Hello, Dear Readers! Did you miss me?
Greymantle has spent much of the last month on the road traveling for both business and family reasons in what has become a seemingly unbreakable pattern since 2023 began.
I’m glad that I didn’t promise too many monthly posts back in January, since I’ve been averaging around one per month — well below my intended goal. Still, as disappointing as that is, I’m here now, typing away and itching to share my observations.
The topic of today’s post is the rise in interracial marriages and relationships in the US since the early 1980s, and what this trend might portend for the long-term. It’s a very significant underlying change in US society, and one that has occurred largely within my own lifetime. For that reason, it’s a social trend that I’ve been able to observe in real time as it has unspooled across every stage of my own life. No question – it’s been fascinating to watch.
I’ve logged this post under three separate categories – ‘America’s Future’, ‘Social Cohesion’ and ‘Transformations’ – for a very sound set of reasons. The reasons I’ll detail below go to the core of the phenomenon and its power to shape, in both overt and subtle ways, the course of future events.
THE FUTURE LITERALLY WON’T LOOK LIKE THE PAST
First, I strongly suspect that the rising trend of mixed marriages, along with completely unrelated technological changes, will shape America’s future over the next 75 to 100 years in critical ways. If the rise in mixed marriages and mixed-race children serves to diminish fear and hostility between different racial groups in the US, then it will play a pivotal role in ensuring the survival of the republic.
On the other hand, if the recent populist backlash against other economic and social changes begins to turn itself against mixed marriages, marking them out as a particular threat to the perceived interests of populists, then this may spread a chill through society, enhancing communal fear and suspicion.
Secondly, inter-ethnic marriages have the peculiar quality of cutting both ways in terms of how they affect social cohesion in the US (and in other nations). Mixed marriages both undermine and enhance social cohesion.
They undermine cohesion within insular and homogenous groups by injecting outsiders into those groups, thereby weakening their internal cohesion, and also by allowing members of insular groups to marry outside their core ‘tribe’. By doing so, some who inter-marry become viewed as ‘lost’ to their tribe. Alternately, inter-ethnic marriages can strengthen the social fabric of the broader society by blunting inter-ethnic rivalries as groups form higher numbers of informal ‘marriage alliances’.
It’s an axiom of ancient and medieval history that whenever two tribes or kingdoms wanted to establish an alliance or end a period of hostilities, they would typically ‘exchange brides‘ in order to generate new kinship ties between their royal families. Literal ‘marriage treaties’ between and among various kingdoms and dynasties were very common in the pre-modern era.
THOUSANDS OF TACIT ALLIANCES
In Greymantle’s view, contemporary America is now engaged in the pursuit of what are, in fact, a set of disguised marriage treaties contracted on a vast scale – slowly and inexorably knitting together the interests and fortunes of America’s major racial groups via direct blood ties.
The Pew Charitable Trusts reported in 2017 that 17% of all new marriages in America involved persons of two different races, up from 3% of new marriages in 1980. Given that the proportion of mixed-race marriages has grown steadily since 1980, we can surmise that this percentage will increase further still, to some unknowable equilibrium point.
The rate of divorce among mixed race couples at 41% (as of 2015) is notably, and quite sadly, higher than the divorce rate among couples of the same race (30%), but the fact of the marriages themselves nevertheless signifies a profound softening in attitudes regarding the seeking of a marriage partner outside of one’s own race. While too many of these marriages will fail, the biracial offspring they produce will remain, a permanent and provocative reminder of the original alliance.
A LONG AND PARTLY HIDDEN HISTORY
Third and finally, I have logged this blog post under the category of ‘Transformations’. This is a category that I usually reserve for big technological changes, geopolitical reorderings, or major shifts in social habits. The mixed marriage phenomenon surely belongs to the third category, although Greymantle believes that ‘shift in social habits’, if one were to insist on using such bland terminology, fails to capture the enormity of this shift for the U.S., and how it will alter the nation’s destiny.
