The New Mix:
More black women and white men are settling what some consider the final frontier of interracial marriage by Cassandra West Chicago Tribune
For years black women watched as black men men dated and married white women, gallantly strolling down the street with them or awkwardly bringing them to family reunions.
Andrea and Matt Wukitsch married 2 1/2 years ago and live on the North Side. She says, with a laugh, that she used to be "that black woman looking at black men with white women, thinking 'Whaaat?'"
Sometimes when a black man achieved fame and fortune, black women would hold their collective breaths, wondering whether he would bypass someone like them for a woman of another race. And among themselves, black women have talked endlessly about the shortage of eligible black men. Now, as if to say, "enough of that," black women have begun their own silent march across the color line. In growing numbers, they are dating and marrying white men.
"It's not as easy for women of any race to find good men nowadays, so why shouldn't we broaden the horizons?" says Manhattan author Brenda Lane Richardson, 53, a black woman who is something of a pioneer of the trend--she has been married to a white man for 18 years.
"The biggest change in intermarriage in this last decade has actually been black women marrying white men," says Maria P.P. Root, a clinical psychologist in Seattle who has studied interracial relationships and multiracial families extensively. "It's a very significant demographic trend that nobody has picked up on." In the last 40 years, all marriages between blacks and whites have increased, but recently interracial marriages have climbed faster for African-American women than for African-American men, according to a 1996 article in The New Democrat written by Douglas Besharov, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.
The number of black female-white male marriages remained fairly static between 1960 and 1980, going from 26,000 to 27,000. But by 2000, the number had almost tripled, to 80,000, according to Current Population Survey figures. By comparison, the number of marriages between black men and white women rose from 94,000 in
1980 to 227,000 in 2000. Shelley Haley and Adrian Pollock have been married for 27 years and live in New York state. He's from England, not the U.S., "and I think that's why we've lasted this long," Haley says half-jokingly. "Black men have been doing this sort of pairing up, particularly with white women, for such a long period of time. I think that actually opened the door" for black women, theorizes Root, whose book, "Love's Revolution: Interracial Marriages" (Temple University Press, $22.95), was published last year.
Two years ago, Richardson published "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner: Celebrating Interethnic, Interfaith, and Interracial Relationships" (Wildcat Canyon Press, $14.95), partly to acknowledge the increase in interracial unions and to show how such unions can help people look beyond race.
This "quiet revolution fueled by love," as Root calls it, obviously is happening not only because black women have become more open to the idea of interracial relationships. "One of the reasons we're seeing more black women going out with white men is because white men are changing too," Richardson says. "When I say changing, I mean losing prejudicial thoughts. They're in the office with us, at the health clubs with us.
They're being confronted with the truth of who we really are." And their attitudes, in fact, may have changed faster than black women's. According to a 1995 study on interethnic marital attitudes conducted in 21 cities, white men were the group most willing to intermarry; black women and white women were the least. "I've always been willing to think outside the box," says Chicagoan Matt Wukitsch, 33, a social worker, on why he had no qualms about marrying an African-American woman. "We felt a connection right away. The first day I saw her, I was like 'Wow, who is that?'" That first day was at a youth workshop that he had arranged at the Black Ensemble Theater, where Andrea was an artistic director. Within two weeks she told her mom
that he was the one. They've been married 2 1/2 years.
Beverly Morgan-Welch and Mark Welch with their daughter Alexandra, 9, as she practices her viola in their Andover, Mass., home. This, despite the fact that Andrea, 31 and now an actress, used to be "that black woman looking at black men with white women, thinking 'Whaaat?' " she says, laughing. What's behind the greater openness to black female-white male relationships?
Hollywood has played a small role in the last few years, on both film and TV. Most notably, Halle Berry won an Oscar on Sunday for her role in "Monster's Ball," in which she plays a waitress who gets involved with a white man (Billy Bob Thornton) after her black husband is executed in a Georgia prison. Last year Berry played John Travolta's girlfriend in "Swordfish," and Angela Bassett was cast as the girlfriend of Robert DeNiro in "The Score." In 1998, Berry played Warren Beatty's love interest in "Bulworth."
