Slog
News & ArtsThursday, February 16, 2012
Panic Mixing America
Posted by Charles Mudede on Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 8:45 AM
Interracial marriage in the USA reached an all-time high in 2010: 8.4% of all marriages, compared with 3.2% in 1980, finds a Pew Research Center study, released today, that analyzes unions between spouses of different races or ethnic groups.Among marriages in 2010, 15% of couples married outside their race or ethnicity.
"Interracial marriage has gone from taboo to a rarity, and with each passing year, it's less of a rarity," says Pew's Paul Taylor. Pew reviewed Census data from more than 850,000 people in the American Community Survey between 2008 and 2010.
Two takes on this trend. One is by the Welsh geneticist Steve Jones; the other by the American biologist Christopher Wills. Jones more or less sees this as the end, the culmination of human evolution as it is understood in Darwinian terms (after the war, the lovemaking). Wills sees it as the point at which human evolution begins to accelerate like never before. Wills thinks that diversity will not homogenize us but open us to new genetic possibilities. Diversity will make us more diverse. You can read about Wills' position in Children Of Prometheus: The Accelerating Pace Of Human Evolution, and Jones in The Language of the Genes. Jones' book is better written; Wills' has better ideas.
This is also interesting:
Among blacks, 24% of newlywed men married outside their race, compared with 9% of women. Among Asians, the opposite is true: 36% of women married outside their race, compared with 17% of men.Of the 20 or so cousins I have on my mother's side of the family—the more honest, decent, and affluent side of my little world—90% percent of the men are married to women of another race, whereas 90% of the women are married to men of the same race. It's just something to think about.
1
Given that African-Americans are around 10 percent of the population, in a race-free world, 90 percent of them should be married to a person of another race.
2
Had an interesting bar conversation once with someone that compared eventual forward evolution of race to how -- if you throw 1000 dogs of various breeds into the wild to intermingle -- you end up at a common point. He said the view came from his time in SE Asia, and the native wild dogs there. They all "look" the same, but even this has some geographical variants. Examples:
Carolina dog and Indian wild dogs. I saw the Indian ones first hand--it's odd, seeing 30 wild dogs just hanging out and they look almost all the same. If we made every single person globally always breed with someone of another race, that's where we'd end up eventually. Kind of neat, if you think about it, that we all have a common look buried in our future genetics.
Carolina dog and Indian wild dogs. I saw the Indian ones first hand--it's odd, seeing 30 wild dogs just hanging out and they look almost all the same. If we made every single person globally always breed with someone of another race, that's where we'd end up eventually. Kind of neat, if you think about it, that we all have a common look buried in our future genetics.
3
It is worth noting that historically, marriage has been defined as being between one man and one woman of the same race.
4
Surprise, surprise. White dudes are marrying Asian chicks, and black girls have no interest in white dudes. I'm actually surprised that the # is as high as 17% for Asian men. No offense to you Asian studs of course, but you're not usually that high on the list for us non-Asian ladies.
6
Good Morning Charles,
I just read that article as well and I am not too surprised by it given what I've seen.
However, it isn't portending well for African-American women. Two of the most famous & wealthy Gayle King & Oprah Winfrey are single. A few months ago, the NYT had a piece on how difficult it is for them to find marriageable partners and the innovative ways to find them. We'll see what the next generation does.
@2,
I, too saw that "wild" dogs in Africa looked similiar. That makes sense. As for humans, if one looks at photos of European-Americans & African-Americans from the late 19th century & early 20th century one notices more racial homogeneity largely due to miscegenation laws. In America and elsewhere people were "lighter" & "darker" back in the day. So, that theory stands to reason.
I just read that article as well and I am not too surprised by it given what I've seen.
However, it isn't portending well for African-American women. Two of the most famous & wealthy Gayle King & Oprah Winfrey are single. A few months ago, the NYT had a piece on how difficult it is for them to find marriageable partners and the innovative ways to find them. We'll see what the next generation does.
@2,
I, too saw that "wild" dogs in Africa looked similiar. That makes sense. As for humans, if one looks at photos of European-Americans & African-Americans from the late 19th century & early 20th century one notices more racial homogeneity largely due to miscegenation laws. In America and elsewhere people were "lighter" & "darker" back in the day. So, that theory stands to reason.
7
i'm sure there are more academic studies about this ...but isn't this trend directly related to the acceptance of woman of other races as being attractive and desirable. i'm a boomer so i remember how rare it was to see women of other races presented as models . the first african american woman in playboy magazine showed up in 68 or so. asian women have always been presented as exotic and desirable , so it would make sense that men, who still seem to do the lion's share of choosing, choose them. as black women get presented as attractive , more men feel free to date and marry them. again when i was growing up white men didn't date black women. then there's geography. interracial dating was usually more prevalent on the west coast, where romantic ideals have been more liberal than it was back east
but then again i'm gay and married to a white man . i can tell you from my experience his race was harder for my family to deal with than my gayness. she loves him now, genuinely loves my husband , but the first time she met him i asked my mother what she thought, she whispered to me '..umm.. well.. he's kind of pink..'
but then again i'm gay and married to a white man . i can tell you from my experience his race was harder for my family to deal with than my gayness. she loves him now, genuinely loves my husband , but the first time she met him i asked my mother what she thought, she whispered to me '..umm.. well.. he's kind of pink..'
