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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29300 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.

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.

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.

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