U.S. progressives take particular pleasure in harping about the existence of ‘white supremacy’ in America, frequently adopting rhetorical flourishes that make it sound as if the listener were living in the year 1863, rather than 2023. This obnoxious phrase (though its users will argue that it refers to a far more obnoxious reality than that contained in ANY form of rhetoric) tends to mask complicated dynamics between simple racial majoritarianism, differences in wealth levels and institutional power between White and Black Americans specifically (Asian and Hispanic wealth levels are typically not referenced), and various attitudes toward race held by whites and other Americans.
This style of rhetoric fails to recognize that both sexual relationships, and their offspring both legitimate and illegitimate, and mixed marriages have been a feature of American life since the first European colonies were established in North America in the early 17th century.
How many so-called ‘White’ Americans can trace Native American ancestors? Apparently, quite a few. Official statistics cite 1.7%, but that figure reflects limited genetic testing among the US population. The real figure is surely higher if one relies on oral histories and folklore – likely in the range of 3% to 5%. That seems like a small percentage, but we are talking about hundreds of thousands of people.
How many so-called ‘Black’ Americans have Native American or white ancestry? In general, the majority of Black Americans have some European and Native American ancestry, with the average Black American showing 73% African ancestry, 24% European, and 2% Native American.
Native Americans also show genetic evidence of both African and European ancestry. These genetic markers stem from the realities of frontier life, which was marked by violence and communal antagonism on one hand, but also by a certain permeability between communities on the other.
Some White ‘mountain men’ eventually joined Native American tribes and were absorbed into them, as were white women and children captured in Native raids on colonial settlements. Escaped Black slaves also frequently sought refuge in Native American tribes, sometimes becoming tribal members.
In addition, Hispanics in the U.S. report, on average, that 21% of their ancestry is Native American. The races in America have been mixing all along. It is only the number of formal and open marriages that has lagged behind the reality of racial intermixing.
A SEA CHANGE IN SOCIAL ATTITUDES
Like other previously illicit or ‘taboo’ sexual relationships, such as same-sex relations, interracial sexual and romantic relations have gone through a certain process of ‘coming out of the closet’ since the mid-1960s. While mixed marriages were never subject to quite the same level of taboo status as gay or lesbian relationships, it can sometimes be difficult for non-American observers to truly appreciate the extent to which mixed-race marriages and relationships carried a strikingly negative ‘charge’ in the eyes of the majority of the American public until fairly recently.
To put it bluntly, if a White woman announced to her parents in 1963 that she was engaged to be married to a Black man (this was the actual plot of the 1967 motion picture “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”), it is most likely her parents and their social circle would have viewed her choice as only slightly less bad than her coming out of the proverbial closet and announcing that she was in a romantic relationship with another woman. The parents of a Black woman engaged to be married to a White man might have been only slightly less (and in many circumstances, even more) offended by her choice than the white parents.
Between a mixed marriage and a same-sex liaison, the mixed marriage was historically the more acceptable in the U.S. – but only just barely. To my European and Asian readers who are confused by this trip down U.S. history ‘memory lane’, I can only say that the example laid out here is only one example of social conservatism being tied to ‘racial conservatism’ in the United States. That U.S. social conservatives have only softened towards mixed-race marriage in the last generation (i.e. since the year 2000) represents a statistical after-shock from earlier segregationist attitudes.
Two key concepts floating in the background to this enormous shift in attitudes are ‘openness’ and ‘consent’. It is now acceptable for mixed marriages and inter-racial dating to be ‘out in the open’ whereas in the past they tended to be pursued in a somewhat clandestine manner, even in states that had never passed any laws forbidding mixed marriages (New Jersey and New York are two among the small number of states that never outlawed mixed marriages, a fact that strongly influences the social composition of, and attitudes within, those states down to the present time).
