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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29317 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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December 13, 2022

My friend and I recently got into a lengthy discussion over the topic of interracial dating while having coffee one morning. What made it specifically interesting was the perspective from which we both were perceiving it. I am a white Christian reactionary, and he is a mixed-race homosexual man. We were at a bar the previous night and i had politely declined a black woman's advances, and when asked why in the morning i explained to him that i have a strong preference for white women. I explained that i do find other races of women attractive, including black women, but that i simply cannot picture myself married with a woman of a different race and desired children who resembled myself. I don't usually explain this to people, but he seemed fairly interested.

It is here where he interjected and told me that the way i view interracial relationships were wrong, and that sooner rather than later the west will be a homogenization of all different races. He explained to me of a recent study he had read that said that interracial marriages already encompassed 30% of all marriages and is at upwards of 93% acceptance rate among the population, and both are projected to climb. This shocked me, as I explained to him that within my main communities that are predominately white I still found interracial marriages to be relatively rare through simple observation. I told him there is absolutely no way that is correct, as there is no way 30% of white people are in interracial relationships.

That night I did some more research and found out the realities of it. Now the biggest hurdle is that i can only really make claims based on marriages, there is no data on interracial dating. The data may be far higher when we take that into consideration but i could find nothing to substantiate any definite claims. The claim of 30% is not true. As of 2017 17% of the overall population is in an interracial relationship. There is also a 94% acceptance rate of interracial marriages in aggregate.

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/05/18/1-trends-and-patterns-in-intermarriage/

https://www.asanet.org/wp-content/uploads/attach/journals/apr20srefeature.pdf

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2378023118814610

It gets more interesting the more you delve into the makeup of the interracial relationships themselves. While definitely seeing an increase, White people have had the lowest growth of interracial marriages in the last forty years. Only about 11% of the white population will intermarry. And the gender disparity between white men and white women who intermarry are exactly the same as they were in 1980.

Among white newlyweds, there is no notable gender gap in intermarriage – 12% of men and 10% of women had married someone of a different race or ethnicity in 2015. The same was true in 1980, when 4% of recently married men and 4% of recently married women had intermarried.

Unlike many other ethnicity's, the intermarriage rates among whites are also constant regardless of education levels.

Among white newlyweds, the likelihood of intermarrying is fairly similar regardless of education level. One-in-ten of those with a high school diploma or less have a spouse of another race or ethnicity, as do 11% of those with some college experience and 12% of those with at least a bachelor’s degree. Rates don’t vary substantially among white newlywed men or women with some college or less, though men with a bachelor’s degree are somewhat more likely to intermarry than comparable women (14% vs. 10%).

For comparison, Black intermarriage rates have tripled since 1980, from 5% to 18%. The most dramatic gap in all the data exists between college educated black men and women.

Black men are twice as likely as black women to have a spouse of a different race or ethnicity (24% vs. 12%).

Also, just as a side note that shocked me, 54%! Of US born Asian women marry outside their race.

Overall, while whites have the largest amount of people intermarrying simply due to sheer logistical numbers, they are statistically the least likely to date outside of their race, and relatively equal rates for both men and women. I brought this up to him the next time I saw him, and he was quite shocked at this. He brought up an interesting question.

Considering that the general acceptance of interracial marriage is so high, why is it so relatively rare? We came up with a couple conclusions

  1. There is simply not enough intersection or engagement between different ethnic communities. If you are a certain race, you most often will associate with others of the same ethnicity simply due to family connections/religious affiliations etc.

  2. Most are outwardly accepting of it, but secretly discourage it. This is what I personally think it is, just simply based on my actual experiences. My parents could go on and on about however noble their intentions are, but if I brought home a black woman or a native woman, they would be supportive but be incredibly disappointed. I also see many white women disparaged in friend groups if they date inter-racially as well. I even found studies that suggest this has been measured (Could be misrepresented however)

https://www.psypost.org/2021/01/study-uncovers-a-gendered-double-standard-for-interracial-relationships-59477

  1. Religion. Most ethnic groups have different religious beliefs that would be difficult to compromise on if starting a family. It would be difficult if I were to date a Hindu woman for example, because then quickly come into contact with irreconcilable differences. She wants to have a Hindu wedding; I want to make Christian vows. She wishes to raise our child Hindu; I was to raise him Christian. I don’t see any way how these could be reconciled. Most of the successful interracial relationships I’ve ever seen have always had a shared religious belief between them. It just makes everything way easier.

It is also interesting that both my friend and I came into the conversation of interracial marriages with the context that that means some sort of mixture of whites. We never considered that the majority would be between different ethnic groups. It actually came into my head reading this article from refinery.

https://www.refinery29.com/en-ca/2021/12/10794659/interracial-relationships-black-women-whiteness\

While I resent much of the post-modern perspectives about race this is not the place for that, but I couldn’t help but notice that I ended up agreeing on many of her points. We do look at interracial relationships much like the perspectives that she presents. But the fact still remains, even in a period of time that is most likely the most accepting of interracial marriages throughout any point in history, almost to the point of encouragement, Interracial relationships still remain relatively rare.

I think it is relevant that different races have gaps in how relatively attractive each gender is. E.g black women are the least attractive women and this is the strongest effect, to a lesser degree east Asian and south Asian men are the least attractive men. So a black man would often be "marrying up" by marrying outside of their race, and same for an Asian woman. White men and white women are relatively equal to each other.

