interracial relationships

The Lovings – their Supreme Court case in 1967 overturned laws against interracial marriage in the US.

Repost: This was first posted over two years ago. With more than 2,000 comments and still going, its thread is no longer usable. I am closing the original to comments and reposting it here. I added a bit about “preferences” and made some small changes:

An interracial relationship (IRR) is a dating or married relationship between people from different races. This post is about the ones in the US. It is an overview post – click on links to go deeper into a particular topic.

The numbers:

In 2010, 4.1% of all marriages in the US were interracial. The rate was 2.1% for White women, 4.6% for Black women and 17.5% for Asian women.

Interracial marriages, from most common to least:

• 21.3% Asian woman, White man
• 19.7% other woman, White man
• 19.7% White woman, other man
• 15.7% White woman, Black man
• 8.8% White woman, Asian man
• 6.8% Black woman, White man
• 2.7% other woman, Black man
• 1.6% Asian woman, Black man
• 1.5% Asian woman, other man
• 1.1% other woman, Asian man
• 0.7% Black woman, other man
• 0.4% Black woman, Asian man

Notes:

• Hispanic/Latino – not a race.
• Asian – everyone from Pakistan to Japan, from Mongolia to Papua New Guinea is one “race”.
• other – presumably Native Americans, mixed-race people, etc.

Myths:

1. “I am not racist. My girlfriend is Black.” Right, and I am not sexist because my wife is a woman.
2. “Mixed-race marriages will help end racism. In 500 years we will all look Brazilian!” The people in Brazil already look Brazilian – and they are still racist. Racism comes not from differences, but how people think about those differences.
3. “Mixed-race children are better-looking.” Is that because being part White puts them closer to White ideas of beauty?
4. “All Black men secretly want to marry White women.” Supposedly most Black men who make over $100,000 a year marry White. That could well be true, but not necessarily because of any secret desire: as Michelle Obama found out, most highly successful Black men live in an all-White world and become cut off from other Blacks.

Issues:

• Beauty is objective – a racist trope that comes up in these discussions. Pushed by Steve Sailer, Satoshi Kanazawa, Heartiste, majorityrights.com and their godfather, J.F. “Caucasian” Blumenbach. It is all beside the point because:
• Men are dogs – when it comes to race, it is women who do the choosing. Or so says the Columbia speed dating study.
• sexual selection and race – a study of Chinese American women found that those who grew up in White neighbourhoods tend to marry White while those who grew up in Chinese neighbourhoods tend to marry Chinese.
• Asian fetish – while there are probably White men with creepy desires for Asian women, the high number of Asian women married to White men mainly comes from the fact that Asian women are far less likely to grow up in same-race neighbourhoods than other women.
• “It’s just my preference.” – probably not if it falls in line with society’s racist beauty standards.
• Red flags:
  • Exoticization – this makes the other person into some kind of racist fantasy, not a flesh-and-blood person. No one is exotic.
  • Internalized racism – this shows up as badmouthing one’s own race, particularly the opposite sex. Examples:
    • BWE Movement – thinks that Black men are DBR (Damaged Beyond Repair), that the answer is to marry White men.
    • Tommy Sotomayor – the Black male counterpart to BWE.
• mixed-race identity – what the children of these unions will have to deal with at some point.

See also:

• Black women, loyalty and Black men
• My views on relationships between Black women and White men
• OkCupid and race and dating – a dating website with a half million people runs the numbers
• Famous interracial couples
• Adrian Tomine: Shortcomings – internalized racism and interracial relationships
• growing up biracial