A quick look at the US census shows that both groups, when compared to their opposite sex counterparts, are not seeing nearly as much success in terms of interracial marriages. Even just a day people-gazing in a multi-ethnic major American city will attest to this. You’ll see BM/WF couples, WM/AF couples, but any other combination will be fairly rare.
So what is the source of this disparity? Masculinization of Blacks and feminization of Asians in the media and the public consciousness? Demeaning stereotypes that hurt one gender more than the other?
Cultural hangups I’m ready to dismiss, because as I’ve come to observe living in fairly diverse environments, almost everyone is willing to date a White person. And those that can often do, especially since Whites are the majority in the US.
So I guess the real question is why are AM and BFs considered less desirable in the US?
Well, let’s ask a question right off - are the couples you see dating or are they married?
I think people date lots of different people (increasingly, people of different races) before settling down. Now, who they settle down with is a separate question from who they date.
This question has particular relevance for black women, since they seem less likely to get married at all, let alone married to someone from another race.
Could you provide us with that quick look at the US census that points this out? Also the one that says people are willing to date a white person if they could.
I ask because I’ve seen the same amount black woman/whatever man as black man/whatever woman relationships. Hell, even I dated a black girl once. And I’ve also dated white women and I don’t think they are all they’re cracked up to be.
Black women tend not to date interracially. Sure, there are some BF/WM couples out there, but not to the extent of BM/WF couples. (Maybe in large, cosmopolitan areas the ratio will be more even, but not here and other places I’ve lived.) I’ve heard several reasons for it:
“The Sally Hemmings Factor”; a BF/WM relationship would resemble a master-slave relationship, something seen as undesirable by black women.
The penis length thing. Dating a white man would be “dating down” in that sense. Probably BS, as demonstrated by Cecil. FWIW, Ive hear it as a reason for the relative lack of AM/WF couples compared to WM/AF couples.
Tolerance for “thickness”. Possible. Black women as a whole are generally larger than white women. Culturally, it’s been said here that black men have a greater tolerance, and even greater attraction to, larger women.
Feedback loop. The idea of desire for a “strong black man” amplifies as it’s repeated many times throughout the weeks, to the exclusion of others.
There was a long, and fairly controversial, article about this subject in the National Review a few years ago. It’s probably on the net somewhere. It may have been controversial, but it was the only thing I’ve seen on this subject that was anything close to a reasoned argument.
Don’t beat up on me – these are the conclusions of the article, not my own, but here’s what it came up with, to the best of my recollection:
Asians, both men and women, to white people, seem subconsciously somehow to be more feminine than white people. That makes asian women seem ultrafeminine, and asian men seem emasculated.
Black people, both men and women, to white peple, seem subconsciously somehow to be more masculine than white peole. That makes black men seem ultramasculine and black women seem masculinized.
With these subconscious thought pattersn, and our new patterns of dating in which we date based on our personal desires with no regard with who would actuallly be “good” for us, the interracial trends become clear.
Whoops, I just found the National Review article. It’s from 1997:
Doesn’t explain everything, but I imagine there’s some degree of cultural insularity in both camps, in the form of family & friends pressure not to get serious with someone that’s too different. Also conflicts with what Asian perceptions might be of an ideal wife and Black perceptions of an ideal husband.
And don’t forget that the Asian community is just a heck of a lot smaller–what, 2% of the population significantly concentrated in only a handful of communities, vs. Blacks’ 12% spread out over the whole country?
I disagree with your first point. There is certainly a new trend going on where Black women are seeking White men exclusively. The consensus is that White men make better fathers and are more likely to stick around when the baby is born.
I personally know of two BW who date White men only.
I don’t have a cite to back this claim up. I heard it being talked about on a Black radio station. They were getting their information from some kind of study that was done.
Against all odds, I know several couples comprised of black women and white men as well as black women with a string of white boyfriends (or girlfriends).
