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