Interracial marriage hits new high - 1 in 12
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WASHINGTON - Interracial marriages in the U.S. have climbed to 4.8 million — a record 1 in 12 — as a steady flow of new Asian and Hispanic immigrants expands the pool of prospective spouses. Blacks are now substantially more likely than before to marry whites.
A Pew Research Center study, released Thursday, details a diversifying America where interracial unions and the mixed-race children they produce are challenging typical notions of race.
"The rise in interracial marriage indicates that race relations have improved over the past quarter century," said Daniel Lichter, a sociology professor at Cornell University. "Mixed-race children have blurred America's color line. They often interact with others on either side of the racial divide and frequently serve as brokers between friends and family members of different racial backgrounds," he said. "But America still has a long way to go."
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The figures come from previous censuses as well as the 2008-2010 American Community Survey, which surveys 3 million households annually. The figures for "white" refer to those whites who are not of Hispanic ethnicity. For purposes of defining interracial marriages, Hispanic is counted as a race by many in the demographic field.
The study finds that 8.4 percent of all current U.S. marriages are interracial, up from 3.2 percent in 1980. While Hispanics and Asians remained the most likely, as in previous decades, to marry someone of a different race, the biggest jump in share since 2008 occurred among blacks, who historically have been the most segregated.
States in the West where Asian and Hispanic immigrants are more numerous, including Hawaii, Nevada, New Mexico and California, were among the most likely to have couples who "marry out" — more than 1 in 5. The West was followed by the South, Northeast and Midwest. By state, mostly white Vermont had the lowest rate of intermarriage, at 4 percent.
In all, more than 15 percent of new marriages in 2010 were interracial.
The numbers also coincide with Pew survey data showing greater public acceptance of mixed marriage, coming nearly half a century after the Supreme Court in 1967 barred race-based restrictions on marriage. (In 2000, Alabama became the last state to lift its unenforceable ban on interracial marriages.) About 83 percent of Americans say it is "all right for blacks and whites to date each other," up from 48 percent in 1987. As a whole, about 63 percent of those surveyed say it "would be fine" if a family member were to marry outside their own race.
Minorities, young adults, the higher educated and those living in Western or Northeast states were more likely to say mixed marriages are a change for the better for society. The figure was 61 percent for 18- to 29-year-olds, for instance, compared to 28 percent for those 65 and older.
Due to increasing interracial marriages, multiracial Americans are a small but fast-growing demographic group, making up about 9 million, or 8 percent of the minority population. Together with blacks, Hispanics and Asians, the Census Bureau estimates they collectively will represent a majority of the U.S. population by mid-century.
"Race is a social construct; race isn't real," said Jonathan Brent, 28. The son of a white father and Japanese-American mother, Brent helped organize multiracial groups in southern California and believes his background helps him understand situations from different perspectives.
Brent, now a lawyer in Charlottesville, Va., says at varying points in his life he has identified with being white, Japanese and more recently as someone of mixed ethnic background. He doesn't feel constrained with whom he socially interacts or dates.
"Race is becoming a personal thing. It is what I feel like I am," he said.
According to the Pew report, more than 25 percent of Hispanics and Asians who married in 2010 had a spouse of a different race. That's compared to 17.1 percent of blacks and 9.4 percent of whites. Of the 275,500 new interracial marriages in 2010, 43 percent were white-Hispanic couples, 14.4 percent were white-Asian, 11.9 percent were white-black, and the remainder were other combinations.
Still, the share of Asians who intermarried has actually declined recently — from 30.5 percent in 2008 to 27.7 percent in 2010. In contrast, blacks who married outside their race increased in share from 15.5 percent to 17.1 percent, due in part to a rising black middle class that has more interaction with other races.
Intermarriage among whites rose in share slightly, while among Hispanics the rate was flat, at roughly 25.7 percent.
"In the past century, intermarriage has evolved from being illegal, to be a taboo and then to be merely unusual. And with each passing year, it becomes less unusual," said Paul Taylor, director of Pew's Social & Demographic Trends project. "That says a lot about the state of race relations. Behaviors have changed and attitudes have changed."
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African-Americans.You can call me racist if you so wish but I will disagree with you for I do not hate blacks.
Agreed. The more people realize this (and look at the DNA studies) they more they will learn humans are 99.9999% the same. Our DNA is interchangeable. Period.
Hopefull prejudiced, science-denying jerks will wake up and smell the coffee.
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Sounds good but not quite true. The old assumption that the DNA of any two persons, regardless of race, is 99.9% identical has been proven to be false. More complete studies of the genomes have revealed that the differences can be as high as 12%.
For far too long it has been socially improper (and even offensive) to speak of valid scientific findings that clearly indicate differences in racial characteristics that can be rooted in genetic structures. The research found in "Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability" by the University of Western Ontario reports, "The Worldwide Pattern of IQ Scores. East Asians average higher on IQ tests than Whites, both in the U. S. and in Asia, even though IQ tests were developed for use in the Euro-American culture. Around the world, the average IQ for East Asians centers around 106; for Whites, about 100; and for Blacks about 85 in the U.S. and 70 in sub-Saharan Africa." It confirms its findings with the explanation, "Race differences show up by 3 years of age, even after matching on maternal education and other variables, therefore they cannot be due to poor education since this has not yet begun to exert an effect."
The utopian idea of creating a single race through inter-marriage does not come without consequences. If we subscribe to the idea that 99% justifies massive racial mixtures, then we must remember that the chimpanzee also has 99% of our DNA.
Other than birth defects such as Fragile X, Down's Syndrom, some forms of Autism and Phenylketonuria there is very little in the way of genetic influences in the determination of intelligence. It is revisionist thinking to believe otherwise.
Over and over again, studies have verified the poor co-relation between heriditary and I.Q. I.Q. itself is not all that great an indicator of intelligence in the first place and virtually all the differences in I.Q. across cultural and racial lines can be explained by the "cultural binding" of the test itself and the amount of intellectual stimulation the individual recieves in early childhood.
I'm not going to bother to cite references only to say that the Western Ontario Study; Murry and Herrenstein's controversial chapter 13 of their "Bell Shaped Curve" and Dr. William Shockley's tragic attempts to paint blacks (in particular) and other non whites as genetically inferior have been shown by much other research both before and afterward, to be flawed - either in the data collected, the data massaged, the statistical analysis, or the preconcieved bias of the investigators. The conclusions are largely false.
The answer, therefore, to the question Dr. Jensen asked in the first paragraph is an unqualified "yes".
Hopefull prejudiced, science-denying jerks will wake up and smell the coffee.