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Intermarriage: a real measure of race relations
By Naomi Schaefer Riley
December 29, 2014 | 7:08pm
Kim Kardashian, Kanye West and daughter North West, an example of a high-profile interracial marriage.Photo: Jackson Lee
Will we look back on the early 2000s as the pinnacle of racial harmony in this country?
It seems an odd question, but a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC poll found that only 40 percent of Americans think race relations in this country are good, the lowest level since 1995.
Charles Blow, for one, isn’t worried. The New York Times columnist looks at the figure “optimistically.” He writes, “I see the result of vociferous truth-telling and justice-calling, in the face of which fairy-tale obliviousness is reduced to ashes.”
In other words, we’ve spent so much time in the past year ripping the bandages off that we can finally expose our racial wounds and let them begin to air out and heal.
What a load of malarkey.
As depressing as that poll is, it’s only about Americans’ perceptions. The reality is far different.
The miniscule number of blacks shot by white police officers has only declined further in recent decades. Meanwhile, our educational institutions are almost single-mindedly devoted to producing racial diversity. The KKK is not on the march.
To understand the real state of race relations in this country, consider this: In 1960, multiracial marriages were only 0.4 percent of all marriages. By 2010, that figure had jumped to 8.4 and was at 15 percent for recent newlyweds.
Of all marriages by blacks in this country, 1.7 percent were to whites in 1960. Today, it’s 12 percent.
In a recent New Republic article, Brookings scholar William H. Frey writes, “Sociologists have traditionally viewed multiracial marriage as a benchmark for the ultimate stage of assimilation of a particular group into society.
“For that to occur, members of the group will have already reached other milestones . . . similar levels of education, regular interaction in the workplace and community and, especially, some level of residential integration.”
Interracial marriage is booming, so America plainly has closed in on those benchmarks. Yet you’d never know it from most media accounts of blacks and whites in this country. What gives?
Our liberal elites have plainly decided it’s better if we’re all convinced that our country had made no progress on race since 1960, that lying just beneath the surface of every white person is a gurgling volcano of racial epithets ready to spew forth at the slightest provocation.
The current trend toward chronicling “microaggressions” (bits of racism so small you might not even see them as racism) is, if anything, evidence of the lack of a problem.
The first lady recently cited an incident she’d previously used as a joke — two years ago, someone at Target asked her to reach something on a high shelf — as (in her new telling) a sign of prejudice that shows she’s still the victim of racism.
Similarly, the critically acclaimed poet Claudia Rankine in a new book cites this: “The real-estate woman, who didn’t fathom she could have made an appointment to show her house to you, spends much of the walk-through telling your friend, repeatedly, how comfortable she feels around her.”
As the Times review glowingly notes, “Rankine wants us to know that no American citizen is ever really free of race and racism. The potential to say a racist thing or think a racist thought resides in all of us like an unearthed mine in a forgotten war.”
That may or may not be true, but dwelling upon these “potential” slights could reverse the racial progress we have in fact made.
In recent months, we’ve heard endlessly about “the talk” black parents must have with their sons — the one where they warn boys about the dangers police officers pose to them. Never mind that the danger to black boys is far more likely to come from their peers.
We’ve heard from the media, the politicians and the professoriate about how difficult it is to bring up children with dark skin in our society today because of all the injustice they face. We’re bombarded with the message that white people could never possibly understand because of, well, privilege.
And plenty of well-meaning whites have bought into all of it. On Facebook, my middle-class white friends now advertise talks with their white kids about how different their lives would be if their skin were black.
And Jen Hatamaker, the wife of an evangelical pastor who has adopted a son from Ethiopia, told the Religion News Service: “A couple years ago, I would’ve said we’re moving to a post-racial society because I was so under-exposed to people of color and the issues they deal with on a daily basis.”
Her 600-strong congregation includes two or three dozen adoptive families, many interracial. But she somehow doesn’t see that, in and of itself, as proof of progress. Instead, she keeps telling her son about Michael Brown: “Every time we talk about it, there are tears, there’s confusion.”
Who’s really the confused one there? Even if not a single black person were shot by a cop this year, it wouldn’t make a dent in the black homicide rate.
But what matters now is perception — and it may start pushing us backward. Will people considering dating, marrying or having children with people of other races start reconsidering, thanks to all this handwringing? Maybe adopting across racial lines is just a bridge too far? Being married and having children are hard enough. Why do it with someone you could never hope to understand?
Sounds like the kind of thing you might think in 1960.
http://nypost.com/2014/12/29/intermarriage-a-real-measure-of-race-relations/
This white woman was fired for writing this blog post, in which she argued for the elimination of university Black Studies departments, by mocking a few dissertation topics in the field.
And she got a black husband.
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