8
And none of this would have been possible if those pesky activist judges hadn't redefined traditional marriage in Loving v. Virginia...
9
My husband and I are the only people among our siblings who married someone of the same skin tone. All our siblings married people of different races, so all our nieces and nephews are biracial, to those nieces and nephews our child is "the white cousin."
11
@7, following up on more interracial dating on the wc than the ec--from my experience growing up in the ec and now living on the wc--neighborhoods aren't as defined ethnically and racially on the wc as they are on the ec; Ethnic and Racial minorities/majorities back east are much more nationalistic in their politics and their preferences for who they date, marry and hang out with than they are out west; furthermore, for black folk, there aren't that many other black folk around on the wc compared to back east, so same race dating is too limited an option for many to pursue.
13
I heard and interesting statistic over 5 years ago that of those (rarer) Black Woman-White Male pairings they are something like 5x as likely to be highly educated professionals than the more common Black Male-White Female ones.
Does anyone else remember this statistic? I seem to remember several pieces on NPR, Oprah, etc about it.
Does anyone else remember this statistic? I seem to remember several pieces on NPR, Oprah, etc about it.
14
@12, barely. Miscegenation wasn't legalized in CA until 1948. The laws actually got much tougher in the first half of the twentieth century (as they did most places, including the South). Full public accommodation of public places wasn't required until 1954; until that time even the beaches in Los Angeles were segregated by race (blacks and Asians on one side, whites on the other).
16
African-Americans who weren't post1860 immigrants from Africa have always been highly mixed and "lighter" due to the legacy of slavery.
17
@4 - "White dudes are marrying Asian chicks, and black girls have no interest in white dudes."
Um... why blame the 'girls'? Perhaps the 'dudes' are equally culpable?
Um... why blame the 'girls'? Perhaps the 'dudes' are equally culpable?
18
@2 Being hapa and somewhat racially indeterminate, it's amazing the kind of casual "Hybrid Vigour" racism I overhear or am blatantly told. The whole race-as-breed analogy is, I think, specious and more than a little offensive in its extreme cultural blindness. But hey, that's probably my innate resentfulness and inner Heathcliff bubbling its way past my properly scientific white skin.
19
I think it was George Carlin who proposed the solution to the problem of race was to "...keep fucking until we're all brown." If it wasn't him it still sounds good when you say it in his voice.
20
@15, which points out a major flaw in this study: it uses "marriage" as a proxy for relationships. Marriage is increasingly being abandoned in communities of color, particularly poor communities of color (not just Oprah). Something like 70% of African-American babies are born out of wedlock (though wedlock may well follow after; I have an African-American cousin who recently married his longterm girlfriend after a couple of children).
Make of that what you will sociologically, but from the point of view of an analysis of race-mixing, it's a huge, huge oversight.
I don't have numbers to back this up, but I'll bet that the vast majority of these out-of-wedlock births are black mother+black father. I wonder what the numbers would look like if you jiggered them to show interracial "couple" rates, defining "couple" as a man and a woman who produced at least one child.
Interestingly, while the rate of out-of-wedlock births to black mothers has been declining precipitously for the past forty years, the birthrate among married black mothers has declined even more.
Make of that what you will sociologically, but from the point of view of an analysis of race-mixing, it's a huge, huge oversight.
I don't have numbers to back this up, but I'll bet that the vast majority of these out-of-wedlock births are black mother+black father. I wonder what the numbers would look like if you jiggered them to show interracial "couple" rates, defining "couple" as a man and a woman who produced at least one child.
Interestingly, while the rate of out-of-wedlock births to black mothers has been declining precipitously for the past forty years, the birthrate among married black mothers has declined even more.
21
@19 - I'm reminded of Ursula le Guin's "Lathe of Heaven", where George Orr is directed to dream of a world without racism and, sure enough, when he awakes, everyone on the planet is the same shade of gray.
Not quite the happy solution his "doctor" was intending...
Not quite the happy solution his "doctor" was intending...
23
race-mixing in the us really started with plantation owners impregnating slaves; that might help to explain the historical and current distance between AA females and white dudes. Asian women for the most part started out as trophies; spoils of war for white dudes, sort of paving the way for acceptable mixing down the road.
24
Excellent observation Fnarf, the distinction between "marriage" and "relationship". I knew Oprah was unmarried. I just didn't know she was in a relationship for that long. I had thought she broke up with Stedman Graham.
Your data is accurate too. I read the out-of-wedlock birthrate for African-Americans is 72%. It's pretty high and having devasting consequences for the community.
Your data is accurate too. I read the out-of-wedlock birthrate for African-Americans is 72%. It's pretty high and having devasting consequences for the community.
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