CNN has an interesting story on a recent Pew Research Center survey that shows that interracial marriage rates have increased greatly over the last 30 years. Unlike the Associated Press, CNN’s story emphasizes the important positive aspects of this trend:
Asian. White. Black. Hispanic. Do race and ethnicity matter when it comes to marriage?
Apparently, race is mattering less these days, say researchers at the Pew Research Center, who report that nearly one out of seven new marriages in the U.S. is interracial or interethnic. The report released Friday, which interviewed couples married for less than a year, found racial lines are blurring as more people choose to marry outside their race.
“From what we can tell, this is the highest [percentage of interracial marriage] it has ever been,” said Jeffrey Passel, a senior demographer for the Pew Research Center.
He said interracial marriages have soared since the 1980s. About 6.8 percent of newly married couples reported marrying outside their race or ethnicity in 1980. That figure jumped to about 14.6 percent in the Pew report released this week, which surveyed newlyweds in 2008.
Especially noteworthy is the fact that interracial marriage rates have gone up sharply for blacks, as well as other groups:
The African-American population also saw increases in interracial marriage, with the number of blacks participating in such marriages roughly tripling since 1980, the study said. About 16 percent of African-Americans overall are in an interracial marriage, but researchers point out a gender difference: It’s more common for black men to marry outside of their race than for black women.
The full Pew study shows that only about 5% of black newlyweds married members of other races in 1980, compared to 16% in 2008. Historically, black-white interracial marriages have faced greater hostility than those between other racial groups.
As nearly all experts on the subject agree, growing acceptance of interracial marriage is an important indicator of increasing racial tolerance and improvement in intergroup relations. Studies still show that most people tend to prefer to date and marry members of their own racial and ethnic group, often very strongly so. Such preferences are, however, weakening, and even those who still hold such views are less likely to oppose interracial relationships by others than a generation ago.
Even in a society completely free of racism and intergroup hostility, we would not necessarily expect to see a racially random pattern of marriages. Some people may prefer to marry within their group for noninvidious reasons, and others might be more likely to marry within their group even if they don’t have any racial preferences one way or the other (e.g. – because they simply know more people from the same background as their own). Despite such caveats, however, the growth of interracial marriage is definitely a positive trend.
Mark M says:
This is encouraging news regarding racial tolerance, but it’s somewhat disappointing that black women have such limited options. I would like to see the interracial marriage rates for black women at the higher ends of social and economic status. Are they only looking for black men? Do white men not want to date black women?
Probably some of both.
June 5, 2010, 5:41 pmPetep says:
Why do you call it ‘a positive trend’ ? What’s ‘positive’ about it, per se ? I’m not saying it’s negative, but aksing why you say it’s ‘positive’ ?
Is this some kind of ‘reverse racism’ on your part, to show how politically correct you are ?
If you were truly ‘non-racist’, you would be lauding such things as how long various marriages last, or how many kids still have both parents in the home, etc, etc, and you wouldn’t care about the racial component.
June 5, 2010, 5:56 pmLibertarian1 says:
I live in NYC and last night went to a local restaurant. It is located directly next door to a club. As we left the restaurant I was startled to see a long long line of people waiting to get into the club. There had to be over 100 people in line. What shocked me was 100% of them were black. Zero diversity. Happy, laughing, smiling, contented. Free choice.
Years ago, when I visited my daughter at the University of Michigan (undergraduate) I became aware for really my first time how voluntarily segregated the students had become. Black dorms, black parks, white dorms, white parks. What shocked me was the total lack of integration. When I visited another daughter at Stanford she pointed out the all-black dorm. Again, strictly voluntary. Doesn’t this defeat the concept of affirmative action?
June 5, 2010, 6:15 pmDG says:
{Doesn’t this defeat the concept of affirmative action?}
It drives some people crazy. But the right to voluntarily associate with whomever you want is pretty important. Young people, in particular, tend to be more insecure and flock to an ethnically integrated support group.
June 5, 2010, 6:22 pmCrazyTrain says:
Maybe you should read the post. He clearly said why hej thought it was positive.
June 5, 2010, 6:31 pmKirk Lazarus says:
Yes, wonderful isn’t it?
June 5, 2010, 6:43 pmwhisper says:
Do you believe it should be legal for a private restaurant owner to refuse service to an inter-racial couple?
June 5, 2010, 6:53 pmBrett Bellmore says:
Why do you assume it’s a result of white men refusing to marry black women, rather than black women refusing to marry white men? The link on online dating racial preferences is quite explicit that research shows that women show much stronger racial preferences than men.
It’s not that the black women have limited options, it’s that they have limited tastes.
June 5, 2010, 6:54 pmNorthern Dave says:
What! My Canadian friends who married American girls are going to be refused service! I’m outraged!
June 5, 2010, 6:56 pmElliot says:
I have a speculation that speech patterns and accents become more important as race becomes less important. The speculation says Blacks, Whites, Asians, and Hispanics who all sound like TV announcers form a distinct class, with the marriages that cross racial lines taking place within this class, while few happen across speech pattern lines.
If you can’t tell the race of a person by listening to a recording, it is more likely that person will marry across racial lines. It’s also more likely that person will have more success in business since people seem to pay more attention to those who share the TV announcer speech pattern.
I called this a speculation because it is; it’s based on personal observation and experience. Does anyone know if there has been more thorough work done in this area?
June 5, 2010, 6:58 pmPetep says:
“Maybe you should read the post. He clearly said why he thought it was positive.”
No, actually he never broached the subject, other than to make the claim at the end.
June 5, 2010, 6:59 pmBrett Bellmore says:
It’s positive news, because the most straightforward and effective way to abolish racial conflicts of all kinds, is to abolish racial differences. Once we’ve blended into one race, racism is by definition gone.
We just need to find some way to convince black women to be less racist.
June 5, 2010, 7:04 pmNickM says:
Mate preferences are influenced by sexual dimorphism. Larger men and smaller women attract more interest.
Nick
June 5, 2010, 7:16 pmDissenting Reason says:
We just need to find some way to convince black women to be less racist.
This assumes that convincing black women of anything is possible.
