For decades, trends in American life usually have been analyzed through the prism of race, with white Americans serving as the reference point -- comparing black unemployment with white unemployment, for instance.
Those comparisons are illuminating, but neglect how that reference point itself is changing. Understanding of white America is subject to several outdated assumptions that need rethinking.
1. Working-class whites are more religious than upper-class whites. This is a pervasive misconception encouraged by liberals who conflate the religious right with the working class, and by conservative evangelicals who inveigh against the godless ruling class.
Certainly, white intellectual elites have become extremely secular. However, as a whole, the white upper middle class long has displayed higher attendance at worship services and stronger allegiance to their religious faith than the white working class -- going all the way back to the first data collected in the 1920s and continuing today.
Since the early 1970s, white America has become more secular, but the drop has been greater in the working classes. As of the 2000s, the General Social Survey indicates, nearly 32 percent of upper-middle-class whites ages 30 to 49 attended church regularly, compared to 17 percent of the white working class the same age.
2. Elite colleges are bastions of white upper-middle-class privilege. It's common to assume that upper-middle-class white kids win more slots in top universities than middle-class or working-class students not because they're smarter, but because their parents can afford to send them to the best grade schools and high schools, pay for SAT prep courses or make donations to colleges.
There are two problems with this logic. First, ever since the landmark Coleman Report on educational equality back in 1966, scholars have had a hard time demonstrating that attending fancy elementary and secondary schools raises academic performance. And on average, those highly touted test-preparation courses boost students' SAT scores by only a few dozen points.
Second, educational attainment is correlated with intelligence. (The mean IQ of white Americans with just a high school diploma is about 99; the mean IQ of whites with a professional degree is about 125.) And children's IQ is tied to that of their parents. How genes and environment conspire to produce these relationships is irrelevant; the relationships have been stable for decades. As a result, white parents with advanced educations inevitably account for a disproportionate number of the white kids with the highest SAT scores, best grades and other evidence of academic excellence.
If college admission were purely meritocratic -- eliminating favoritism for the children of alumni, celebrities and big donors -- upper-middle-class children would still be overrepresented.
3. Marriage is breaking down throughout white America. Overall marriage rates are indeed declining in the United States: Just over half of American adults are married, compared with 72 percent in 1960. However, among white Americans, there is a sharp class divide.
The share of upper-middle-class whites ages 30 to 49 who are married has been steady since 1984, hovering around 84 percent. During that same period, marriage for working-class whites the same age has fallen from 70 percent to 48 percent.
This is not a statistical artifact that can be explained by class differences in the age of marriage or the frequency of remarriage, nor by hard economic times for the working class. Marriage now constitutes a cultural fault line dividing socioeconomic classes.
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