JUST
three decades ago, Thurgood Marshall was only months away from
appointment to the Supreme Court when he suffered an indignity that
today seems not just outrageous but almost incomprehensible. He and
his wife had found their dream house in a Virginia suburb of
Washington, D.C., but could not lawfully live together in that state:
he was black and she was East Asian. Fortunately for the Marshalls, in
January 1967 the Supreme Court struck down the
anti-interracial-marriage laws in Virginia and 18 other states. And in
1967 these laws were not mere leftover scraps from an extinct era. Two
years before, at the crest of the civil-rights revolution, a Gallup
poll found that 72 per cent of Southern whites and 42 per cent of
Northern whites still wanted to ban interracial marriage.
Let's fast-forward to the present and another
black - Asian couple: retired Green Beret Lieutenant Colonel Eldrick
Woods Sr. and his Thai-born wife, Kultida. They are not hounded by the
police -- just by journalists desperate to write more adulatory
articles about how well they raised their son Tiger. The colossal
popularity of young Tiger Woods and the homage paid his parents are
remarkable evidence of white Americans' change in attitude toward what
they formerly denounced as ``miscegenation.'' In fact, Tiger's
famously mixed ancestry (besides being black and Thai, he's also
Chinese, white, and American Indian) is not merely tolerated by golf
fans. More than a few seem to envision Tiger as a shining symbol of
what America could become in a post-racial age.
Interracial marriage is growing steadily.
From the 1960 to the 1990 Census, white - East Asian married couples
increased almost tenfold, while black - white couples quadrupled. The
reasons are obvious: greater integration and the decline of white
racism. More subtly, interracial marriages are increasingly recognized
as epitomizing what our society values most in a marriage: the triumph
of true love over convenience and prudence. Nor is it surprising that
white - Asian marriages outnumber black - white marriages: the social
distance between whites and Asians is now far smaller than the
distance between blacks and whites. What's fascinating, however, is
that in recent years a startling number of nonwhites -- especially
Asian men and black women -- have become bitterly opposed to
intermarriage.
This is a painful topic to explore honestly,
so nobody does. Still, it's important because interracial marriages
are a leading indicator of what life will be like in the even more
diverse and integrated twenty-first century. Intermarriages show that
integration can churn up unexpected racial conflicts by spotlighting
enduring differences between the races.
For example, probably the most disastrous
mistake Marcia Clark made in prosecuting O. J. Simpson was to
complacently allow Johnny Cochran to pack the jury with black women.
As a feminist, Mrs. Clark smugly assumed that all female jurors would
identify with Nicole Simpson. She ignored pretrial research indicating
that black women tended to see poor Nicole as The Enemy, one of those
beautiful blondes who steal successful black men from their black
first wives, and deserve whatever they get.
The heart of the problem for Asian men and
black women is that intermarriage does not treat every sex/race
combination equally: on average, it has offered black men and Asian
women new opportunities for finding mates among whites, while exposing
Asian men and black women to new competition from whites. 
In the 1990
Census, 72 percent of black - white couples consisted of a black
husband and a white wife. In contrast, white - Asian pairs showed the
reverse: 72 percent consisted of a white husband and an Asian wife.
[For 2000 Census ratios, see my
2003 article "2000 Census: Interracial Marriage Gender Gap Remains
Large."]
Sexual relations outside of marriage are less
fettered by issues of family approval and long-term practicality, and
they appear to be even more skewed. The 1992 Sex in America
study of 3,432 people, as authoritative a work as any in a field where
reliable data are scarce, found that ten times more single white women
than single white men reported that their most recent sex partner was
black.
Few whites comprehend the growing impact on
minorities of these interracial husband - wife disparities. One reason
is that the effect on whites has been balanced. Although white women
hunting for husbands, for example, suffer more competition from Asian
women, they also enjoy increased access to black men. Further, the
weight of numbers dilutes the effect on whites. 
In 1990, 1.46 million
Asian women were married, compared to only 1.26 million Asian men.
This net drain of 0.20 million white husbands into marriages to Asian
women is too small to be noticed by the 75 million white women, except
in Los Angeles and a few other cities with large Asian populations and
high rates of intermarriage. Yet, this 0.20 million shortage of Asian
wives leaves a high proportion of frustrated Asian bachelors in its
wake.