June 5, 2010, 7:22 pmDG says:
{What! My Canadian friends who married American girls are going to be refused service! I’m outraged!}
I’m ok with blacks, whites, and asians intermarrying. But someone has to draw a line somewhere, and this is it. “Mixed” Canadian/US marriages are unnatural and contrary to God’s Laws. Why, in Lactinians 4:13, it clearly says that the Mabobites should not lay with the Hubtites – what more proof do you want?!
Perverts.
June 5, 2010, 7:58 pmDG says:
{This assumes that convincing black women of anything is possible.}
I assume that stubbornness is what has made them more successful and less criminal than their male counterparts. If so, more power to them.
June 5, 2010, 8:00 pmCDR D says:
An article in this morning’s SF Chronicle was about how whites are soon to be a minority in California. They provided all the numbers and such, but how do they count who is white and who is some other?
There are more and more mixed “race/ethnic” people these days. My grandchildren Amerasian. So, how are they counted in these surveys? Non-white, I’ll bet, which is ok…except they will probably be categorized as Asian, which is ok, too, but really misses an important point – they are AMERICANS.
June 5, 2010, 8:03 pmCJColucci says:
Brett, Dissenting Reason, it’s not that hard for white guys to date, and even marry, black women. Even I managed it, and I would be happy to give you some pointers. Hint, it’s probably not racism or stubbornness on their part that’s giving you trouble. You might want to look over your track record with women of other races and work up some comparisons.
June 5, 2010, 8:25 pmDavid M. Nieporent says:
Yes, actually, he did. Right here: “As nearly all experts on the subject agree, growing acceptance of interracial marriage is an important indicator of increasing racial tolerance and improvement in intergroup relations.”
June 5, 2010, 8:44 pmmemphismacher says:
David Nieporent: reliable VC poster leg-humper.
June 5, 2010, 9:32 pmAllan Walstad says:
Blending of the races? This is an alarming trend! Immediate government action is essential to head off the impending loss of diversity, as well as to save all those affirmative action officer jobs in academia.
June 5, 2010, 10:38 pmTangoMan says:
Once we’ve blended into one race, racism is by definition gone.
You mean this type of blending? Twin girls born to interracial couple. Which “one race” do they represent?
June 5, 2010, 11:56 pmMitch says:
We have had an interracial marriage in my family (white/black), another in my wife’s (white/Asian), and are likely to have at least one or two more among the kids, based on their dating patterns. BFD. It’s about time we got over it, don’t you think? On the other hand, if a liberal wanted to move next door or marry my daughter…
June 6, 2010, 12:02 amRobert B says:
Allan,
Since having a diverse student body is a compelling state interest (Grutter v. Bollinger), aren’t states now required to have anti-miscegenation laws, to ensure a steady supply of racially diverse students in the future? After all, if it’s a compelling state interest when a person is 20, isn’t it also a compelling state interest when they’re just a gleam in their parents eye?
As a man whose children will claim ancestors on four continents, I find this argument to be absolute junk, but the nine
June 6, 2010, 12:07 amNazgûlJustices have spoken, so that’s the way it is.Suzanne says:
I am literally a “farm girl” from Indiana who has a son-in-law engineer from Hungary and a daughter-in-law engineer from India. I love them both. My mother lived to meet and enjoy both of them. But, boy, would Dad have been surprised!
June 6, 2010, 12:21 amNI says:
My suspicion, with no hard evidence to back me up, is that white men marrying black women is less common than black men marrying white women for reasons of both racism and sexism. A lot of men still view “their women” as property, and a white woman is a more valued piece of property than a black woman.
June 6, 2010, 12:40 amq says:
Asian males have it worse. 30% of Asians marry non-Asians, and I didn’t try looking for the exact number, but I’d guess some 90% of those are Asian females.
Not that I’m complaining or anything… Anyway, for all you lonely Asian-American men out there, I’ve got one tip: spend a summer in your motherland, the girls there will probably go gaga over someone who speaks fluent English. Plus they’re prettier.
June 6, 2010, 12:54 amJack Burton says:
My wife and I did our part and now it is up to the second generation to carry on the tradition. Of course, by definition, anyone they marry will be “inter-racial.”
June 6, 2010, 1:03 amMark says:
Any remember the conclusion of Podhoretz’s famous “My Negro Problem–And Ours”?
http://www.lukeford.net/Images/photos/out.pdf
June 6, 2010, 1:12 amPerseus says:
But women don’t come to marriage with a dowry these days, so their value as property isn’t as much as it once was.
June 6, 2010, 1:37 amDon Meaker says:
My first wife is my first cousin. My second wife is black. You just can’t make some people happy…
June 6, 2010, 1:40 amNI says:
Psychologically it still is. If mentally you view “your woman” as your possession, as a certain number of men still do, then “owning” one still has the same psychological dynamics as it used to.
June 6, 2010, 2:50 amJ. Aldridge says:
What is the divorce rate like for interracial marriages? It has been shown to be sky high for same sex couples.
June 6, 2010, 4:06 amJ. Aldridge says:
With such things as federal hate crime laws and affirmative action I doubt it will ever be possible.
There will always be the human element that seeks to associate among ones own race and to resent being told it is wrong to do so. Pro-abolitionists found that out after the civil war when they attempted to erase racial conflicts by law. That blew up in their face with them being swept from power by voters and having their laws repelled.
All your civil rights blow horns will talk about racial tolerance in public to then go attend their “all black” parties and work in their “all black” foundations or groups.
June 6, 2010, 4:16 amRicardo says:
What I think J. Aldridge means to say is that in the aftermath of the Civil War, a domestic terrorist organization rose to power in the South that brutally murdered several thousand civilians and used mayhem, murder and intimidation to suppress the (black) Republican vote in the South. The forceful response of the federal government to this insurgency was not at all liked by the terrorists and their sympathizers who, while suffering a temporary defeat in the early 1870s, managed to get the federal government to back off as part of the grand bargain behind the Presidential Election of 1876.
I suppose from this point of view, if it wasn’t for those evil carpetbaggers in the late 19th century or affirmative action and hate crimes laws, we would have had a color-blind society by now. The real problem, apparently, is all those black people who don’t invite white people to their parties.