This is all averages of course, there are obviously very attractive black women and very attractive asian men. But I think it is a relevant factor.

Overall, while whites have the largest amount of people intermarrying simply due to sheer logistical numbers, they are statistically the least likely to date outside of their race, and relatively equal rates for both men and women. I brought this up to him the next time I saw him, and he was quite shocked at this. He brought up an interesting question.

Wouldn't a lot of this phenomenon be due to the simple number of potential out-of-race partners? Whites are still a large majority in the US, so you would be much more likely to marry a white person no matter who you are (although there is of course still segregation by proximity, work, education, language, etc). This is true for whites, and blacks, but the latter is inter-racial while the former is not. Similarly the 54% for Asian women--Asians are only a few percent of the population. This number still means that Asian women strongly "prefer" marrying intra-race. If they married randomly, and are about 5.4% of the population, the inter-racial portion would be a whopping 95%! (I put "prefer" in scare quotes because it's probably a combination of personal preference and other factors that simply have them in contact with more

What this can't easily explain, and is therefore more interesting, is within-race differences; such as this fact:

The most dramatic gap in all the data exists between college educated black men and women... Black men are twice as likely as black women to have a spouse of a different race or ethnicity (24% vs. 12%).

This is quite interesting. There might still be interactions with the size of the available population (blacks are less likely to be college educated, and I have no idea if there is a gender gap here) but it would probably be more complicated to compute.

She wants to have a Hindu wedding; I want to make Christian vows

FWIW I know at least one Hindu/Jewish couple who just had both types of ceremony. Possibly this comes down to how strictly religious you are individually, since I definitely know several inter-religion marriages.

Most of the successful interracial relationships I’ve ever seen have always had a shared religious belief between them.

Possibly related: there are multiple memes like this that I've found on /r/PCM (another one involves a more modernly-dressed white man and hispanic woman but is basically identical).

What is an interracial marriage? Serious question.

Am I in an interracial marriage? I genuinely don't know. According to 23 and me I'm 100% Northern European genetically. My wife was born in Mexico, where her family has lived for generations, and only moved to the states as a teenager. She attended the same law school as me, and received a "Hispanic" scholarship I would not have been eligible for. Her workplace counts her as a "woman of color" for diversity reporting purposes. According to 23 and me, she's at least 75% European. She has dark hair, but her skin tone is indistinguishable from mine (both pale white).

I'm friends with a married couple consisting of a Korean man and a Taiwanese woman. Are they in an interracial marriage? They're considered the same "race" in the US but if they lived in Taiwan or Korea their marriage would be viewed as something like "interracial." Their backgrounds are quite culturally, linguistically, and genetically different.

I'm friends with a married couple consisting of a Gujrati Indian man and a European white woman. Are they in an interracial marriage? Their skin colors are quite different, but they are both of Indo-European ancestry and not much farther apart genetically than two random Europeans would be.

If Barack Obama is 50% African and 50% European, and if his wife is 80% African and 20% European, are they in an interracial marriage? If Barack Obama was instead 20% African and 80% European would it be an interracial marriage?

Edit: Remembered another example from my own life. I'm friends with a married couple consisting of a white (Northern European) man and a white woman of Sami (aka Laplander) ancestry. Are they in an interracial marriage? Visually they just look like two white people. But Sami do not have Indo-European ancestry, so this couple is more genetically distant than a couple where one partner is Indian and the other European.

In Texas your marriage would not be considered an interracial relationship, in the upper midwest it would be. Racial boundaries are culturally contingent. That doesn't make them not real; the difference between a white and black man in the USA or South Africa is very real and very relevant. But in no case is it based on a genetics test.

I don't believe this is a very serious question. Those are a lot of examples. Some are edge cases, others are not. None of them in any way change the fact that a Northern European and aboriginal Australians are very clearly different races. No one has any problem or issue recognizing an interracial marriage for the vast majority of cases. That might change if people mix more, but then you could, like you are doing here, make a more detailed analysis of racial admixture or make some other compromise based on the fact that the subjects in question are explicitly mixed race. In any case, as it stands this is not a credible issue. And for a lot of mixed people, considering, for instance, mulattos versus hapas, there are still very clear phenotypic differences.

Worst case scenario you get to ape the colloquial racial categorizations of a place like Brazil.

Those objections would only be relevant in a world much more mixed than this one. This argument isn't even relevant to race in particular. It's just a catch all universal 'boo' against any measurement done against anything that is not 100% cut and dry. You could just as well employ this sort of tactical nihilism against the concept of marriage.

Hispanic isn't useless as a category when compared with other categories. Even a simple distinction within the category into Mestizo's and Castizo's can resolve the entire issue. If, say, 80% of 'Hispanics' in the US are Mestizo or 'latino', then you can just assume that and take it into account when seeing a stat like this.

I don't understand why you think non-east Asian is a useless category. I can understand for both Hispanic and Asian, why one would want more clarification and finesse in general. But in the context of contrasting 'Asian' with the larger racial groups in the western world, such as white, the term functions just fine. I was not under the impression anyone was mistaking 'Asians' for whites, unlike the case with Castizo's.

For what it's worth I'd be willing to wager that most normies are far more sane when it comes to race and recognizing race in their own lives. That is, being able to tell that their marriage was interracial. The sort of autism that seeks to play word games of chess around definitions and categories is something generally reserved for the mental world of words and forms, rather than being based in an observation about the world. Though I am sure, such as with any self report data, that it has issues. But, again, that applies to all of it, for nigh any category of anything.

