuasive—is a matter for the most tactically adept rather than the most politically doctrinaire members of our movement to determine. But three things seem obvious:

1. They must speak to people in language and with arguments that they will listen to and can relate to. Repeating the same stock phrases about gay civil rights and gay equality, however valid, has limited effect.
   
   
2. They will need to realize that not all African Americans can be reached equally well by the same arguments any more than all white people can.
   
   
3. And they need even more to be aware that compared with a similar survey in 1971, black freshmen have become much less “liberal” or “far left” (down from 50 percent to 36 percent), much more “middle of the road” (up from 38 percent to 47 percent) and more conservative even (up from 12 percent to 17 percent).