Additionally, it was often the case in the American past that sexual relationships between persons of different races occurred without consent (i.e. due to coercion or outright rape). Such was most shamefully the case during the era of slavery, when White slaveowners and overseers took sexual advantage of Black women who had the misfortune to live under their cruel dominion. These practices continued, to some extent, into the era of segregation that followed the legal end of slavery.
Aside from the circumstances surrounding the period of Black slavery in most of the U.S., the brutal conditions of the frontier also made sexual violence between different racial, ethnic and tribal groups depressingly common, leading to the birth of mixed race children who were sometimes shunned by the broader society and often unloved.
Finally, the practice of men on the frontier taking more than one wife – White soldiers and mountain men often took a Native American wife even if they already had a wife of their own race and ethnicity back in the fully settled regions of the U.S. – meant that genes and cultures mixed on the frontier via the general fluidity and negotiability of sexual rules and practices.
Many, if not most, of the relations described above were illicit in character (i.e. without legal approval) and not infrequently lacking the full consent of one party. The shift in American attitudes toward sex that prioritized consent starting in the 1960s, and arguably slightly earlier, meant that relations between men and women began to take on a legitimate character wherever consent was present.
The imprimatur of consent, coupled with the determination of the post-World War II generations to ‘live openly’ with or without the approval of their parents, enabled increasing numbers of racially mixed marriages and unmarried relationships to flourish after the 1950s. The state-by-state legalization of mixed marriages both before and after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Loving v. Virginia decision in 1967 -which declared state bans on mixed marriages to be unconstitutional – were boats moving on the surface of a sea, the tides of which were already starting to shift in a new direction.
HARBINGERS OF MORE COMPLEX SOCIAL ALLIANCES
Slavery, the frontier, colonialism and settlement, segregation and emancipation: these are all reminders of a complex and unsettling, and indeed a deeply tragic, American past. But what of the future?
Greymantle suggested above that the rise of mixed-race marriages since the early 1980s could be seen as the proliferation of inter-tribal marriage treaties by proxy – unofficial in character (the treaty aspect rather than the marriages themselves) – but possessing an inherent treaty-like character when seen against the backdrop of the violent American past and strikingly complex American social present.
Hundreds of varied American communities are actively in the process of forging intimate kinship ties that are likely to persist for centuries, the informal and highly individualistic character of contemporary American society notwithstanding. These ties bring together more than individual couples. They bring various communities into closer communion with each other. In doing so, they have a ‘bridging’ effect on social groups. Each offspring of such a union acts as a bridge of flesh between two communities.
An Irish-American man marries a Chinese-American woman. Their mixed offspring have ethnic and cultural ties to both Europe and Asia. The children may attend Chinese language school on the weekends and a Catholic Church on Sundays. The Lunar New Year and Christmas are both celebrated in their fairly unprecedented home.
A Jewish woman from Los Angeles marries and Indian-American man whose parents emigrated from Bangalore. Their three children are raised Jewish, but inherit many Indian cultural traditions. Thanks to modern air travel, they can visit living great-grandparents and cousins in both Israel and India. They know Hollywood movies and Bollywood cinema. Upon reaching maturity, one of their daughters marries an Israeli man, moves to Israel for a time, and returns to the U.S. several years later with two children whose first language is Hebrew. They settle in Atlanta, Georgia.
A woman from Texas whose grandparents emigrated to the U.S. from Mexico and who identifies as ‘Tex-Mex’ marries a Vietnamese-American man who was raised in Houston, Texas, the grandson of ‘boat people’ who came to the U.S. as refugees following the Vietnam War. The religious background of both families is Roman Catholic, but both converted to evangelical Protestantism. In search of good careers in the medical profession, they move to Minneapolis, Minnesota.
You can come up with examples like this all day. That’s America in 2023.
When you start encountering couples like the ones above, of which there are now several million (I’m not going to do the math), each one can seem like a novelty. And then you begin to realize that there are patterns. For instance, the Irish-Chinese combination is pretty “popular” in certain jurisdictions such as New York, northern New Jersey, and eastern Massachusetts. White-Mexican and Mexican-Vietnamese combinations are also fairly common in the inner ring suburbs of all major Texan cities.