White isn't doing so great either after they let Sicilians and the Irish in.

No one ever considered the Irish anything but white. This doesn't belong in the conversation and you diminish your own presence in it by engaging in this sort of nonsense.

I think this goes back to the whole tangled mess that is race in the United States.

My personal feeling is that 'race' is an awful lot less significant for most purposes than culture, and typically serves as a loose proxy for it. For your example, if your wife grew up in the upper midwest and spoke only English, she'd probably consider herself 'white', and everyone around her would consider her 'white', even if she had an identical genetic admixture.

However, the State needs to categorize everything, and so you get slotted into the 'White' bucket, and she gets slotted into the 'Hispanic' one. So, to answer your question, it's an interracial marriage if the two partners check different demographic boxes on the standardized forms. :-)

It's also an interracial marriage if the two partners are very different ethnically. Say an ethnic Nigerian and an ethnic Norwegian. No one would consider the marriage anything other than interracial even if the two people checked the same box on a form.

Those are the same bucket. Hispanic isn't considered a race (anymore); most Hispanics are actually white.

Yes, Hispanic is an ethnic identity based on Spanish language and culture. 100% racially European people can also be Hispanic. Because Hispanic is not a race.

There is some point to be made about many people being mestizos. That is some mix Spanish and native. So not really white by some strict measure. The Hispanic ethnic identity, to the degree that it meaningfully exists at all, does not specify the presence or lack of native blood.

The statistics OP linked appear to consider "Hispanic" a race for purposes of measuring interracial marriage rates.

I agree with your line of questioning. I think the goalpost may have been moved a bunch of times, to imply that interracial marriage isn't really happening. I know many boomer couples where a Catholic married a Jew. That was considered taboo back then, and nowadays no one would blink at it. The arc of the universe has strongly bent towards more people marrying outside of their group, by means of those groups becoming less meaningful as a dividing line.

No one blinking at it doesn't change the fact that it's interracial. The 'arc of the universe' also has a strong bent towards more people coming from India, Africa and China. Regardless of how many people from there intermarry in the west, those groups are not becoming less meaningful as a dividing line considering they are the largest and fastest growing populations on earth.

he arc of the universe has strongly bent towards more people marrying outside of their group, by means of those groups becoming less meaningful as a dividing line.

And others becoming more.

https://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/9/23/6828715/heres-how-many-republicans-dont-want-their-kids-to-marry-democrats

I would posit that the stigma is conserved, merely moved around depending on which way the culture war is pointing. There is always an ingroup and an outgroup, and nobody wants their kids to end up in the outgroup. Makes family gatherings tense, strains relationships etc. etc.

There's really only one rigorous approach to all of this: as long as you're married to a homo sapiens sapiens, you're not in an interracial marriage. Everything else is nitpicking

What makes homo sapiens sapiens more rigorous than racial categorization?

It's a lot less blurry at the edges, if nothing else -- at least ever since Neanderthals passed to the greater number. There's still ambiguity around the beginning and the end of life (e.g. fetuses, vegetative states) but there isn't much doubt on whether something is Homo sapiens or not.

I don't see how it's less blurry. With every new fossil that comes to light you have a repeat of what constitutes a homo sapiens debate. Regardless of that I don't see how that relates to rigor. It's not for a lack of rigor that this happens, it's because of a lack of information.

I don't see how it's less blurry.

Diachronically, it's not, as you point out, and arguably even worse; but at the present time, all evolutionary edge cases are extinct. Just imagine the kind of culture-war discourse there would be about Homo erectus personhood, but we don't have to care about it, because they're all long gone. You're correct that it's not much an issue of rigor, but a pragmatic one.

Because race is an extremely noisy and inconsistent proxy for other things we might care about like culture and genetics. As I asked above, I'm genuinely unclear what OP means by "race" and what qualifies as interracial. This is because the concept is so un-rigorous.

It's like if I decided to separate all dogs into four "races" of dogs as follows:

Race 1: yellow labs

Race 2: black labs

Race 3: dogs with short tails

Race 4: all other dogs

Technically this is a valid way to classify dogs into 4 categories. And these categories are undeniably correlated with things like genetics. But the correlation is tenuous and arbitrary to the point that this classification schema has minimal utility.

Racial classifications aren't arbitrary. Even the folk classifications corresponded roughly to now teased out classification derived from DNA.

In 19th century, based on appearance alone, people theorised that native Americans and Asians shared ancestors.

Paleogenetics showed that to be true.

As to racial differences, David Reich who led the large-scale paleogenetic efforts wrote a book about the topic.

If you don't want to read an entire book, here's a blogpost by Jerry Coyne

https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2018/04/01/geneticist-david-reich-responds-to-critics-of-his-views-on-race/

I can make up a nonsensical version of speciation too. That doesn't mean its relevant to anything. The reason I asked the question is that speciation as a categorization method is no more noisy or inconsistent than racial categorization in humans since racial categorization is just speciation by another name. In fact, speciation in humans is less noisy and more consistent since we have studied the humans a lot more than most other animals.

The only thing here that is unrigorous is your understanding of the concept of race.

I've been in a happy interracial and cross-cultural marriage for 10 years (my wife is Filipino), and we have two interracial kids. AMA, I guess?