June 6, 2010, 5:02 amRicardo says:
Yup, both of these are more or less accurate and backed up by U.S. Census data. Steve Sailer and Roland Fryer summarize the U.S. Census data in useful ways (scroll through to the end of the Fryer paper to see the graphs). About 3/4 of Asian-white marriages are of the white man-Asian woman variety while 3/4 of the black-white marriages are of the black man-white woman variety.
June 6, 2010, 5:12 amBarry Youngerman says:
There must be some common factor that helps explain these two phenomena: most asian-white marriages involve a white man; most black-white marriages involve a black man.
Are women as a group choosing the more “manly” spouse, in terms of deeply-held mythology? Black men have a lower social status in America, but they are considered bigger, stronger, tougher, more aggressively heterosexual. Asian men have average to high social status in America, but they are considered smaller, more brainy than brawny, etc. Check out the speculation on Asian men websites.
June 6, 2010, 5:21 amCG says:
I’m white, female and live in an urban area.
Three of my girlfriends married Asian men (1 to Chinese-American born in the states, 1 to a mainland born Chinese who had acquired citizenship the hard way, and 1 to an East Indian-American). These are all wealthy professional guys, and it might be stereotypical, but they are family orientated.
There are a lot of black women in this town marrying and dating white/asian men too. Of the four black women I know personally they’re all in mixed race marriages. They’re not all fair skinned — one is the perhaps the darkest person I’ve ever met. None of them have the “black” accent though.
I think it depends on where you are.
June 6, 2010, 7:06 amBrett Bellmore says:
My track record is that this French/German/Irish mix is happily married to an Asian woman. Nice try, though.
Seriously, the research on this demonstrates that men don’t particularly care what race they marry, the opposition to inter-racial marriage comes from the women. So don’t blame the guys for black women ‘lacking options’, they’ve got plenty of options. They just don’t want to exercise most of them.
I have this image of a woman reflexively looking down at a 6’2″ sumo wrestler, just because she ‘considers’ Asians to be smaller. Seriously, you think women can’t determine how tall and brawny a guy is by looking at him, they need to deduce it from his race? I suspect you’re being a bit PC here, pretending actual statistical trends are just some kind of unfounded prejudice.
There might be something to the sexual dimorphism suggestion. And my view in this has been, humans have instincts, why fight them unnecessarily? Though that doesn’t given much solace to short, slight guys and tall, brawny women…
June 6, 2010, 7:20 amLola LB says:
Your questions can be answered by the excellent blog at Black Female Interracial Marriage Ezine. Evia has been blogging on this issue for years and years, and she has at least one book aimed at black females. There are more and more women coming out with their own books on this topic as well.
Short answer: black females have been conditioned to not consider the option of marrying out, but this is detrimental to them due to the small eligibility pool. I myself was very lucky to see an example of a bf-wm marriage in my own family while growing up and that really opened up the possibility of such a relationship in my life.
So, if you’re a white guy and attracted to black women, don’t be afraid, even if it may take a while to get her attention. There are lots of good resources out there, starting with the blog that I referenced above.
June 6, 2010, 7:20 amRusty says:
Brent – I’ve seriously dated a black woman who I remained friends with and have another close African-American woman friend who married a white guy. I realize that’s light years from a representative sample, but they’d scoff (to put it mildly) at your contention that the difference is because black women are spurning the attentions of white men in contrast to black men/white women. There was also a piece in Salon recently by a black woman who described the pain of going to a party or club and having white men look straight through her as if she didn’t exist.
June 6, 2010, 8:02 amnewscaper says:
Eliot is absolutely on to something.
Instead of the still relative *lack* of mixed marriages being some as yet unconquered racism, the simple fact is that race is very often a proxy for otherwise reasonable issues of class/culture.
Or, more simply put, Snoop Dogg is not Denzel (or Will Smith or Sydney Poitier or Colin Powell or Clarence Thomas).
As to black women, the explanation is also rather simple (in addition to the point of women presumably having stronger preferences): blacks tend to be poorer than whites, women tend try to marry ‘up’ in terms of status (whereas men will marry ‘down’ if beauty trumps a not-too-large status gap). Apart from mixed marriages at the high end, where things are fairly uniform, you see the phenomenon of black men from the next rung down (whether actual $$s or other status) able to attract white women who are further down on the white socio-economic scale.
There is a downside to mixed black-white relationships (not the marrying kind) — go in any Walmart and you’ll see tons of otherwise middle-to-lower-middles class white girls with a mixed baby, *her* parents if she’s lucky but daddy nowhere in sight.
Something interesting to notice, if you watch carefully, is that of the hip TV commercials tossing a young black-white couple into the mix for diversity, the very clear majority have a black guy with a white girl, which suggests an agenda of its own.
June 6, 2010, 8:10 amnewscaper says:
People above are also absolutely right also about self-segregation. The middle and lower class blacks everyone freely mingled with in the workplace on the job (this was a non Fortune 500 electronics design & mfg company listed on the NYSE) would tend to huddle together at company parties etc.
Also, the experience of being one of only 5 white people at a black wedding of about 200 guests (the bride was an engineer colleague) was an eye opening experience for me — not just for the obvious ‘shoe on the other foot’ of being in the very small minority, but the general ‘what are *they* doing here’ vibe (I wouldn’t say ‘hostility’ though there seemed to be some). This last was striking because I am *positive* it would not have been the same had the proportions been reversed — this is the urban South (in Alabama no less), which is actually more integrated in terms of day to day relations than most northern cities (I know, I’ve been there and lived there). The most overt racist hostility among upper middle class whites I’ve ever seen was back in 1983 in Cambridge, MA in a restaurant a couple blocks from Harvard when a couple decently dressed black women came in and received the evil eye like I’d never seen. I ditched the educated southern reflexive collective, somehow unique guilt for racism right there. I was 18.
June 6, 2010, 8:27 amJohn says:
Engineering grad school didn’t have a lot of racial options on females. You had you choice of dating Chinese or Indian. Frankly, my family had more trouble with my wife being a ex-communist party member than the fact she was Chinese.
Made for an interesting family reunion though, with her father and mother there, it was the first time since the civil war, that we had both sides of a confict (Korea) represented.
June 6, 2010, 9:23 amlucia says:
Maybe daddy was at work earning money to pay for diapers?
