Posted on 08/09/2002 7:38:36 AM PDT by Wordsmith
Talkin' 'Bout Miscegenation
New hope in America's race relations
In the long and tortured racial history of America, there have been few more tortured subjects than inter-racial sex. From earliest times, when Thomas Jefferson had an illicit love affair with a slave, the subject has been oddly taboo. Fear of black male sexuality - and white men's sexual insecurity in comparison - powered some of the most racist thuggery of the past. Many lynchings of black men were occasioned by claims of sex with white women, and formal laws banning inter-racial marriage date back to the 1660s. In fact, it wasn't until 1967 - a mere thirty-five years ago - that the U.S. Supreme Court, in the wonderfully named case Loving vs Virginia, struck down such miscegenation bans throughout the United States. Thirty five years out of over three hundred is not a long time.
And the bans on such marriages were not arid or legal affairs. They became, in some respects, the most powerful of all laws maintaining white supremacy in the United States. To give a flavor of the feelings aroused by such matters, here's part of the Tennessee state supreme court's judgment in the late nineteenth century, refusing to recognize a marriage between a white man and a black woman. If such a marriage were allowed to stand, the court reasoned, "we might have in Tennessee the father living with his daughter, the son with the mother, the brother with his sister, in lawful wedlock... the Turk or the Mohammedan, with his numerous wives, may establish his harem at the doors of the capitol, and we are without remedy. Yet none of these are more revolting, more to be avoided, or more unnatural than the case before us."
There you have it: worse than incest or polygamy. To some early Americans, inter-racial marriage was even worse than bestiality. And the marriage ban also lay behind many of the other institutions of American apartheid. I remember talking to the Southern father of a friend of mine who had grown up in the 1960s and attended the first integrated school in his small Southern town. I asked his father why there was such resistance to integration: "Well," he replied, "it was a mixture of things. Politics - and worrying about your children's education and so on. But the thing people were most worried about was not integrating the schools as such - or the quality of the education ... They were worried that once they started integrating the schools, the kids would get to know one another better; and then maybe some of them would get married. That's what they were really worried about." No wonder the U.S. military and schools were integrated and public segregation abolished long before the marriage taboo fell.
All that is a preamble to some terrific news. After decades of very modest rates of inter-racial marriage in America, the proportion of black women marrying white men has just experienced a dramatic jump. The Atlanta Journal and Constitution reported last week that, after an annual rate of 26,000 such marriages a year in 1960 and a stable 27,000 in 1980, the number of marriages between black women and white men soared to 80,000 in 2000. This coincides with other encouraging data from teenage black women as well: their pregnancy rates have just hit their lowest level since 1976. And in the latest survey of sexual activity among high-schoolers, the percentage of black teens saying they'd had sex in the last three months dropped from 50 to 40 percent in one year. Whites saw a much smaller decline - from 35 to 32 percent, while Hispanics saw a small rise to 35 percent.
Slowly but surely, black American women are making it. At least that's one plausible explanation for the sudden jump in inter-racial marriage. Women make up over 60 percent of black college degrees. They have more self-confidence, more independence and decreasingly see themselves as trapped in any particular identity, or required because of their skin color to marry one particular race rather than another. The most obvious examples of black female success are Oprah Winfrey - one of the most accomplished business executives around - and Condi Rice, arguably the most powerful woman in the history of American foreign policy (and, yes, I'm including Madeleine Albright in that list). In popular culture, the movies are also beginning to feature more black women dating white men: Halle Berry just won an Oscar for her role dating a white man in "Monster's Ball," and Angela Bassett was Robert de Niro's girlfriend in "The Score."
The reasons for the racial break-out are hard to nail down. Part of it may well be the impact of three decades of affirmative action in which black women were increasingly integrated into white work-settings. Interaction on the job led to dates which led to relationships. Then there's the effect of welfare reform. Since the reform took national effect in 1996 - against fierce resistance from the left - black women have seen their incomes increase, their pregnancy rates decline, and their family structures solidify. A woman with a job and self-confidence is far more likely to take the risk of dating across the racial barrier than someone trapped in the culture of welfare dependency. These women, unsurprisingly, are also more attractive to men of all races.
Sadly, the new numbers may also be a function of the dearth of black men to date. With much of the young black male population in jail or in some part of the criminal justice system, there's a huge surplus of datable black women. The remaining black men, according to many black women, know they can pick and choose and enjoy the game itself. One black woman told the Atlanta paper, "I've just found that there is a lack of appreciation of black women in Atlanta. We come a dime a dozen here. I haven't found any black men trying to take me to the museum. I wish they would make an effort other than, 'Let's go and have a drink' or 'Let's go to the Red Lobster for all-you-can-eat crab legs on Monday.'" Into that demographic gap, white men have jumped.
But the real promise lies in the future. If the rate of inter-racial marriage increases, the next generation may well not identify as "black" or "white" at all. That's a real fillip. Miscegenation has always been the ultimate solution to America's racial divisions. It blurs distinctions in the only way in which history can be definitively left behind. It was an interesting coincidence that the week in which the Atlanta Constitution ran its article on inter-racial marriage, a new proposition made it onto California's ballot in November. It's called the Racial Privacy Initiative, and it would forbid the government from asking any citizens about their racial identity. It's an attempt to accelerate the slow decline of fixed racial categories in a new and brownish America. And it captures a growing cultural mood. The comedian Chris Rock has noted that things are really changing in America when the best rapper is white and the best golfer is black. But what's more salient is that neither Eminem nor Tiger Woods sees himself as racially defined or restricted. That's the future. And black women are now helping to bring it about.
July 21, 2002, Sunday Times of London
The rumor has been revived lately because it suits Leftwing purposes, both Clintonesque and in general. For my analysis, see Civil War, Reconstruction & Creating Hate In America Today, which deals with it in the context of other issues, and Correspondence, which deals with it in certain correspondence, which I had with the one Jefferson descendant who has chosen to accept the idea. (The family, in general, has rejected it--and given sound reasons for that rejection.)
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
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