Another factor, often referred to as the "shortage" of eligible black men, stems from the fact that so many men of color are incarcerated, unemployed or just emotionally absent, many black women say. Civil rights, upward mobility And even more significant is an increasingly integrated society. "The civil rights movement and upward mobility" among African-Americans have brought about "more equal-status contact across groups," says Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, a UCLA anthropologist who conducted the 1995 study that examined interethnic marital attitudes and dating patterns. At one time, she adds, a black female and white male had very limited contact.
"These days a white male college professor will come in contact with a black female college professor," Mitchell-Kernan says. And although black male-white female couples still outnumber black female-white male couples 4 to 1, some think that it's easier for American society to accept a white man and a black woman being together.
"Of the two types of black-white couples, the black male-white female has historically always bothered people the most," says T. Joel Wade, an expert on interracial relationships and a professor of psychology at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pa. Black male-white female pairs still seem "most repugnant," he says, and perhaps that explains why it's rare to see those pairs even today in movies and soap operas. "That's still much more upsetting. A lot of sexual baggage goes into it."
Daniel Hollis and Yvette Walker-Hollis oversee a Web site for interracial couples.
That baggage is rooted in the history of slavery, when the "whole myth of the black rapist" arose, says Shelley Haley, a classics professor at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., who teaches a course titled "Black Women's Experiences in the United States." Haley says that myth offered "an excuse for lynching" black men in the South, a topic she took up recently in her class. "I pointed out the irony that white men could get away with raping black women with impunity, but the near rumor that a black man had raped a white woman could get him killed," she says. Related resentments formed the barrier between black women and white men.
"The history of racial oppression and perceived sexual exploitation as a part of that racial oppression is a factor that early on discouraged black women from involvements with white men," says Mitchell-Kernan, now UCLA's vice chancellor and dean of graduate studies. "The mythology was that white men had a sexual interest in black women but were not interested in marrying them." The resulting skepticism helps explain why, in the study Mitchell-Kernan conducted, black women as a group indicated they were less willing to marry outside their race than other groups. But reality, not just mythology, plays into the divisions, says Haley, 51. Black female slaves were "sexually exploited by white men who were in the position of their masters. So that history of rape often hardens black women to even the possibility of dating, or contemplating in a romantic way, white men," she says. In her own way, Haley has dealt with what she refers to as that "conflicted history." Her husband of 27 years, Adrian Pollock, 51, is white. He is, however, not an American white male. "He's from England. And I think that's why we've lasted this long," she says half-jokingly. "He wasn't socialized into the American--which is, bottom line, a racist--society."
Subtle slights While progress has been made, interracial couples say they still confront the occasional subtle slight or glare that reminds them, and their children, that they constitute another category of minority status. Haley and her husband have a son, 24, and a daughter, 18, who have grown up biracial in a predominantly white area of central New York state. Because her daughter looks white--blond hair, blue eyes--"she's caught it from both sides," Haley says. "What's most hurtful to her is that her schoolmates, acquaintances [who] may not know she has a black mother and will assume she's complicit in whiteness, will tell her racist jokes."
Until the late 1960s, it was illegal in many states for blacks and whites to marry. In 1958 two Virginia residents, Mildred Jeter, a black woman, and Richard Loving, a white man, were married in Washington, D.C. When they returned to Virginia, they were charged with violating the state's ban on interracial marriage.
The couple took their case to the Supreme Court, and in 1967, in Loving vs. Virginia, the court declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional. How couples, families cope Where there are fewer legal and societal obstacles from outsiders, some women acknowledge that personal or familial ones remain. Veronica Chambers, 31, a fiction writer and freelance journalist, says she faced her own before becoming engaged to Jason Clampet, 28, who is white. "The hardest hurdle for me is that I just remember being in a really close relationship with a black man and being able to come home at the end of the day and say to him, 'It's hard being me. It's hard being a black woman in a predominantly white field.' "I needed to be able to say that to Jason or else I couldn't live with him. . . . He can take it. He knows how to give me space to talk about a situation with white people without having to defend himself." And while Andrea and Matt Wukitsch say their families largely welcomed their marriage, Andrea says her father initially had a hard time with the idea that his daughter was marrying a white man. But she held her ground, and by their wedding day her father was there to give her his blessings. "When you're willing to stand up," she says, "ultimately the good wins out, because you're with the person that you love."