One thing I will note is that I have a deep-seated xenophilia; a huge proportion of my relationships have been with women of different nationalities and races. In general I find it makes things a lot more interesting. That said, I think class differences trump cultural differences a lot of the time, and the vast majority of my relationships have been with women who went to elite colleges and/or had advanced degrees (and often came from money). I would feel far more uncomfortable dating someone outside my class than outside my race. (Also, for some bizarre reason, three quarters or more of my exes have been vegetarian; I'm vegetarian myself, but it's not something I've consciously selected for).

I'd note that for my brother and sister, it seems the other way round; both are in long-term relationships with partners of different class backgrounds, but neither of them have ever had a non-white partner. I don't know that it's a conscious thing on their part, but they also seem relatively disinterested in other countries and cultures. For example, I've lived abroad for a majority of my adult life, and speak five languages, while for them, "abroad" is a place you go on holiday.

In my case, I think my xenophilia is deep-seated, maybe even innate; I remember even as a young kid being fascinated by other countries and cultures (e.g., at 10 years old I was reading books on Japanese etiquette!). It wouldn't surprise me if it's a kind of "social polymorphism" related to neophilia and neophobia; perhaps there's some early life trigger that pushes you one way or the other.

Also in a long term “interracial” relationship and this rings extremely true. I am Turkish (we are sort of a blank spot in American race taxonomy but I am quite Mediterranean personally) and my partner is Latin American. I have dated quite widely across nationalities in the past and typically I felt very comfortable with people of similar social levels no matter where they are from and pretty uncomfortable with Turkish women of much lower or higher social classes. The world is way too homogenised. Turns out we even watched set of cartoons growing up with my partner, two continents away from each other. The chances are no matter where you go, you will find someone who has a similar background to you and it will not correlate with skin color or skull shape too much.

Just because you elaborate more here, I want to riff on my post below.

I'd argue you selecting by class, education and wealth filters for compatible genes to mix just as much, if not perhaps even better, that people who proxy by race. Arguably, it's probably only a reliable option for people who have the capacity, or are born into, a higher class.

I'm going to come at this from the counter factual.

I know several couples with either extremely mixed genes or his/hers/ours children. The problems of raising a child significantly different from you genetically is subtle and profound.

Basically, if you find yourself in that situation, all your intuitions about how to treat that child tactically in any given parenting situation are constantly wrong. In my own family, and other families I know without this problem, parenting isn't necessarily easy, it never is. But the key to solving any problem lies in either your own, or your partner's memories of childhood. How one of you or the other reacted to things, and the sorts of parenting that worked, or didn't, on you. And if you are lucky, the venn diagram of you and your spouses experiences has a good amount of overlap. Because otherwise, you find yourself not just butting heads with your child, but with each other about what is "normal" or not, and what to do about it. In a heavily mixed marriage, or step/adopted situation, you don't have this.

It's a god damned nightmare for those parents. They begin developing these ironclad notions that something is "wrong" with their child because they have so much trouble relating to their nature. It's nonstop conflict and friction between parent and parent and child.

There is so much ancient, primordial wetware tied up in how we pass on our genes. I'm not remotely shocked the majority of people, regardless of social programming, have an innate desire to avoid the situations I described above. Maybe, just maybe, their genes notice.

I dispute all of this. There is no factual basis for these claims.

But the key to solving any problem lies in either your own, or your partner's memories of childhood. How one of you or the other reacted to things, and the sorts of parenting that worked, or didn't, on you.

I'm a father and that's not how parenting works.

My mother says that the lessons she learned from raising me did not apply to my younger brother. Different kids are different. Remembering what worked in your own childhood is not relevant.

It's a god damned nightmare for those parents. They begin developing these ironclad notions that something is "wrong" with their child because they have so much trouble relating to their nature.

This is wild exaggeration or you really misinterpret what is going on. I'm not trying to go hard on you: but this is plain falsehood.

It's a god damned nightmare for those parents. They begin developing these ironclad notions that something is "wrong" with their child because they have so much trouble relating to their nature. It's nonstop conflict and friction between parent and parent and child.

I'm a bit puzzled by your comment. I'm in an international and interracial marriage (my wife is Filipino) and have two mixed-race children, and I genuinely have no clue what you mean about "relating to their nature". Maybe an example would help?

There are obviously some cultural differences between my wife and these sometimes create interesting points of disagreement, but they're utterly dwarfed by the massive similarities in our values and life goals; I have far more of substance in common with her than any other woman I've met (e.g., we are both highly educated, nerdy, extremely open to new experiences, liberal with some a smattering of conservative/reactionary attitudes, education-focused, extremely practical in matters of love and romance, etc....).

A part of me is nervous about the off chance someone reads the examples I'm about to give and goes "Heeeeeeey, what a minute!" So I'm going to scramble and anonymize them to some degree. Hope you don't mind. Take them as illustrations instead of data points if that helps.

There is a guy who as a kid, had a stepdad constantly bitter towards him, because he was overachieving anything his step dad ever did in school. The step dad was utterly incapable of helping with homework after grade 9. The step dad vastly preferred his own children, and treated his stepson suspiciously because he was paranoid the stepson was trying to "trick" him.

I know a couple that is half black. Their kid has, to one parent, profound behavior issues that are totally "normal" to the other parent. Issues that are bad enough that he can't be in regular, achieving, upper middle class suburban school. Would fit right in at a DC school though. It's.... not a good situation. For anyone.