Not sure this would have any more impact than any other interracial dynamic or even a typical male/female relationship. There are a lot of idiots who still think dating a black woman (or guy) is ‘exotic,’ though, so I can see how that might get annoying after a while. No more so than for an Asian or Latina woman, though.
Really? All joking aside, I’ve never known a woman to pursue a man based on an assumed penis size. You never know what you’re going to get, or how he’ll use it.
This I hear more from white female friends with curvaceous figures – even if they don’t up dating them, they definitely get hit on by black guys more. I there are plenty of white guys who like full-figured women, but their concept of ‘full-figured’ is often skewed through socialization to perceive, say, Kate Winslet as hefty.
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1. Asian men are sexless in our media.
Just look at movies. When was the last movie you saw where an Asian man was getting it on with a white woman? Not very often. Asian men are considered almost sexless.
I often cite the movie “Replacement Killers”. No one can tell me that a white male lead would not have knocked boots with that little hottie in the hotel scene. Everything was set up just right. But Chow Yun Fat…no way.
We see this over and over…Asian men have the reputation of having the smallest penises, living with their parents until they’re 90 (some do, sure, not the American-bred ones), etc.
2. Asian parents are not particularly receptive to girls outside of the race.
Think back to WWII and the worst thing you could do was to marry some little French girl you met while you were overseas.
**3. White girls have trouble with the Asian parents. **
Fact is, IME Asians and non-Asians have very different expectations on a daughter-in-law’s role. An Asian girl knows these expectations ahead of time and if the parents are somewhat reasonable can fake it. I’m as American as they come and you don’t think I fake it sometimes? Asian girls know what’s expected. White girls don’t even know and so they start out at a disadvantage “Look at that girl, she doesn’t even know the right respect”.
That’s just a start. Besides, there is some scorn for the so-called lose “morals” of American girls. At least for Indians, I know waaaaay too many Indian guys who fuck around with as many white girls as they can and then marry a “nice Indian girl”, who, presumably, has been too insulated to have slept around. I’ve been accused of having loose morals just because I am so Americanized. Disgusting…but it’s happened many times in many other cultures.
I’m approaching 50, so I can’t speak to how things are now, but I can speak to the 80s and early 90s, which would influence the marriage statistics.
Back then, there were articles about a significant amount of peer pressure within the black female community not to date non-blacks. Supposedly, there was also criticism of black males dating white women. I grew up in a kinda of rural area that suburbanized, and there were essentially no blacks, so I have no personal experience. (HS class of 500, with one black girl, and she wouldn’t deign to talk to any guy I knew.) FWIW, as a young married guy I lived in northern VA, suburban DC. I would meet women who I could tell would have been interested in me, if I was single, and some who were anyway: never a black woman, though.
Going back to the 60s and 70s, I’m sure there were many colleges that were pretty lily white except for male athletes. The student population at the school I attended was only 2% black, a significant fraction of whom were athletes. (To be fair to the school, while very successful athletically, it held little draw to the urban blacks of the northeast and it took a lot of work to attract a significant fraction of nonwhite students.) This was before Title IX, so you had young, incredibly fit black men, and essentially no black women. You might find this incredible, but I do not recall ever meeting a black woman as an undergraduate. (It did not help to be in physics, which had no women, period.) Of course no white males dated black females, we didn’t know any. The black guys did meet white women, of course, and I’m sure some of them are married to each other now. Presumably the few black women there met plenty of white guys, but according to the statistics, they did not date white guys.
I am a white man married to a Japanese-American woman. I can only speak from my personal experience and that of mine and my wife’s Asian friends.
My wife is first generation American and grew up in a major metropolitan area. Her upbringing was simultaneously very traditional and very progressive. She grew up around many other Japanese people, as they tend to form tightly knit immigrant communities.
Before we met, my wife exclusively dated non-Asian men. Her view, which she tells me is by no means uncommon, is that Asian men are about 50 years behind white men with respect to treating women. She already has a father: she does not want to marry another one. Interestingly, she says that Asian men tend to treate white women better than they do other Asian women.