If your point is that sometimes, black/white dating leads to out of wedlock births, everyone will conceded that. So can white/white dating, white/asian dating etc. The rates of out of wedlock births does vary by socioeconomic level, cultural values, and race. If you have more to say, say it.
But you should be very careful trying to gauge whether a child is born out of wedlock or whether the father is absent from its life based on witnessing a mother shopping without a father present. Lots and lots and lots of married women shop without their husbands, boyfriends or partners coming along. The overwhelming majority of my visits to Wallmart, Target, the grocery store or other routine task oriented shopping excursions are without my husband and I’ve been married over 25 years. My mother-in-law and mother, like many women, do what I consider to be “hobby shopping”. They often did this without their husbands. When I was single, I also often shopped without my boyfriend tagging along.
So why in the world would I jump to the conclusion that young mothers shopping without an age appropriate looking male means that the baby’s daddy is not involved in their lives? If you do this, I think you are going to wildly overestimate the number of women whose baby-daddies did not marry then and vanished from their lives.
June 6, 2010, 9:37 amRicardo says:
Well sure, because not only is it not a representative sample — it is a sample explicitly conditioned on having dated a white guy before. Of course they would scoff.
Actual studies have been on the issue of who, exactly, women are attracted to or interested in and they back up the idea that women tend to be more interested in members of the same race. The one exception is Asian women who tend to go for either white men or Asian men. White women prefer white men and black women prefer black men according to the studies that have been done (mostly of online dating or speed dating environments).
Those same studies show that race generally does not influence men one way or the other on average (yes, there are some white men explicitly attracted to one or more non-white races but they tend to get balanced out by other white men more attracted to other white women — on average, it’s a wash).
If a black woman walks into a club full of white men and doesn’t get any attention, there are a few possible explanations:
1) She’s simply not that attractive
2) It’s a gay bar
3) (Maybe the most likely) The white men think her boyfriend is going to show up in 10 minutes.
By anecdote, I’ve heard some black women get exposed to pretty harsh criticism from other black women if they date outside the race. This I’m less sure of but my sample size is about as big as yours on this issue.
June 6, 2010, 10:02 amJeannie says:
Highly educated black women have a difficult time finding a husband. I have a friend who has a PhD in Genetic Engineering and is in her mid-40s, past her child bearing years. She is smart, obviously, beautiful and good. It seems men of both races are afraid of her but I can’t see why and I know her pretty well.
June 6, 2010, 10:14 amMarkD says:
I’m not sure anymore, but in my day a lot of the Asian Woman – Caucasian Male pairings were servicemen marrying foreign women. The military was much more male then, so the ratio is not at all surprising.
I spent almost 5 years in Japan, and there were no caucasian women to date, had I been interested, which I was not. One marriage, three children and thirty-five years later, I’m still grateful for my good fortune. This bit of personal trivia isn’t an ethnic slam, or one of those tiresome Asian-women-are-wonderful bits. I’ve known some who are not. In the end, it’s all personal. I met a wonderful girl who happened to be Japanese.
June 6, 2010, 10:24 amsetnaffa says:
Looks like someone forgot about Gregor Mendel from their what, fourth grade?, science class…
June 6, 2010, 10:32 amLaura(southernxyl) says:
1 – I agree with Lucia. After my baby was born, I didn’t go back to work full-time for several months. My parents would come up to Memphis and spend part of the day with me, and we’d go to the mall or wherever; my mom came up several times and went to the grocery store with my daughter and me, just to give me a little boost. My husband was at work. It’s best not to jump to conclusions.
2 – Now that I am middle-aged, and have been married 27 years, inexplicably I get a bit of male attention from time to time; double-takes and smiles, that kind of thing. (Makes me want to find a mirror and see if I have a smudge on my face.) When I was young and single, at parties and other events white men definitely looked through me like I was made of glass. I don’t know what that was about, or what changed, but I do know that I was a white woman and I experienced it anyway. I feel those black women’s pain but that is not exclusively a black experience.
3 – FWIW, I had a black co-worker who hosted a family reunion one year; she had one of those families that do that every year, and they travel from all over the country to see each other. (I think that’s fantastic. Lots of families only see each other when someone has died.) Anyway, one of the events was a picnic at Patriot Lake in Shelby County, TN, and she invited all of us to go. I was the only coworker who went, and my daughter, about ten, and I were the only white people. My coworker happened to not be there when we drove up, and we did get the you’re-in-the-wrong-place look when we got out of the car, but then my coworker’s mother recognized me. I had taken my friend to the emergency room once when she’d gotten sick, and stayed until her mother got there, and so she came over, “Laura!” and hugged me. Instantly the ice melted and these strangers were urging me and my kid to come and get a plate, and sit and eat with them. So there it is.
June 6, 2010, 11:16 amDesiderius says:
As much as men like to pretend otherwise, it’s women who make the mating decisions. All other things equal, the base prejudice is for the alpha, and the further away from Olduvai your racial group ended up, the less alpha you’re likely to be.
We’ve made progress over those prejudices, but that’s the point – we had to progress from that base, colorblindness is not the default.
The assumption that the relatively rare pairings of white men/black women is on the men is a quaint throwback to the days of mistaken feelings of white superiority. Those pants aren’t sagging out of feelings of superiority.
June 6, 2010, 12:09 pmCatoRenasci says:
My experiences are only anecdotal: I dated a couple of black women and a Native American woman. In the case of one of the black women and the Native American woman, there was tremendous family pressure for the girl not to ‘date white’ even though in both cases the parents had met me and (according to independent 3rd party reports) liked me. In the case of the other black girl, she faced serious peer pressure from other black women (i.e. threatening violence) not to ‘date white’.
Most of the professional black women I’ve known as a lawyer have expressed frustration at not being able to find black men with compatible values and education, but also were adamant about not dating (other than very casually) any non-black men.
June 6, 2010, 1:07 pmptt says:
Stanford doesn’t have an all-black dorm, though your daughter might see it as such, I suppose, or perhaps you misunderstood. The university has four ethnic theme houses. Ujamaa is the black/African-American one. I lived there back in 1976. It was my first choice for housing assignment as a freshman. This was very puzzling to a lot of people, white and black. The house was about 60-75% black, IIRC.