I know another couple where both parents are ostensibly very extroverted. However there is another kid from another relationship that is very introverted, because that partner was very introverted. Once again, it causes constant problems in the family, because not a one of them understands the needs of introverts, and the one that did is out of the picture. Every time we see them, that poor kid is so fucking depressed.

Sounds like things are working out great for you. Congrats. I don't really have a "Greater Theory of Why Racing Mixing Always Results in Broken Families". I've just seen enough to have a confident guess as to why not a lot of people jump at the chance.

I’m in a IR marriage with an East Asian. As I explained to my parents, the specifics here matter. It sounds like the examples you gave are specific to certain pairings. And the deficiencies relate to what are clear negative issues that are likely passed on genetically.

I’m sure there are pitfalls to white asian pairings as well. If my daughter is stereotypically Asian, I don’t personally see any obvious problems there. I think I prefer my wife’s attitudes to the generic western white woman who will put their daughter on hormone birth control at 13 and not think twice.

The obvious pitfalls with Asian men is trickier. If my son were stereotypically Asian it would certainly be a bit alien to me but I think the race specific stereotypes are not inherently negative. Anime and riced our cars may not be high status but neither are they serious negatives. My childhood experience wasn’t alpha jock so it probably not worlds apart either. Though there is a high potential for some disappointment here.

Perhaps I’m am blind to issues other would see as profoundly negative. That’s entirely possible. This was all considered when I married my wife and the altertive white women in my social circle all had significantly more negative issues. Not everyone can have it all.

This is one of those areas where anecdotes can help illuminate statistics. My understanding (from a quick search) is that not all interracial couples are the same with regards to marital stability. I've seen lots of contradictory data, but it seems fairly clear that White/Black marriages are less stable than White/White (although possibly more stable than Black/Black), and White/Asian ones are about comparable (although far less stable than Asian/Asian)

If that's accurate, it's not so much that interracial marriages are inherently unstable, and more that they tend to default to the least stable demographic of the pairing... which would intuitively make sense. It takes two to make a marriage work, but only one to end it.

I have some personal experience in the area (as do many on this forum, I suspect). I'm happily interracially married (wife is Asian) for 18 years, with two kids. Interestingly enough, much of the initial opposition from my wife's family revolved around "He's white, and white people will divorce you". The familial opposition to interracial marriages faded pretty quickly after we got married; her brother married a white woman, and she has several female cousins who married white men. All of those marriages have been successful so far, but I'm sure that if any of them fail, the stereotype will return full force.

I know a couple that is half black. Their kid has, to one parent, profound behavior issues that are totally "normal" to the other parent.

To be fair this sounds like a culture thing more than a race thing per se. My wife is black, but if we were to have children neither of us would accept it if our kids started acting stereotypically black (which is what it sounds like you mean?). But that's because we both have similar cultural values about how to behave properly.

To be fair this sounds like a culture thing more than a race thing per se.

Well that is the $64,000 question, isn't it? Is it more of a culture thing than a race thing? We know intelligence is heritable, along with alcoholism, propensity for various mental illnesses or personality disorders, religiosity, and many, many more dimensions of temperament. You take it for granted that either these things are uncorrelated from race, or "culture" which is mutable. I'm unconvinced.

My pure Ulster Scots nephews have significantly more rambunctious and violent behavior than either my Ulster-Scots/Anglo-Saxon kids (with my first wife) or my Ulster Scots/Black kid (with my second wife) which is anecdotal, but illustrative.

We Ulster Scots are renowned for our problematic behaviors ( Borderers et al) but we are white. Given how pale we often are we may be some of the whitest whites in fact. Is that behavior genetic or cultural?

Would a more (historically) masculine cultured (if I can put it that way) Ulster Scots parent be ok with the more rambunctious behavior from the mixed kid (if this is what your example was saying?) than a WASP parent even though they are both from the same (white) race? Which of them is correct in any case?

Is what you are seeing a racial dynamic or the result of more (historically) feminine behaviors and standards having become more common in middle class white American culture? My kids getting in a fist fight at school in the US is seen differently depending on if we are talking Blue Tribe or Red Tribe parents, let alone my Northern Irish relatives who would certainly see it as part of growing up, for boys at least.

I was in fights consistently in school, and it only escalated to parents getting involved very very rarely. The biggest differences I see across how kids are treated nowadays in my experiences in Northern Ireland/England and the US are not race based but generation and class based. My older Red Tribe neighbors are much closer culturally in that regard than the younger Blue Tribe academics I work with in the city, even though they are both primarily white.

Which makes me think that either you have to look at racial sub-groups or it is a matter of culture and upbringing, with Blue vs Red in the US sense being significant and the fact that Black culture (broadly) shares a lot of behavior in an honor/traditional masculinity sense with Red rather than Blue. My uncle praises his kids for taking a swing at another kid who insulted them and my dad did the same for me, despite the fact he was a teacher, but my Blue Tribe co-worker had to have a stern conversation with his son about words not being an excuse for violence and took them to a therapist for their anger issues when he did the same.

African Americans are a pretty heterogeneous group, genetically- a mix of within-Hajnal Europeans, west Africans, East Africans, Irish, etc- and so my priors would be that behavioral differences which aren’t rooted in well-known genetic differences(like the IQ difference’s likely effects on time preference) are probably mutable through culture.