This view is apparently quite common in Japan as well. There is far less of a stigma against premarital sex and cohabitation than there is in the United States. But once a woman is married, she becomes Mrs. Husband. She is expected to give up her career, assume his identity, and raise the children. Understandably, many Japanese women enjoy both careers and relationships, so they simply don’t marry. Hence the declining marriage and birth rates in Japan.
I’m speaking in terms of both marriage and dating. But for the sake having data, let’s say marriage. If it were dating though, I get the sense the gap would be even greater.
Cite. Yes it’s wikipedia but its cites are in order.
Anecdotal. As an Asian male with lots of Asian male friends and acquaintances, I think people are overestimating family pressures or ‘cultural insularity’ or what have you. It may play some role, but I don’t think a huge one. Hell I’m dating interracially. Though I can’t speak for Black women, I suspect the situation may be similar.
An entertaining article, kind of spits out what everyone is itching to say. Kind of broad in its generalizations though. Boils down to “Blacks are big and strong, while Asians are small and nerdy”. He also seems to be a big fan of this Rushton fellow who looks a lot like a eugenicist.
So an Asian woman who refused to even give Asian men a chance is an expert on how Asian men treat their wives? I think that fact she dated exclusively non-Asians says more about the state of affairs than anything.
I suppose you can attribute similar trends in Europe to their conservatism as well.
EDIT: Does anyone have access to data on interracial marriage in some place like Brazil? I feel like I saw a lot more Asian Male/Nonasian female and Black female/nonblack male couples there, but that just might be confirmation bias and the fact there were generally more interracial couples to begin with.
If growing up in a community full of Asian males of all ages for much of one’s life does not make one an expert, then tell me, how many Asians would she have to date to reach a level of expertise?
We all go through life using heuristics. Most of the time they are fairly useful. I am not going to defend my wife’s view, as its defensibility is not really the issue. Whether it is true or not, there is a perception that Asian men do not treat women very well. Its truth value or how it is perpetuated can be grist for another mill.
So your question can be just as easily turned around: why are Asian women so comfortable with interracial marriages?
I’ve met a lot of white guys who claim they aren’t into black women at all. I think the refusal to acknowledge the possible attractiveness of any black woman (the extreme version of that, which I’ve also seen) is just a socially acceptable form of racism. Not that these guys would ever admit it: it just “doesn’t turn them on”.
Actually, yes. The New York Times ran a very interesting article about it a few weeks ago called No Babies? The lowest fertility rates in Europe are in Italy, Spain and Greece, all of which take a more conservative view of women’s roles than countries like Norway or Belgium.
What age group are these white guys? I was born in 1960, and most of the guys that I grew up with thought that attractive women came in pretty much all colors (white, black, Indian, Asian, whatever). There were some black girls in junior high and high school (they could easily have been models – one of them looked a lot like Teresa Graves from the TV show “Get Christie Love”) that got a ton of attention from the guys!
I always just assumed that most guys about my age (I am 47) and younger felt this way – a pretty girl is a pretty girl, regardless of race!
“Among married black men in Minnesota, 44 percent have wives who are not black; among married black women in the state, 14 percent have husbands who are not black. Nationally, the figures are 7 percent for men and 3 percent for women.”
Here at least, it’s amazingly common for black men to date and marry white women.
I kinda skimmed some of the other posts, but let’s not leave class (financial and cultural levels) out of the picture. Even though I know that’s going to be adding dynamite to the gasoline of this issue. As a solidly middle class white male, I’d personally be less likely to marry a “trailer trash” white female. Given that blacks tend to be at a lower economic level as well as the cultural differences, I’m a lot less likely to connect to and have a relationship with a poor urban black female. Nothing racist about it, just a whole helluva lot less in common.
But if Halley Berry were to wink in my directions, I’d be all over it. Then again, she’d probably take one hard look at MY class and economic background and say no thanks.