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/rde/shs/ugrad/lagunita.htm#ujamaa
Ah, yes, sky high “divorce rates”. I wonder what the “divorce rate” among heterosexuals would be if you did a survey of failed dating relationships among a crowd of people waiting to get into a singles club…
June 6, 2010, 2:14 pmJ. Aldridge says:
What J. Aldridge means is Radicals flamed the passions that led to the rise of the domestic terrorist organization, which ultimately cost Radicals and their policies dearly.
June 6, 2010, 2:17 pmJ. Aldridge says:
But people as a community can’t do that (schools, clubs, housing, etc.)
June 6, 2010, 2:35 pmricky says:
An astonishingly dim-bulb analysis but, hey, political correctness makes people stupid. Anyway, as our current President shows, mixed-race children can be some of the most fiercely tribal people around. This idea of a post-racial utopia is as much a fantasy as the communist worker’s paradise. But hey, let’s continue on this grand suicidal social experiment lest Presidents of third world countries scold us for our perceived bigotry (while their countries have explicit policies in place to protect racial homogeneity)…
June 6, 2010, 5:09 pmNancy Reyes says:
interracial marriage? Works for me.
It’s not political. It’s hormones.
June 6, 2010, 6:08 pmInterracial Marriage Rate Increase Meets Resistance : The Other McCain says:
[...] Marriage Rate Increase Meets ResistancePosted on | June 6, 2010 | No Commentsby SmittyThe news that interracial marriage rates are increasing seems like a good thing. Family history and ethnic heritage, while excellent [...]
June 6, 2010, 9:26 pmChris Travers says:
Also, even when an extended family member is present that doesn’t mean anything either. Occasionally my wife and my mother go shopping together or my wife and her mother (when she comes to visit). It is entirely inappropriate to judge someone’s private life based on a small sample of information such as shopping habits.
As a funny aside, my aunt adopted two children from China and occasionally my sister would go visit them and baby site when she was a teenager. She’d have to take them shopping. Occasionally someone would stop her and ask “is the father Chinese?” She said she always wanted to reply that she didn’t know who the father was (which would be technically correct since the children weren’t hers and were adopted from an orphanage) just to shock people who wanted to make that assumption.
June 6, 2010, 10:02 pmnewscaper says:
Lucia and Laura…
Of course I’m an idiot, how foolish of me to assume that most of these teenaged girls aren’t married.
June 6, 2010, 10:02 pmElliot says:
Anyone open to the idea that we are genetically predisposed to favor, associate with, and marry within our own race?
June 6, 2010, 10:03 pmChris Travers says:
How do you know that the children with them are theirs? Maybe they are babysitting?
June 6, 2010, 10:05 pmChris Travers says:
I think that highly depends on how you define “race.” I don’t think people are predisposed to favor, associate with, or marry people who look like them. However, we ARE predisposed to favor, associate with, or marry people who act and talk like us. The socio-linguistic elements are fairly strong throughout history. Appearance-based factors are not.
I personally think that “race” is a modern justification of socio-linguistic grouping anyway, and racism is this sort of tribalism where things like skin color are used as a proxy for the underlying preferences.
June 6, 2010, 10:07 pmRicardo says:
It’s possible, but there is no evidence that American men favor members of their own race for dating or marriage. There would have been no need for anti-miscegenation laws in the first place if there was such a strong inclination toward marrying someone of the same race. The history of imperialism shows that it was common for European men to take non-white wives until the law or social pressure put a stop to it.
As long as we’re speculating, maybe some men are genetically predisposed to disperse their genes as widely as possible, seeking to have affairs with multiple women of different races or nationalities. Call this the James Bond theory of male mating behavior.
June 6, 2010, 10:37 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Newscaper, you didn’t say “teenagers” in your original post.
You still don’t know they’re teenagers unless you looked at their ID. My 23-year-old daughter is routinely thought to be 13 or 14 by people who don’t know her.
Elliot, we most definitely are genetically predisposed to marry within our race, since it’s impossible for us to reproduce with non-humans. (sorry, couldn’t resist.) (no, if by “race” you mean black/white/Asian, I don’t think we are.)
June 6, 2010, 10:49 pmNickM says:
Highly educated white women often have the same problem. They intimidate many men.
Female teachers have a huge problem this way, made even worse by the fact that their coworkers are predominantly female (at the K-12 level) and most men they can meet through work are parents of their students.
Nick
June 6, 2010, 11:45 pmRandy says:
J. Adridge: “What is the divorce rate like for interracial marriages? It has been shown to be sky high for same sex couples.”
Any sourcing for that?
Just today, the Washington Post wrote that interfaith marriages have very high. Perhaps we should make it illegal for Catholics to marry Jews.
June 7, 2010, 12:02 amSarcastro says:
OMG! Obama’s totally racist in my head too!! I just can’t work it into random other threads as well as you can.
June 7, 2010, 12:07 amElliot says:
Perhaps the evidence is the observation that most American men do marry within their own race? If there were a genetic component to stay within a race or population I’d expect it to be found all over the world.
In terms of miscegenation laws, I don’t know why they were passed. Was it in response to a significant move towards interracial marriages.
(I agree with everyone who points out that race is a poorly defined term. Strange that we seem so shackled to meaningless terms in our social dialog. Maybe we really do understand something that hasn’t yet been accurately expressed in language.)
June 7, 2010, 12:22 amRicardo says:
That’s evidence of outcome, not of preference. The studies of online dating and speed dating environments show that men on average have no racial preferences in who they indicate interest in. It is the women who have a preference. So men are not choosing to marry within the race — they are being chosen by women within their race. Moreover, in non-artificial dating environments, men tend to find partners through their social circles or at parties. These sources will tend to be skewed toward the man’s own race.
June 7, 2010, 1:24 amJ. Aldridge says:
I’m sure you are one of those who think its just fine for the Feds or court to make anything illegal.
June 7, 2010, 5:17 amNorthern Dave says:
Part of the problem with this discussion is the anecdotal aspect. Rather like looking at bulk properties of electrons in solids and the activities of individual electrons (one is predictable one is rather not).