I assume that’s what your talking about, specifically, due to the context.

My understanding is that "heritable" refers to both traits which are innate as well as those which are acquired from one's environment. So I don't think that your argument need be opposed to my observation.

More generally I think the HBD hypothesis is nonsense, so yeah of course I believe that this sort of thing isn't genetic. But even if we take it as a given the the HBD argument is true, surely you would not try to argue that there are literally zero behaviors which are learned rather than innate. So really we are talking about the degree to which race is a factor versus culture, not whether culture is a factor at all.

My understanding is that "heritable" refers to both traits which are innate as well as those which are acquired from one's environment.

In biology, "heritable" specifically refers to differences due to genetic variation. Confusing name choice, right?

Nah that actually makes sense. The confusing part is that (again, to my understanding) there are many people using "heritable" to mean something other than that.

More comments

Interesting examples! I'm happy to grant that (i) there are almost certainly important dimensions of variance X that are largely genetic, such that (ii) if you have children someone whose value of X is very different from yours, your children will in turn be very different from you, and (iii) this could potentially create parenting challenges.

The one relatively clear case here would be intelligence: I think if I married someone significantly less intelligent than myself, our children would be less intelligent, and speaking as someone whose identity is very much intellectually defined, that could be an issue. There are perhaps other traits like conscientiousness that could matter here.

I guess my main outstanding query is why think race-mixing correlates with cases like this? Maybe it's true in a very general ceteris paribus sense, but I'd imagine most race-mixing fits the usual patterns of assortative mating. For example, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, I'm sure, have far more X-type traits in common than Mark Zuckerberg and a random white American woman, e.g., intelligence, nerdiness, and conscientiousness (plus a host of other deep psychometric traits that we don't have convenient names for).

I'd argue this position would be appropriate for upper classes. There are rather limited ways to achieve high status. If you meet someone as high status as you, it's prefiltered out a lot of people, along with whatever temperament their genes may have imposed on them which blocked their way.

But imagine you are lower class, and the varied stereotypes about specific ethnicities specific lower class dysfunctions. To take a historic example, ancient civilizations like China and Rome regularly exploited steppe people's susceptibility to alcohol. At the bottom, or even the middle, race might serve as a better proxy for coarsely compatible genes than achievement. Because there isn't a lot of achievement to judge by.

At the bottom, or even the middle, race might serve as a better proxy for coarsely compatible genes than achievement. Because there isn't a lot of achievement to judge by.

The specific examples you gave reminded me of some of the (all white) parents on my mother's (lower middle class) side of the family.

I think there is much to be said about how the loss of "good" non-college jobs (especially in certain regions) in the US has led to a blending of the middle, working and underclass.

My cousins on that side had kids with people who, on paper, were very similar to them in terms of finances, education, race, religion, etc (often even meeting in their shared workplaces). But, if you went a generation or two back, the class differences would be apparent. And while they'd all fall under "red tribe", looking closer there would be clear cultural differences as well.

Obviously that still leaves open the % split between nature and nurture in terms of behavior, my point being the difficulty in distinguishing based on achievement may continue to become more difficult as automation marches on and class divides widen at the top and narrow near the middle and bottom.

While definitely seeing an increase, White people have had the lowest growth of interracial marriages in the last forty years.

As most people in the US are white, this is going to be true by simple statistics. (It's a little more complicated statistics for "growth", but ultimately the same conclusion.)

I can be accepting of other people's preferences while not sharing that preference myself. I publicly accept the existence of pistachio flavored ice cream, even if I do not like it myself. Maybe only a few people do, I do not know. But I have no reason to disapprove of it, because I do not think there is anything fundamentally wrong with pistachio flavored ice cream. I just don't like the taste.

If I find myself unattracted to people of substantially difference race, that doesn't mean I find anything wrong with the concept. As long as two people are attracted to each other, I don't see the issue. I'm just not personally attracted to certain people, for reasons that include physical appearance.

Something that surprised and amused me slightly was my secular progressive parents apprehension of me dating a mostly secular Jewish girl, visually and culturally largely indistinguishable from other Swedes.

I can't imagine a much closer "interracial" marriage and yet they got nervous. I wonder what would have happened had I married someone from an actually different race, culture and religion like one of my best friends that married a Japanese woman.

I think a big reason for this apprehension is when you get married, you blend families to a significant degree. The parents are apprehensive about how they are going to get along with a group so culturally different than themselves.

Thoughts. I'll note first, to give my standpoint and biases, that my marriage of years could be classified as interracial in some cases but not in others. I look like an SS corporal out of central casting, my wife is Persian and even paler than me. On the census, some Persians pick white and some pick Asian and some pick other, normally depending on what they think is most advantageous to them personally. In public we read as a white couple, some of my bigoted relatives say we're not, some of her uncles say it's all Aryans.

  1. The use of categories like "Hispanic" and "Asian" probably introduces a lot of noise into the data. If David Ortiz marries Meghan Markle, in what ways is that counted as interracial in the stats? Is it a Black man marrying a Black woman, an Hispanic man marrying a Black woman, a Black man marrying a (mostly) white woman, a Hispanic man marrying a white woman? If I saw them in the street without context, I'd call that a white woman and a Black dude. But God forbid we start talking about the same scenario with Sammy Sosa. Hispanic really just means your family lived south of the Rio Grande at any point in history, I've dated Mexican girls who were Lebanese and Mexican girls who were Polish and Mexican girls who were, well, native Mexicans. Some of them were happy to bring me home to their parents but wouldn't dream of bringing a "fellow-Hispanic" with darker skin home. I kind of want the data by where you fall on a foundation pallet. Or with Asians other than East Asians and all Hispanics eliminated from the data, as they confuse things with vague categorization.