For years black women watched as black men men dated and married white women, gallantly strolling down the street with them or awkwardly bringing them to family reunions.
Andrea and Matt Wukitsch married 2 1/2 years ago and live on the North Side. She says, with a laugh, that she used to be "that black woman looking at black men with white women, thinking 'Whaaat?'"
Sometimes when a black man achieved fame and fortune, black women would hold their collective breaths, wondering whether he would bypass someone like them for a woman of another race. And among themselves, black women have talked endlessly about the shortage of eligible black men. Now, as if to say, "enough of that," black women have begun their own silent march across the color line. In growing numbers, they are dating and marrying white men.
"It's not as easy for women of any race to find good men nowadays, so why shouldn't we broaden the horizons?" says Manhattan author Brenda Lane Richardson, 53, a black woman who is something of a pioneer of the trend--she has been married to a white man for 18 years.
"The biggest change in intermarriage in this last decade has actually been black women marrying white men," says Maria P.P. Root, a clinical psychologist in Seattle who has studied interracial relationships and multiracial families extensively. "It's a very significant demographic trend that nobody has picked up on." In the last 40 years, all marriages between blacks and whites have increased, but recently interracial marriages have climbed faster for African-American women than for African-American men, according to a 1996 article in The New Democrat written by Douglas Besharov, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.
The number of black female-white male marriages remained fairly static between 1960 and 1980, going from 26,000 to 27,000. But by 2000, the number had almost tripled, to 80,000, according to Current Population Survey figures. By comparison, the number of marriages between black men and white women rose from 94,000 in
1980 to 227,000 in 2000. Shelley Haley and Adrian Pollock have been married for 27 years and live in New York state. He's from England, not the U.S., "and I think that's why we've lasted this long," Haley says half-jokingly. "Black men have been doing this sort of pairing up, particularly with white women, for such a long period of time. I think that actually opened the door" for black women, theorizes Root, whose book, "Love's Revolution: Interracial Marriages" (Temple University Press, $22.95), was published last year.
Two years ago, Richardson published "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner: Celebrating Interethnic, Interfaith, and Interracial Relationships" (Wildcat Canyon Press, $14.95), partly to acknowledge the increase in interracial unions and to show how such unions can help people look beyond race.
This "quiet revolution fueled by love," as Root calls it, obviously is happening not only because black women have become more open to the idea of interracial relationships. "One of the reasons we're seeing more black women going out with white men is because white men are changing too," Richardson says. "When I say changing, I mean losing prejudicial thoughts. They're in the office with us, at the health clubs with us.
They're being confronted with the truth of who we really are." And their attitudes, in fact, may have changed faster than black women's. According to a 1995 study on interethnic marital attitudes conducted in 21 cities, white men were the group most willing to intermarry; black women and white women were the least. "I've always been willing to think outside the box," says Chicagoan Matt Wukitsch, 33, a social worker, on why he had no qualms about marrying an African-American woman. "We felt a connection right away. The first day I saw her, I was like 'Wow, who is that?'" That first day was at a youth workshop that he had arranged at the Black Ensemble Theater, where Andrea was an artistic director. Within two weeks she told her mom
that he was the one. They've been married 2 1/2 years.
Beverly Morgan-Welch and Mark Welch with their daughter Alexandra, 9, as she practices her viola in their Andover, Mass., home. This, despite the fact that Andrea, 31 and now an actress, used to be "that black woman looking at black men with white women, thinking 'Whaaat?' " she says, laughing. What's behind the greater openness to black female-white male relationships?
Hollywood has played a small role in the last few years, on both film and TV. Most notably, Halle Berry won an Oscar on Sunday for her role in "Monster's Ball," in which she plays a waitress who gets involved with a white man (Billy Bob Thornton) after her black husband is executed in a Georgia prison. Last year Berry played John Travolta's girlfriend in "Swordfish," and Angela Bassett was cast as the girlfriend of Robert DeNiro in "The Score." In 1998, Berry played Warren Beatty's love interest in "Bulworth."