For example, I have never found any black woman physically attractive (an interracial American couple he white, she black were guardians for our kids when they were young so it isn’t a racism issue, just a genetic one). A petite, curvy redhead with pale skin (the paler the better) I’m usually completely helpless with. They can wrap me around their finger in under 5 s if I’m not careful. Tell me that isn’t genetics :-)
For group dynamics, I’d have everyone recall that the word for blond and pretty are the same in old english – “Fair”.
That being said as all groups of sailors/soldiers from anywhere prove, when men have been separated from the home group of women for some time they’ll make do and some men are simply satyrs – more all the time as pornography becomes more prevalent.
June 7, 2010, 6:55 amRicardo says:
In Asian countries, skin-whitening products are big business and are very popular among women. Interracial (half-white) or light-skinned women are generally considered more attractive there. How much of that is due to the influence of Western culture versus much deeper preferences, it’s tough to say.
If Halle Berry (half-black, half-white) doesn’t do it for you, though, I would suggest that is genetics — an abnormality of some kind :-)
June 7, 2010, 8:05 amDesiderius says:
Nick M,
“Highly educated white women often have the same problem. They intimidate many men.”
That’s the party line. This seems more likely.
Ricardo,
“Anyone open to the idea that we are genetically predisposed to favor, associate with, and marry within our own race?”
See. It’s the base, but culture has progressed beyond that, some more than others.
June 7, 2010, 10:40 amDesiderius says:
Nick M,
That a woman would worry that she intimidates men would suggest that she underestimates them, which is more likely to be her problem.
June 7, 2010, 10:44 amCJColucci says:
I long ago came to the conclusion that explanations for my lack of success with subgroups of the female sex, or even with particular women, were more likely to be found if I stopped focusing on the seemingly perverse preferences of the women and focused instead on what I brought to the bargaining table. Perhaps not conicidentally, my success rate improved at about the same time.
June 7, 2010, 11:05 amRyan says:
As a guy in a inter-racial marriage with mutt kids, I would heartily support private restaurant owners refusing to sell food to me. I would rather know who is likely to spit in my food, so that I could go somewhere else. Negative cash feedback works better then cops and lawyers.
June 7, 2010, 11:32 amRyan says:
Tee Hee… Although, My college roommates girlfriend could have been Neanderthal.
June 7, 2010, 11:43 amMichael Ejercito says:
Why would that be so?
June 7, 2010, 2:12 pmMichael Ejercito says:
I wonder why women would be more picky than men.
I wonder if it was that way during Africa’s colonial period, with European troops marrying local women.
June 7, 2010, 2:23 pmShelbyC says:
The former is pretty ambitious, of course…
June 7, 2010, 3:15 pmlucia says:
Let’s see, you wrote this:
Writing tip: If you want readers to know you mean teenaged girls, you might want to consider adding that to the string of adjectives in this description “otherwise middle-to-lower-middles class white girls”. (I’m still pondering if having the baby turned them into not white girls or not middle-to-lower class.)
If you’d bothered to add the word “teenaged” I would have pointed out a different logical flaw.
Logic tip: if a teenage girl is in Walmart with people you are guessing are her parents, how do you know the kid in the stroller isn’t her sibling? Or niece? Did you forget to add “who I can tell are the mother because the teenage girl was breastfeeding in the aisle at Wallmart?”
The neighbors kitty corner of me have six kids; the youngest at 3 is more than 16 years younger than the oldest who is in college. I’ve seen the older girl watching the toddler– that doesn’t make her an unwed mother.
Same with the Laura in the house behind me, although in that case, although Laura’s youngest is now in 8th grade. I’ve seen the younger teenage kids hopping in the store with Laura (i.e. grandma) and the baby. Meanwhile both the baby’s father and mother might be visiting friends while they are in town.
Heck, believe it or not I’ve taken my nieces and nephews to the store with my mother while my sister and brother-in-law visited Illinois to attend a friends wedding.
I’m sure you see people in Walmart. I’m less confident you are well able to figure out the precise relationship between groups of people you see, the age of any baby’s mother, whether or not she is married and even less able to tell whether the baby’s father bolted.
June 7, 2010, 6:47 pmMichael Ejercito says:
If the girl and her parents are white and the kid is mixed, the only way the kid is her sibling is if the sibling were adopted.
June 7, 2010, 7:07 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Adoptions happen, from inside the family and out. Also fostering happens.
The point is not to jump to conclusions. It’s pleasant, though, to jump to conclusions that validate the dim view we like to take of people who are strangers to us but who clearly don’t live their lives right.
June 7, 2010, 9:28 pmnewscaper says:
Some of the responses to me are hilarious.
So most of these girls are babysitters whom the real parents have allowed to take their infant or toddler on a trip to WalMart — with some extra adults tagging along?
Sheesh, anyone ever hear of Occam’s Razor?
Plus you know damned well that if I had been praising them that you would not have had any problem with my drawing the common sense conclusions about the parental and marital status.
P.S. My use of the term ‘girl’ (not PC for a man to use wrt women, IIRC) should have been a bit of a clue that they were young.
June 7, 2010, 10:01 pmnewscaper says:
On the aspect of a possible underlying genetic predisposition to racial selectivity in mating…
There is a perfectly plausible evolutionary hypothesis that fits quite well (and could apply in some degree to more than just humans).
1st, sperm is cheap, so it would make sense that males are less selective, period.
2nd, eggs are not, particularly human ones. Furthermore, exogamy (or archaically ‘new blood’), mating outside the close kin group is favored for increasing genetic diversity, preventing inbreeding.
OTOH, straying too far risks wasting an egg on a male with whom the female is NOT interfertile. Worse, due to the long time it takes to raise humans to full sexual maturity the greater risk is of having offspring but who are themselves sterile, IOW ‘mules’. That would likely be discovered too late for the original mother to correct. Factor in the more-or-less monogamous (albeit with some cheating) relationships* it appears the large majority of human primitive societies ‘evolved’ at the junction of biology and culture, and the above actually makes quite a bit of sense.
BTW, the PC claim that ‘race is meaningless’ is nonsense. However imperfect the categories may be (particularly in light of increasing modern genetic and geographic mixing), clearly there persistent bundles of traits which reflect our different evolutionary pasts, and to deny this is itself unscientific. By definition if ‘lateral gene flows’ had been so great in the past as to make ‘race’ meaningless as is usually claimed, at least wrt regional environmental selection pressures, then there would be no ‘races’ for us to see in the first place to be arguing about.