  2. Approving of it if you want to do it doesn't mean you think it's a good idea. People might approve in concept, but may not like it themselves or may see it mostly in reality play out poorly. I approve of people being allowed to listen to Polka, that doesn't mean I like Polka. That doesn't mean I think polka has a positive social effect (what with all the drinking). I'm in a favor of a great many things being allowed or existing that I don't want to do, that doesn't make me a hypocrite.

  3. Fetishization is probably a big part of the story. People of all races reduce people of other races to flat cheap characters in romance novels or pornography, and imagine dating that flat character when you ask them about interracial dating. They don't imagine dating real life people of other races, what with the friction and the reality and all. A lot of girls I've dated (Asians, Hispanics, Black girls) had this fantasy of me as this super preppy white guy with a sweater wrapped around my shoulders*; and hey at 19 I'll play the country club minstrel show if it got me laid. But do I want to keep that up? Do they like me as I really exist? Idk.

  4. Local color: One of the four or five richest families I know, practically speaking local feudal lords. One of their sons married a black girl he met in college, gorgeous girl and a really sharp CPA. One of my old PA dutch uncles asks me what I think of it, he knew his grandfather and he wouldn't have stood for it. I said Uncle, you got it all wrong. That kid is Ticketed for the governor's office in 2056. The halfrican scion of a wealthy Republican farming family? The idpol folks would vote for him right now in the cradle! Teach him Spanish, he's golden. This is ethnogenesis in action: URM status has advantages, people are going to identify into it if practical, marry into it if necessary. Look at Bill DiBlasio, he ran on his Black gay wife and Black son, and won despite total incompetence. Idk how that fits in but it feels relevant.

  5. Cross cutting versus coinciding identities. How many interracial marriages are also cross-class marriages? How many marriages at all? Because race often coincides with economic class, it will show up in the raw stats as racial bias, but it's really class bias. They have no objection in theory to meeting a nice girl from their alma mater who happens to be Black, in reality there are very few Black girls who meet that description.

P.S. Shouldn't a Christian reactionary refuse any woman's advances in a bar? Story sort of confused me on that point, race seems irrelevant to whether you're going home with a rando if you're a Christian.

*The weirdest wasn't even a girl I dated, I had a Nigerian study partner in Econ who, in conversation, starts telling me that she wants to marry a blonde guy with blue eyes so she'll have children with pretty eyes and pretty hair, staring at me the whole time. I got just a hint there of what Asians must feel whenever they meet an anime fan.

People of all races reduce people of other races to flat cheap characters in romance novels or pornography, and imagine dating that flat character when you ask them about interracial dating.

I think its worth making explicit that Asian women are also the thinnest grouping in 'racial group broadly defined'.

Asian women are vastly less obese than the non-asian population of the United States.

There is this idea that white people (and weebs in particular) think of Asian women as this old practically Victorian Era submissive 3 steps behind the husband trope but I contend that that's not the primary appeal of Asian women to White guys.

In an American context Asian women are far more likely to be

  • Japanese, Korean, or Chinese descendent

  • roughly speaking are thinner than white women by 30 pounds, hispanics by 40 pounds, and black women by 50 pounds

  • more likely to be intelligent as well as college educated

  • less likely to come from a family that's undergoing social breakdown from fentanyl/drugs.

  • match speech patterns/accent to the local White population if they grew up in a predominately White area instead of adopting a distinct dialect of opposition.

If the Hispanic population in the US was small, distinct, and had the same level of thinness and educational attainment I maintain that Hispanic girls would have a similar highly desired status as Asian women today. Imagine a situation where the US was 4% Chilean, Argentinian, and Uruguayan with the same traits as expressed above. I guarantee if you talked to a random white guy he'd go 'oh yeah. hispanics are cute. I love hispanic girls'. But hes just using physical features as shorthand in order to estimate an what is overwhelmingly an expression of body type & compatibility. It's not a desire to obtain a lifestyle of tropes from old media and/or pornography about what "foreign women" are like.

That would all make sense if all the aspects of fetishizing Asian women that you glide glibly past, and the fetishization off Asian women, didn't predate the broad American obesity epidemic and the high educational attainments of Asian women by several decades.

I also simply refuse to pretend that there isn't a huge childhood anime obsession to adult Asian fetish pipeline. Your materialism is nothing to observed reality.

Anyway the much more likely material element is that taking white Americans as your base group, Asian features tend to read as more feminine. Hence the inverse effect on Asian men, who would otherwise benefit from most of those elements.

But my point had less to do with Asians in particular and more to do with all races in all contexts. Foreign girls fetishize white American boys, suburban white girls fetishize black men and black men fetishize them right back, Indian exchange students fetishize hooking up with white classmates before their in-caste marriage kicks in, so on and so forth. It goes on between every racial group combination you will ever see, and I've seen most of them already. I'm sure someone out there has a fantasy involving aboriginal Australians for whatever godawful reason.