Black women's resentment of intermarriage is
now a staple of daytime talk shows, hit movies like Waiting to
Exhale, and magazine articles. Black novelist Bebe Moore Campbell
described her and her tablemates' reactions upon seeing a black actor
enter a restaurant with a blonde: ``In unison, we moaned, we groaned,
we rolled our eyes heavenward . . . Then we all shook our heads as we
lamented for the 10,000th time the perfidy of black men, and cursed
trespassing white women who dared to 'take our men.''' Like most guys,
though, Asian men are reticent about admitting any frustrations in the
mating game. But anger over intermarriage is visible on Internet
on-line discussion groups for young Asians. The men, featuring an
even-greater-than-normal-for-the-Internet concentration of cranky
bachelors, accuse the women of racism for dating white guys. For
example, ``This [dating] disparity is a manifestation of a silent
conspiracy by the racist white society and self-hating Asian [nasty
word for ``women''] to effect the genocide of Asian Americans.'' The
women retort that the men are racist and sexist for getting sore about
it. All they can agree upon is that Media Stereotypes and/or Low
Self-Esteem must somehow be at fault.
LET'S
review other facts about intermarriage and how they violate
conventional sociological theories.
1. You would normally expect more black women
than black men to marry whites because far more black women are in
daily contact with whites. First, among blacks aged 20 - 39, there are
about 10 per cent more women than men alive. Another tenth of the
black men in these prime marrying years are literally locked out of
the marriage market by being locked up in jail, and maybe twice that
number are on probation or parole. So, there may be nearly 14 young
black women for every 10 young black men who are alive and unentangled
with the law. Further, black women are far more prevalent than black
men in universities (by 80 per cent in grad schools), in corporate
offices, and in other places where members of the bourgeoisie, black
or white, meet their mates.
Despite these opportunities to meet white
men, so many middle-class black women have trouble landing
satisfactory husbands that they have made Terry (Waiting to Exhale)
McMillan, author of novels specifically about and for them, into a
best-selling brand name. Probably the most popular romance advice
regularly offered to affluent black women of a certain age is to find
true love in the brawny arms of a younger black man. Both Miss
McMillan's 1996 best-seller How Stella Got Her Groove Back and
the most celebrated of all books by black women, Zora Neale Hurston's
1937 classic Their Eyes Were Watching God, are romance novels
about well-to-do older women and somewhat dangerous younger men. Of
course, as Miss Hurston herself later learned at age 49, when she
(briefly) married a 23-year-old gym coach, that seldom works out in
real life.
2. Much more practical-sounding advice would
be: Since there are so many unmarried Asian men and black women, they
should find solace for their loneliness by marrying each other. Yet,
when was the last time you saw an Asian man and a black woman
together? Black-man/Asian-woman couples are still quite unusual, but
Asian-man/black-woman pairings are incomparably more rare.
Similar patterns appear in other contexts:
3a. Within races: Black men tend to most
ardently pursue lighter-skinned, longer-haired black women (e.g.,
Spike Lee's School Daze). Yet black women today do not
generally prefer fairer men.
3b. In other countries: In Britain, 40 per
cent of black men are married to or living with a white woman, versus
only 21 per cent of black women married to or living with a white man.
3c. In art: Madame Butterfly, a
white-man/Asian-woman tragedy, has been packing them in for a century,
recently under the name Miss Saigon. The greatest
black-man/white-woman story, Othello, has been an endless hit
in both Shakespeare's and Verdi's versions. (To update Karl Marx's
dictum: Theater always repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as
opera, and finally as farce, as seen in that recent smash, O.J.,
The Moor of Brentwood.) Maybe Shakespeare did know a thing or two
about humanity: America's leading portrayer of Othello, James Earl
Jones, has twice fallen in love with and married the white actress
playing opposite him as Desdemona.
4. The civil-rights revolution left husband -
wife balances among interracial couples more unequal. Back in 1960
white husbands were seen in 50 per cent of black-white couples (versus
only 28 per cent in 1990), and in only 62 per cent of white - Asian
couples (versus 72 per cent). 
Why? Discrimination, against black men
and Asian women. In the Jim Crow South black men wishing to date white
women faced pressures ranging from raised eyebrows to lynch mobs. In
contrast, the relatively high proportion of Asian-man/white-woman
couples in 1960 was a holdover caused by anti-Asian immigration laws
that had prevented women, most notably Chinese women, from joining the
largely male pioneer immigrants. As late as 1930 Chinese-Americans
were 80 per cent male. So, the limited number of Chinese men who found
wives in the mid twentieth century included a relatively high fraction
marrying white women. In other words, as legal and social
discrimination have lessened, natural inequalities have asserted
themselves.
5. Keeping black men and white women apart
was the main purpose of Jim Crow. Gunnar Myrdal's landmark 1944 study
found that Southern whites generally grasped that keeping blacks down
also retarded their own economic progress, but whites felt that was
the price they had to pay to make black men less attractive to white
women. To the extent that white racism persists, it should limit the
proportion of black-man/white-woman couples.