Another factor, often referred to as the "shortage" of eligible black men, stems from the fact that so many men of color are incarcerated, unemployed or just emotionally absent, many black women say. Civil rights, upward mobility And even more significant is an increasingly integrated society. "The civil rights movement and upward mobility" among African-Americans have brought about "more equal-status contact across groups," says Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, a UCLA anthropologist who conducted the 1995 study that examined interethnic marital attitudes and dating patterns. At one time, she adds, a black female and white male had very limited contact.
"These days a white male college professor will come in contact with a black female college professor," Mitchell-Kernan says. And although black male-white female couples still outnumber black female-white male couples 4 to 1, some think that it's easier for American society to accept a white man and a black woman being together.
"Of the two types of black-white couples, the black male-white female has historically always bothered people the most," says T. Joel Wade, an expert on interracial relationships and a professor of psychology at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pa. Black male-white female pairs still seem "most repugnant," he says, and perhaps that explains why it's rare to see those pairs even today in movies and soap operas. "That's still much more upsetting. A lot of sexual baggage goes into it."
Daniel Hollis and Yvette Walker-Hollis oversee a Web site for interracial couples.
That baggage is rooted in the history of slavery, when the "whole myth of the black rapist" arose, says Shelley Haley, a classics professor at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., who teaches a course titled "Black Women's Experiences in the United States." Haley says that myth offered "an excuse for lynching" black men in the South, a topic she took up recently in her class. "I pointed out the irony that white men could get away with raping black women with impunity, but the near rumor that a black man had raped a white woman could get him killed," she says. Related resentments formed the barrier between black women and white men.
"The history of racial oppression and perceived sexual exploitation as a part of that racial oppression is a factor that early on discouraged black women from involvements with white men," says Mitchell-Kernan, now UCLA's vice chancellor and dean of graduate studies. "The mythology was that white men had a sexual interest in black women but were not interested in marrying them." The resulting skepticism helps explain why, in the study Mitchell-Kernan conducted, black women as a group indicated they were less willing to marry outside their race than other groups. But reality, not just mythology, plays into the divisions, says Haley, 51. Black female slaves were "sexually exploited by white men who were in the position of their masters. So that history of rape often hardens black women to even the possibility of dating, or contemplating in a romantic way, white men," she says. In her own way, Haley has dealt with what she refers to as that "conflicted history." Her husband of 27 years, Adrian Pollock, 51, is white. He is, however, not an American white male. "He's from England. And I think that's why we've lasted this long," she says half-jokingly. "He wasn't socialized into the American--which is, bottom line, a racist--society."
Subtle slights While progress has been made, interracial couples say they still confront the occasional subtle slight or glare that reminds them, and their children, that they constitute another category of minority status. Haley and her husband have a son, 24, and a daughter, 18, who have grown up biracial in a predominantly white area of central New York state. Because her daughter looks white--blond hair, blue eyes--"she's caught it from both sides," Haley says. "What's most hurtful to her is that her schoolmates, acquaintances [who] may not know she has a black mother and will assume she's complicit in whiteness, will tell her racist jokes."
Until the late 1960s, it was illegal in many states for blacks and whites to marry. In 1958 two Virginia residents, Mildred Jeter, a black woman, and Richard Loving, a white man, were married in Washington, D.C. When they returned to Virginia, they were charged with violating the state's ban on interracial marriage.
The couple took their case to the Supreme Court, and in 1967, in Loving vs. Virginia, the court declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional. How couples, families cope Where there are fewer legal and societal obstacles from outsiders, some women acknowledge that personal or familial ones remain. Veronica Chambers, 31, a fiction writer and freelance journalist, says she faced her own before becoming engaged to Jason Clampet, 28, who is white. "The hardest hurdle for me is that I just remember being in a really close relationship with a black man and being able to come home at the end of the day and say to him, 'It's hard being me. It's hard being a black woman in a predominantly white field.' "I needed to be able to say that to Jason or else I couldn't live with him. . . . He can take it. He knows how to give me space to talk about a situation with white people without having to defend himself." And while Andrea and Matt Wukitsch say their families largely welcomed their marriage, Andrea says her father initially had a hard time with the idea that his daughter was marrying a white man. But she held her ground, and by their wedding day her father was there to give her his blessings. "When you're willing to stand up," she says, "ultimately the good wins out, because you're with the person that you love."