ETA: which to get back to OP, might lead to a gap between theoretically approving of an interracial relationship and actually engaging in an interracial marriage. When you ask me if I'd marry/date/fuck an X I picture an attractive X, not an ugly X. If attractive Xs are thin on the ground then I will not actually marry one, while still being totally willing to.

This is ethnogenesis in action: URM status has advantages, people are going to identify into it if practical, marry into it if necessary.

"Ethnogenesis" created entirely by government discrimination against an ethnic group, incentivizing its members to marry out of it, is not a good thing.

As Jeff Foxworthy used to say, Booing it doesn't make it less true.

P.S. Shouldn't a Christian reactionary refuse any woman's advances in a bar? Story sort of confused me on that point, race seems irrelevant to whether you're going home with a rando if you're a Christian.

This part confused me quite a bit, too. I mean, let's add to it that Christian sects which condemn interracial marriage almost universally take a hard line on fornication.

some of her uncles say it's all Aryans

To be fair, she's an actual real life Aryan. Not so much white guys like you and I though.

Man, I just always write down prefer not to say anyway. No government or pollster should have that information, and who knows anyway? My recent ancestors all spoke German or Magyar, but the last name is Turkish, so odds are there's some steppe-slaveholder somewhere in there?

*The weirdest wasn't even a girl I dated, I had a Nigerian study partner in Econ who, in conversation, starts telling me that she wants to marry a blonde guy with blue eyes so she'll have children with pretty eyes and pretty hair, staring at me the whole time. I got just a hint there of what Asians must feel whenever they meet an anime fan.

Have you noticed that most people don't have a particularly strong grasp of genetics? I'm sorry, Nigerian woman, no matter who you marry, your kids will have brown eyes and dark hair.

Now, grandkids are another story, but nobody is going to be thinking that far in advance.

Eh, I think the hair thing is more complicated. Her kids will likely end up moving down the curl spectrum, from a solid 4 to a 3b or even a 2c. Which is a significant "improvement" on balance, if that's what you're looking for.

Though I suspect the various ways that Black women in American media make themselves up confuses the issue considerably for a Black woman from abroad.

Also see the grandmother in the painting "Redemption of Ham"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanqueamiento?wprov=sfti1

Though I suspect the various ways that Black women in American media make themselves up confuses the issue considerably for a Black woman from abroad.

There's, um, interracial porn where the actors' skin tones are close enough that you wouldn't be able to tell from a close-up shot that it's not just regular porn. I doubt it's full-body make-up. American Blacks are on average significantly lighter than West Africans.

But yeah, getting blue-eyed first-generation descendants would be quite improbable.

I was thinking more of hair relaxing, wigs, extensions, contacts. All fairly common among Black celebrities (of the non porn variety). I can personally say that prior to dating a girl who would leave my Ford explorer smelling like a nice ethnic hair care product, I did not realize how much effort American Black women put into making their hair look vaguely straight. So one might reasonably form unrealistic expectations for what a little mixing will do for hair, and to a lesser extent eyes and skin, from that exposure and lack of context.

We came up with a couple conclusions

You forgot 3: Cultural differences. For example, the highest rated TV shows differ substantially by race. It is likely that often, single people of different races are less likely to have things in common.

Re: #1, intersection between people of different groups, note that intermarriage rates differ substantially by metro area, ranging among newlywed whites in 2011-2015 from 34% in Honolulu and 28% in Miami to 4% in Portland, ME. And note that the data on US-born Asian American women is consistent with theory #1, given that 67% of 18-24 year old Asian Americans are enrolled in college, where they are going to be meeting a lot of non-Asian peers. And see PS below.

Re: #2, I would caution against drawing inferences from your own experience; you describe yourself as a reactionary, so you are an outlier in at least some respects, and your upbringing probably had something to do with that, so your mother might not be representative. Also, note that the poll on attitudes re intermarriage merely asks "do you approve or disapprove of marriage between Black people and White people," and you yourself have not said that you disapprove of that in principle, but only that your personal preference is to marry within your race.

PS: I think that data re Asian American women might be a bit off. This study says that 53% of second-generation Asian American women 1994-2004 married whites, but among third-generation Asian American women, it was 36.5%, but that more recently (2005-2015) the numbers are lower: 36% for 2nd gen and 29% for 3rd gen. (For Asian American men 2005-2015, the numbers are 21.6 and 22.4).

Finally, it is possible that B/W intermarriage rates are relatively low because African Americans are reluctant to marry whites, rather than vice-versa.

You forgot 3: Cultural differences. For example, the highest rated TV shows differ substantially by race. It is likely that often, single people of different races are less likely to have things in common.

To me that mostly looks like "Whites, Asians and Hispanics prefer the same shows with a slightly different ordering, Blacks have their own taste".

I think your explanation for low rates of white intermarriage is wrong. We should expect the majority racial group to intermarry less, absent any racial preference.

As a toy example, let's say a population is 99% French and 1% Chinese, and everyone has a strong preference for intermarriage. We should expect 100% of Chinese to intermarry, and only 1% of French to intermarry. A higher number for French intermarriage isn't mathematically possible, there aren't enough Chinese spouses to go around.

I'd also be interested to see how the smoothing out of culture works, though and as immigrant populations get deeper roots

Like the culture shock from marrying a 4th-generation American who happens to be genetically from Southeast Asia is probably less than the culture shock of marrying a European who's fresh off the boat from Russia.

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