The percentage of marriages in the US that are black/white has increased by something like a factor of three since 1970. See http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18090277/
Interracial marriages are still a small fraction of the total, but growth shows no sign of abating.
And indeed, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18090277/ is a story titled “After 40 years, interracial marriage flourishing”, which gives the beautiful news that Since landmark 1967 ruling, unions have moved from radical to everyday
:
The number of interracial marriages has soared; for example, black-white marriages increased from 65,000 in 1970 to 422,000 in 2005, according to Census Bureau figures.
…
Factoring in all racial combinations, Stanford University sociologist Michael Rosenfeld calculates that more than 7 percent of America’s 59 million married couples in 2005 were interracial, compared to less than 2 percent in 1970.
What a positive sign! I feel a lot more hopeful about the situation. And 7% isn’t just just 3.5 times greater than before, it’s a number that compounds over the generations. I’d consider this a litmus test for acceptable racial politics — when most black or white Americans whose family has been here more than a couple generations are mixed black and white, things are not so fucked up.
I would further specify that their families should be recognizably mixed black and white, as most individual African Americans and many whites have had mixed ancestry for hundreds of years. On that note, individual estimates of ancestry will soon be available to anyone who wants them, which could also change things in some unpredictable fashion.
We’d probably also have to stipulate extended families, as I doubt it is likely for “most” say nuclear + 1 families that include a black or white person to also include the other, simply because blacks are a small and declining minority and whites, while a majority, are rapidly declining as a percentage of total population (all referring to the US).
In any case, here’s to more race mixing and the destruction of race as anything other than a historical concept.
And, since your previous post started out with music, more listening to race mixing and miscegenation remixed.