SINCE
these inequalities in interracial marriage are so contrary to
conventional expectations, what causes them? Academia's and the mass
media's preferred reaction has been to ignore husband - wife
disproportions entirely. When the subject has raised its ugly head,
though, they've typically tossed out arbitrary ideas to explain a
single piece of the puzzle, rather than address the entire yin and
yang of black - white and white - Asian marriages. For example, a
Japanese-American poetry professor in Minnesota has written
extensively on his sexual troubles with white women. He blames the
internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Presumably, the
similarity of frustrations of Chinese-American men is just a
coincidence caused by, say, China losing the Opium War. And the
problems of Vietnamese men stem from winning the Vietnam War, etc. But
piecemeal rationalizations are unappealing compared to a theory which
might explain all the evidence.
The general pattern to be explained is:
blacks are more in demand as husbands than as wives, and vice-versa
for Asians. The question is, what accounts for it?
The usual sociological explanations for who
marries whom (e.g., availability, class, and social approval) never
work simultaneously for blacks and Asians. This isn't surprising
because these social-compatibility factors influence the total number
of black - white or white - Asian marriages more than the husband -
wife proportions within intermarriages.
By emphasizing how society encourages us to
marry people like ourselves, sociologists miss half the picture: by
definition, heterosexual attraction thrives on differences. Although
Henry Higgins and Colonel Pickering are so compatible that they break
into song about it (``Why Can't a Woman Be More like a Man?''),
Higgins falls in love with Eliza Doolittle. Opposites attract. And
certain race/sex pairings seem to be more opposite than others. The
force driving these skewed husband - wife proportions appears to be
differences in perceived sexual attractiveness. On average, black men
tend to appear slightly more and Asian men slightly less masculine
than white men, while Asian women are typically seen as slightly more
and black women as slightly less feminine than white women.
Obviously, these are gross generalizations
about the races. Nobody believes Michael Jackson could beat up kung-fu
star Jackie Chan or that comedienne Margaret Cho is lovelier than Sports
Illustrated swimsuit covergirl Tyra Banks. But life is a game of
probabilities, not of abstract Platonic essences.
So, what makes blacks more masculine-seeming
and Asians more feminine-seeming? Media stereotypes are sometimes
invoked. TV constantly shows black men slam-dunking, while it seems
the only way an Asian man can get some coverage is to discover a cure
for AIDS. Yet try channel-surfing for minority women. You'll see black
women dancing, singing, joking, and romancing. If, however, you even
see an Asian woman, she'll probably be newscasting -- not the most
alluring of roles.
Conventional wisdom sometimes cites social
conditioning as well. But while this is not implausible for
American-born blacks, who come from a somewhat homogeneous culture,
it's insensitive to the diversity of cultures in which Asians are
raised. Contrast Koreans and Filipinos and Cambodian refugees and
fifth-generation Japanese-Americans. It's not clear they have much in
common culturally other than that in the West their women are more in
demand as spouses than their men.
One reasonable cultural explanation for the
sexual attractiveness of black men today is the hypermasculinization
of black life over the last few decades. To cite a benign aspect of
this trend, if you've followed the Olympics on TV since the 1960s
you've seen sprinters' victory celebrations evolve from genteel
exercises in restraint into orgies of fist-pumping, trash-talking
black machismo. This showy masculinization of black behavior may be in
part a delayed reaction to the long campaign by Southern white males
to portray themselves as ``The Man'' and the black man as a ``boy.''
But let's not be content to stop our analysis here. Why did Jim Crow
whites try so hard to demean black manhood? As we've seen, the chief
reason was to prevent black men from impregnating white women.
So, did all racist whites a century ago make
keeping minorities away from their women their highest priority? No.
As noted earlier, the anti-Asian immigration laws kept Asian women
out, forcing many Asian immigrant bachelors to look for white women
(with mixed success). While white men were certainly not crazy about
this side effect, it seemed an acceptable tradeoff, since they feared
Asian immigrants more as economic than as sexual competitors. But why
did whites historically dread the masculine charms of blacks more than
those of Asians? Merely asking this question points out that social
conditioning is ultimately a superficial explanation of the
differences among peoples. Yes, society socializes individuals, but
what socializes society?
There
are only three fundamental causes for the myriad ways groups differ.
