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Race and Ethnicity
Love and (Inter)marriage
Does race or ethnicity still matter in love??
Posted November 27, 2011
According to the 2010 Census, there are 4.5 million interracial marriages in the USA, an increase of 20% since 2000. Perhaps love really knows no color. Or does it?
What does this statistic really mean? Who is marrying who?
Census categories
Given that the Census has changed their racial categories almost every 10 years since the 18th century, it is hard to know what an 'interracial' marriage is. Race in America is not just socially defined, it is legally constructed by the government. There is no scientific concept called race, only a social and legally supported one. And though socially defined, these categories are very important.
A search on Amazon.com on the topic of interracial marriages brings up dozens of choices. So if it is so 'normal', why is it still the topic of books and heated discussion? If race is socially defined and there really is no 'real' difference between us, why do we care?
Much of the 'comfort' some people have with their own race is about a 'shared culture'. What that really means is a shared classed and raced experience. Because, a black person from Louisiana shares more culturally with a white person from Louisiana than a black person from New York City.
Culture versus Race
It may be more accurate to focus on intercultural marriages because it is culture that is at the heart of the difference that would matter in the day-to-day relations between spouses. Of course, it is their race that impacts their individual social experiences in the world.
Not so long ago, the New York Times (September 23, 2011) ran an article called Three Generations Under One Roof. The story told of an intergenerational Chinese family that included a Cuban-Chinese husband, a Cantonese-only-speaking grandfather, and an adopted daughter from Ethiopia. the family is culturally Chinese and their brown daughter will not share culture with her African American peers and that will be more of a hurdle in a relationship than will the simiilarity of color be a facilitator of good relationships.
Race and Love and Marriage
Since this blog entry was first posted to Psychology Today (November 27, 2011), I realized that I committed a major omission by not including the significance of the Loving v. Virginia case that symbolized a state-sanctioned (varying from state to state) support against interracial marriage.
On June 12, 1967, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Mildred and Richard Loving (Loving v. Virginia) and made unconstitutional all laws against inter-racial marriages in the USA. It was not an easy fight. In 1959, the Lovings left Virginia for the District of Columbia (DC) to avoid a 1-year suspended term in jail for marrying each other (she was black and he was white). They were a Virginia couple who had crossed state lines (DC) to get married in June 1958 to avoid the Racial Integrity Act which made it illegal for any white and non-white person to marry. Upon their return to Virginia they were charged. Forty-five years later after that landmark Supreme Court decision many people still find marriages across racial lines to be problematic.
On June 3, 2011, the Modern Love column of the New York Times focused on interracial love. In the story, the author explores the 'hidden' taboos about race, ethnicity and marriage that still exist, even in 'liberal' families. There is always that 'someone' who one is not to marry. Eventually in this story, the Korean parents liked the non-Korean wife and they all lived "happily ever after". In fact, that phrase is included in the title of the book the author wrote about their story of interracial love. In her story it was not about culture because though her husband was of Korean ethnicity, he was culturally American. Interestingly the article ends with the writer - a white woman - worrying that perhaps one day someone will be telling her Korean/White children that they are not acceptable to love.
In the April 2012 issue Marie Claire magazine had a 6-page feature on Race and Love that told the stories of Americans of all races, hues and ethnicities who crossed, or thought of crossing, racial/ethnic lines. These stories had no standard arc as love is different for everyone, but a consistent theme was that racial and cultural differences create expectations of difference and those expectations are more problematic than the reality itself. And these expectations are grounded in our perceptions of each other, not our knowledge of each other; expectations rooted in our culture of race but not who we are as human beings.
Rethinking Race
I teach Race and Ethnicity to college students and though there are lots of academic theories about the whys and wherefores of the way we perceive race, ethnicity and culture, in the day-to-day most of what we do and think is based on premises that have no basis in science or even in what we see and experience. They are bad habits. Harmful bad habits. That hurt. Sometimes for life.
Like any bad habit, thinking that race or ethnicity equal difference in culture, or difference in being, requires work to change. The more we come close to each other in social interaction, the easier it is for those thoughts to change or not to exist at all.
The irony in a supposedly post-racial world is that we still think and talk about race even as we speak of not thinking of race. We said it didn't matter that the President was black and yet his race was a marker for 'how far we have come'. Even for that mother worrying about her children, though she married outside her race, and thus decided that race was not a significant barrier to love, she still worries about what it will mean for her children.
It seems we have a long way to go to a post-racial world.
Yes....race and ethnicity still matter in love.... but we love anyway.