*In primitive conditions, given the unsually demanding task (compared to other mammals) of raising human babies, paternal investment in offspring is required. Further, polygamy (more properly polygyny) only arises in more widespread form lalter when human cultures developed enough that significant inequality between males could arise (wrt them having enough resources to to support multiple ‘wives’ and children).
June 7, 2010, 10:24 pmlucia says:
First: I babysat a two brothers. One was white one was mixed. His mother had been widowed and remarried.
Second: newscaper is just guessing the age appropriate people with her are her parents. They could be a mother and uncle. Or neighbors. Or her inlaws (with her husband adopted.)
Third: Why can’t her sibling can’t be adopted?
newscaster
Why would Occam’s razor exclude likely, plausible events?
If you want to insist on using Occam’s Razor, I would think we’d have to go with the theory that you probably aren’t very good at telling the difference between a 16 year old and an 18 or 19 year old; 18 or 19 year olds may be teens, but they can perfectly well be married.
Moreover, if the girl near the baby is 14, the theory that the kid is her niece, nephew or sibling is more plausible than the notion that it’s her kid. It’s true it might be her kid. But mothers of 14 year old girls are often still fertile and have kids. Also, 14 year old girls often have 18-22 year old siblings who might have kids. This is not an implausible situation.
PC or not, lots of people call women less than 30 years old girls. I know people who call 80 year old women girls. If you want to say teenager, say teenager. If you are advancing theories that the girl can’t be married, you might even want to narrow the range down to “young teenager”. After all, 18 year olds can be married.
I believe you have jumped to an utterly incorrect conclusion about whether or not I would have a problem. Also, I think you are missing my point: You are not drawing a common sense conclusion. You are omitting a huge number of very plausible and common possibilities to interpret the world in some way you think it really is.
In any case, I have another reason I discount your annectdote. Quite honestly, I don’t even believe you actually see many teenage girls pushing strollers at Walmart either in the presence of older adults or by themselves. It may be that you’ve seem one once or twice. But I shop at Walmart regularly and I can’t ever remember seeing any; I don’t think many Walmarts are teeming with examples of teenagers pushing baby strollers.
June 7, 2010, 11:43 pmDesiderius says:
CJ,
“I stopped focusing on the seemingly perverse preferences of the women and focused instead on what I brought to the bargaining table. Perhaps not conicidentally, my success rate improved at about the same time.”
Exactly right. Also holds for those women.
June 8, 2010, 10:37 amMichael Ejercito says:
It also helps that a huge portion of the male population dies prematurely, like in wars.
June 8, 2010, 10:51 amElliot says:
Sure it’s evidence of outcome. That outcome can be a function of various factors. But I see no reason to discount race (cue definitional objections) as a genetic preference. A study showing online preferences does nothing to discount other factors.
Do you contend an online study of speed dating disproves the idea of a genetic connection to preference?
June 8, 2010, 12:35 pmElliot says:
I have noticed the WalMart phenomenon for several years. I wouldn’t use the word “teemimg,” but there are sufficient numbers that I began speculating about it as a social phenomenon.
Truth in antecdote: I only go to one Walmart, and only go about once a month.
June 8, 2010, 1:26 pmlucia says:
Elliot–
Maybe it’s a neighborhood thing.
I go about once a week, and to about 4 different Walmart’s in the DuPage county. I don’t see many very young looking women with infants or toddlers. I ran into a knitting friend who has a baby– the friend (white) is married (husband black) I’d guess she’s in her late 20s. (She has a degree in engineering.) I see other women about her age fairly regularly. I’ve seen what appear to be college age girls with what are parents doing some rather major shopping together particularly in August and near Easter. But very young looking mothers with infants? With or without what look like parents in tow? Not often. Maybe I need to spend more time in the Pampers aisle?
June 8, 2010, 2:55 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
newscaper, once I saw this in your comment:
women tend try to marry ‘up’ in terms of status
I figured you for a sexist for whom using “girl” for “woman” fit right in.
I tried to track down that women-marry-up thing the other day, after I mentioned it to my husband and he laughed his head off. (I’ve been the household breadwinner for many years.) The only thing I’ve found is allusions to a study done in the 1970′s in which it appeared that men married women who were less educated than they were. Do you have anything to back up your “in terms of status” or anything at all that’s not more than 30 years old? Or is this more assuming facts not in evidence because they fit your worldview?
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June 9, 2010, 2:02 pmMauwi says:
CJ BRAVO!! Finally a smart man! I am very disappointed by some comments on this page claiming that black women are racist & stubborn? Really?! I read studies basically showing that white men are not too adventurous and rather remain in their comfort zone.
Some comments are basing this issue on social-languistic patterns, accents humm let me think… I hardly believe that white men would find any dilemma in dating girls coming straight from eastern european countries for english immersion!!
Don’t forget that our society still views men as the “chasers”, this article just confirms that black men use all their options.
Now based on my own experience as a black woman, I have no racial preferences in general and when it comes to love relationships, although I noticed that my online dating profile is mostly visited by white men (70% to 80%), in social life I’ve been looked at, smiled at, approached by white men and they will tell me how attractive I am etc and do they act on it? NO!! They simply walk away…
Furthermore I do agree on the fact that TV sets the guidlines for society behaviours, I guess the day TV will decide to show more commercials with white men/black women couples and also white hollywood male stars dating black hollywood female stars the rate of interracial realionships involving white men/black women will skyrock, so sad…
You should stop making excuses, if you find the girl you are looking for well just go for it don’t limit yourself with some stereotypes you might end up in a great relationship or get turned down that’s the dating game. Let’s face it you could be & probably have been turned down by women your own race did it stop you from trying??
A little piece of advice for black women into dating white men, you should go for europeans, they have less problems expressing their feelings (sorry but this is the truth).
June 10, 2010, 1:04 amnewscaper says:
Eliot — thank you for some common sense backup.
Lucia –
Just because multiple scenarios are possible does not in any way mean they are equally probable.
re: “Maybe it’s a neighborhood thing.”
