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