The first is unsatisfying but no doubt important: random flukes of
history. The second, the favorite of Thomas Sowell and Jared Diamond,
is differences in geography and climate. The third is human
biodiversity. Let's look at three physical differences between the
races. 1) Asian men tend to be shorter than white and black men. Does
this matter in the mating game? One of America's leading hands-on
researchers into this question, 7'1", 280-pound basketball legend
Wilt Chamberlain, reports that in his ample experience being tall and
strong never hurt. Biological anthropologists confirm this, finding
that taller tends to be better in the eyes of most women in just about
all cultures. Like most traits, height is determined by the
interaction of genetic and social factors (e.g., nutrition). For
example, the L.A. Dodgers' flamethrowing pitcher Hideo Nomo is listed
as 6'2", an almost unheard-of height for any Japanese man fifty
years ago, owing to the near-starvation diets of the era. While the
height gap between Japanese and whites narrowed significantly after
World War II, this trend has slowed in recent years as well-fed
Japanese began bumping up against genetic limits. Furthermore, it can
be rather cold comfort to a 5'7" Asian who is competing for dates
with white and black guys averaging 5'11" to hear, ``Your sons
will grow up on average a couple of inches taller than you, assuming,
of course, that you ever meet a girl and have any kids.'' In contrast,
consider a 5'1" Asian coed. Although she'd be happy with a
5'7" boyfriend if she were in an all-Asian school, at UCLA she
finds lots of boys temptingly much taller than that, but few are
Asian.
2. This general principle -- the more racial
integration there is, the more important become physical differences
among the races -- can also be seen with regard to hair length. The
ability to grow long hair is a useful indicator of youth and good
health. (Ask anybody on chemotherapy.) Since women do not go bald and
can generally grow longer hair than men, most cultures associate
longer hair with femininity. Although blacks' hair doesn't grow as
long as whites' or Asians' hair, that's not a problem for black women
in all-black societies. After integration, though, hair often becomes
an intense concern for black women competing with longer-haired women
of other races. While intellectuals in black-studies departments'
ebony towers denounce ``Eurocentric standards of beauty,'' most black
women respond more pragmatically. They one-up white women by buying
straight from the source of the longest hair: the Wall Street
Journal recently reported on the booming business in furnishing
African-American women with ``weaves'' and ``extensions'' harvested
from the follicularly gifted women of China.
3. Muscularity may most sharply differentiate
the races in terms of sexual attractiveness. Women like men who are
stronger than they; men like women who are rounder and softer. The
ending of segregation in sports has made racial differences in
muscularity harder to ignore. 
Although the men's 100-meter dash is
among the world's most widely contested events, in the last four
Olympics all 32 finalists have been blacks of West African descent.
Is
muscularity quantifiable? PBS fitness expert Covert Bailey finds that
he needs to recommend different goals -- in terms of percentage of
body fat -- to his clients of different races. The standard goal for
adult black men is 12 per cent body fat, versus 18 per cent for Asian
men. The goals for women are 7 points higher than for men of the same
race.
For interracial couples, their ``gender gaps'' in body-fat goals
correlate uncannily with their husband - wife proportions in the 1990
Census. The goal for black men (12 per cent) is 10 points lower than
the goal for white women 
(22 per cent), while the goal for white men
(15 per cent) is only 4 points lower than the goal for black women (19
per cent). This 10:4 ratio is almost identical to the 72:28 ratio seen
in the Census. This correlates just as well for white - Asian couples,
too. Apparently, men want women who make them feel more like men, and
vice versa for women.
Understanding
the impact of genetic racial differences on American life is a
necessity for anybody who wants to understand our increasingly complex
society. For example, the sense of betrayal felt by Asian men
certainly makes sense. After all, they tend to surpass the national
average in those long-term virtues -- industry, self-restraint,
law-abidingness -- that society used to train young women to look for
in a husband. Yet, now that discrimination has finally declined enough
for Asian men to expect to reap the rewards for fulfilling traditional
American standards of manliness, our culture has largely lost interest
in indoctrinating young women to prize those qualities.
The frustrations of Asian men are a warning
sign. When, in the names of freedom and feminism, young women listen
less to the hard-earned wisdom of older women about how to pick Mr.
Right, they listen even more to their hormones. This allows cruder
measures of a man's worth -- like the size of his muscles -- to return
to prominence. The result is not a feminist utopia, but a society in
which genetically gifted guys can more easily get away with acting
like Mr. Wrong.
George Orwell noted, "To see what is in
front of one's nose requires a constant struggle.'' We can no longer
afford to have our public policy governed by fashionable philosophies
which insists upon ignoring the obvious. The realities of interracial
marriage, like those of professional sports, show that diversity and
integration turn out in practice to be fatal to the reigning
assumption of racial uniformity. The courageous individuals in
interracial marriages have moved farthest past old hostilities. Yet,
they've discovered not the featureless landscape of utter equality
that was predicted by progressive pundits, but a landscape
rich with
fascinating racial patterns. Intellectuals should stop dreading the
ever-increasing evidence of human biodiversity and start delighting in
it.
Reader
responses to "Is Love Colorblind?"
"2000 Census: Interracial Marriage Gender Gap Remains
Large."
Interracial
Divorce Statistics