LMFAO, that says it all! I googled DuPage county, and if it is the one in Illinois, it is “one of the nation’s wealthiest counties”, and per the 2000 census is only about 3% black (which fits with my firsthand experience in spending a week in nearby Schaumberg and Elk Grove back about 1999), so I’d suggest that it is *your* experience and perspective of the real world which is sorely lacking. Me? I’m in Mobile county, Alabama, which is about 33% black and not nearly as wealthy per capita, so maybe my feel for the broader milieu is less insular than yours. (Interestingly, I noticed you didn’t touch my evolution post with a ten foot pole.)
Laura – perhaps I should have qualified to “women tend to want to marry ‘up’ [although a variety of obvious factors limit their ability to actually do so]“. Duh.
Michael E — the relationship between war and larger scale polygyny is interesting, as there is a positive feedback loop. In both the Incan Empire and the first few centuries of Islam it shows up neatly — the promise of women from conquered areas (as well as a shortage internally due to established males taking nth wives) encourages lower status men to fight. It also encourages the surviving defeated men to ‘join up’ and keep the ball rolling. When the expansion stops then instability sets in.
June 10, 2010, 10:47 amMichael Ejercito says:
Are women more willing to share men than men are willing to share women?
What stopped women from taking multiple husbands?
June 10, 2010, 12:52 pmnewscaper says:
Michael E asked
“Are women more willing to share men than men are willing to share women?
What stopped women from taking multiple husbands?”
The answer also points back to evolution — for an excellent summary of the intersection between human culture and biology, I highly recommend ‘The Red Queen’ by Matt Ridley. It shed more light on the underpinnings of culture and relations between the sexes than any standard ‘social science’ course or book (which typically ignore evolution or ‘human nature’ — funny for the supposed ‘reality-based community’) that I’ve been exposed to.
The answer is that in primitive times (hunter-gatherer paleolithic), the key point is that women evolved to prefer all of a man’s resources for her offspring — every one was dirt poor and there was virtually no way she could make it without a provider. OTOH men want their offspring to survive too and thus contribute (unlike almost all other mammals, where babies are helpless for only a relatively short time, and the pregnant mothers not at all).
The key is this — a woman always knows her children are hers — she gave birth, duh — but men do *not*. The worst thing in reproductive terms, is for a man to spend years supporting kids who aren’t his, a massive genetic opportunity cost. Therefore the importance of the near universal development of some sort of community-sanctioned marriage (usually monogamous, at least in theory – with some cheating/cuckolding on the side as an alternate strategy) to reinforce the bargain of exclusive sexual access and fidelity (yes, more importantly from the woman) in return for support from the man. A nominal monogamy has the advantage of spreading the women out among the men — when every one is mostly equally poor/rich back then, this results in more well-provided or offspring for the tribe, and also reduces intra-tribe male-on-male violence.
Another interesting point is that while female-supported polygyny sounds like a good deal as more freedom for women (is it better to be some dirt poor guys only wife, or a rich Brad Pitt’s 5th junior wife?), in practice, as a broader social institution, it has almost always ended up in less freedom for women.
June 10, 2010, 2:12 pmMichael Ejercito says:
How did it end for less freedom for women?
June 10, 2010, 9:20 pmnewscaper says:
By artificial scarcity, so to speak, the women become an even more contended for resource — pawns or prizes.
More fundamentally, I think, with one man-one woman marriage, the woman has inherently more power in the relationship compared to a wife who is merely one of many who are always replaceable (even if she cannot be easily divorced, the man, if rich enough, can always add a younger, prettier, more compliant one.)
June 10, 2010, 10:21 pmNorthern Dave says:
Very true. Rival wives do reduce the power of women in marriage (as well as the fact that one will always be the favourite).
Add in that polygamous societies add in age reductions in “wives” (I had an old friend of mine in S. America visiting a native village where polygamy was practiced and a child he estimated at 2 years of age came over and asked to be picked up – he was a grandfather – and as he did a local yelled “Put down my Wife!!”, which he did.) Everyone knows about the Ayatollah’s and their age directions for marriage which are illegal in all fifty states and it is a very bad idea.
PS – germaine to the original topic is that one would think that like the Numidian cavalry stationed in Roman Britain interracial marriage would in time eliminate the racial differentiation problem, wouldn’t one?
June 11, 2010, 4:42 pmDASHO says:
Saying that black women have a limited taste, I think that very stupid. you may not like black women but, others do.
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June 16, 2010, 3:49 pmPamela says:
THIS Native American, college-educated, suburban-raised, Biotech major, Shakespeare and ice skating and classical music loving, woman, WANTS a white man to marry me! THIS “Pocahantas” WANTS a “Captain John Smith” (as per the “legend”) and can’t find one to save my life!! Where in this country ARE the white men who will marry “Pocahantas” anyway, except in New York City’s European immigrant areas?! I want someone SUITABLE with like interests and lifestyle. With at least a Bachelor’s degree in something as that’s what I have so far.
THIS is what people look for, and in the case of American Indians and black women, and probably dark-skinned Latina ones as well, overrides racial concerns. Race isn’t it; similar education, upbringing and socio-economic status is what matters. It would never do for me to try to marry another Choctaw if there weren’t any Choctaw men who had done anything but drop out of high school and sit around on the Rez all day drinking and doing drugs.
I’m a minority woman with “the white man’s” education and upbringing and THAT is what drives my man-hunt. Someone similar whom I could stand to be with. Not someone with the same skin color as me and nothing else on this planet in common with me.
June 26, 2010, 3:29 pmNorthern Dave says:
Have you tried eharmony?
I know it sounds trite, but several of my cousins have found great husbands who have been good matches through online dating services. Though they had all dated extensively via the optical scan about the surroundings method it wasn’t until they met someone with common interests/worldviews online that they paired up and that didn’t happen through the 15+ years of standard dating techniques!
As an aside, several of my blond-haired blue eyed buddies have married native american women and been very happy so it does happen – good luck!
June 26, 2010, 4:36 pmMST says:
I am a black woman who was married to a white man. It didn’t work out, but we are still friends. I’ve dated white men since then, but I do think its true that many black women are not interested in dating white men. Black women tend to be loyal to black men, but it always isn’t the other way around.
July 19, 2010, 4:09 pm