In the greater New York City area, I’ve encountered a fair number of Korean-Chinese and Korean-Jewish combinations as well. Korean-Black American and Black-Jewish combinations are also a lot more common than the media would lead you to believe, the desperately diverse casting of many TV shows these days also notwithstanding.
Will these patterns continue? Will certain neighborhoods and regions within the country be heavily populated by Anglo-Hispanic, Euro-Chinese, or Afro-Korean descendants of the most common inter-ethnic couplings of the early 21st century. Or will these patterns me subsumed within a more general and indiscriminate mixing of America’s ethnic groups?
Greymantle believes the particular will become the doorway to the general in the case of mixed marriages. Critical bridgings of communities will become possible because of the existence of only a small number of mixed couples. In other words, presuming that it will take 20% of the members of two communities to bind together in marriage to achieve a meaningful alliance between those communities is to vastly overestimate the number of unions required to bring into being important social alliances.
Let me be more specific. Let’s imagine that a major redevelopment project has been proposed in a large city. We can say that the city in question is Philadelphia. Groups of ethnically White and ethnically Asian (say Chinese or Korean – it doesn’t matter), business people and property developers are clashing on the terms of the project. However, the nephew of one of a leader of one group of ethnic Asian developers is married to the daughter of one of the White ethnic developers. The social ties engendered in this single married speed the resolution of various differences and allow the project to move forward.
But, you may argue, aren’t most major economic decisions driven by large corporations that are dominated by shareholders? This isn’t the Middle Ages. Marriage ties between a handful of families won’t make a difference!
My answer to these objections is that individual families and their allies are still very important at the local and regional level. New York City’s real estate market is still dominated by seven families, even though hundreds of less-influential families have major stakes. Racial inter-mixing at even the level of a half dozen families could play a role in cementing various economic, social and political alliances.
Don’t let the present “post-historical” moment cloud your eyes to the permanent features of human politics. Don’t let a failure of imagination prevent you from envision the nearly endless kinds of alliances that may come out of the combinations happening all around you.
The problem isn’t that the human mind is incapable of engaging in such musings. The problem is that the mind reels at the possibilities, and therefore retreats from the chaos of reality altogether.
THE CHAOS OF REALITY ISN’T REAL – ONLY APPARENT
If the growing ethnic and racial diversity of the United States appears chaotic on the surface, Greymantle advise you not to be fooled. The chaos on the surface isn’t real, it is only apparent. It is an appearance, rather than being an actuality.
The diversity of American might seem to make the nation ungovernable at some future time, but only if you believe in racial essentialism. If you believe if the human person’s ability to be open to new opportunities and possibilities – in ‘self-interested-ness’ as some philosophers would term it – then you will realize that these changes will all sort themselves out in the end. Communities and social groups – clans and sects and otherwise – are also capable of self-interest.
A more socially complex polity won’t necessarily be ungovernable, but merely require a more subtle form of governance. Perhaps the solution is to create more political parties. Or perhaps that’s not the way at all. Perhaps the way forward is through new social and political alliances that hinge, in part, on common patterns of mixed marriages between ethnic groups that share common interests. In this sense, the marriages chosen freely may have just as much force as formal marriage treaties.
Let nature take its course and American society will evolve…naturally. Seen from a certain point of view, the old ‘miscegenation’ laws and racial segregation and other such laws intended to separate individual of different communities were all very artificial. They knew they were acting against nature, and the particular ferocity with which these old laws and norms were enforced speaks to that fact very eloquently. Human being are seldom more violent than when they are acting consciously in defiance of nature, including their own nature.
When the definitive history of the U.S. is written in some future century, the historian who writes it may conclude that America’s ultimate destiny came about as the result of love, rather than war. Love and mutual attraction are the most effective, as well as the gentlest means, of natural evolution.
Until the next time, I remain —
Greymantle
