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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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