Interracial Marriage and the Liberal Mind – The Weekly Standard

"First Black Bachelorette shines in debut, but is America ready for interracial love?" When NBC executives tweeted that question last week, what exactly did they expect the answer to be? Were they hoping for some racial unrest to boost their primetime ratings? Have they noticed Kanye West and Kim Kardashian together recently? And what year is it at Rockefeller Center anyway?

For the rest of us it's 2017, a half-century since Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court decision that invalidated state laws prohibiting interracial marriage. The notion that we still need to ask whether Americans are ready to accept interracial relationships seems patently absurd.

Last week Pew released a poll showing that one in six newlyweds are married to someone of a different race. And it will be no surprise if the Bachelorette, Texas lawyer Rachel Lindsay, winds up with someone white or Asian or Hispanic since "the most dramatic increases in intermarriage have occurred among black newlyweds." According to Pew, "Since 1980, the share who married someone of a different race or ethnicity has more than tripled from 5% to 18%."

Despite the obvious fact that romantic relationships between people of different races are simply a fact of life in this country, a number of articles about the study zeroed in on differences in attitudes toward interracial marriage that Pew researchers found in a survey earlier this spring. The New York Times, for instance, noted that "Roughly half of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents see intermarriage as a good thing for society. For Republicans and GOP-leaning independents, less than 1 in 3 saw marriages between races and ethnicities as a good thing for society." A story on NPR also reported on this this "stark split" along political lines. The San Francisco Chronicle pointed out the disparity with a piece titled, "As Intermarriage Spreads, Fault Lines Exposed."

It is easy to imagine liberal elites shaking their heads and sighing at these numbers. And no doubt their worst fears were confirmed when they saw that "Among Americans who live in urban areas, 45% say [interracial marriage] is a good thing for society, as do 38% of those in the suburbs; lower shares among those living in rural areas share this view (24%)." Yes, those folks in middle America, once again clinging to their guns, their religion, and their outdated racial views.

But the truth is that most Americans (52 percent) simply believe that intermarriage "doesn't make much difference for our society." (That's true of 60 percent of Republicans and 63 percent of people who live in rural areas.) In other words, more than half of Americans couldn't care less who you marry. While liberals think we should run out and congratulate every interracial couple we see (and tell them their children are beautiful), most Americans think you should marry whomever you want. Which is probably how we ended up with a president whose third wife is a Slovenian supermodel.

It's correct that in order for intermarriage to be made legal, Americans did have to recognize the humanity of other races, but at this point, their attitude is much more "live and let live." Sure, it's nice to think that Americans have come to fully embrace the idea that people who look different from them are worthy of finding marital happiness, but the truth may be slightly less noble.

The reason that interracial marriage became common, that no-fault divorce became ubiquitous, that gay marriage was legalized, and that we will probably get state-recognized polygamy and various other romantic arrangements is because Americans increasingly think what goes on in your bedroom is your own damn business.

There are plenty of conservatives who will argue that this attitude is problematicnot because they oppose interracial marriage, but because they believe that the public has an interest in stable, two-parent families. They think reasonably enough that we absolutely should care who it is our neighbors are marrying if we care about the welfare of families in our community. But frankly for most Americans, that horse has left the barn.

Liberals, on the other hand will not be satisfied until every American praises people who marry outside their race and encourages their children to do the same. Indeed, if Republicans or folks from rural areas do not see the interracial marriages of their neighbors as something that is benefiting the country as a whole, they might as well be racists in this formulation.

Of course there are reasons to think that interracial marriage, like any kind of racial or ethnic assimilation, might improve the fabric of our country. But the truth is that these marriages will happen anyway. Once the legal barriers to racial mixing came down, interracial marriage became mostly a matter of opportunity. As any marriage expert will tell you, we date and wed the people with whom we go to school and work. Or perhaps the people who appear on reality shows with us.

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Interracial Marriage and the Liberal Mind - The Weekly Standard