Mixed race

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March 21, 2011 | 11:58 AM | By

On the Internet, there’s still no such thing as a post-racial America

Most of the data out there on interracial relationships doesn’t come from online dating sites, but it’s high time more of it did, because the results are fascinating.

The online dating website OkCupid’s dating-trends research component, OkTrends, posted a dizzying set of graphics with analysis the other day illustrating how, in spite of new census data telling us that the United States is becoming more diverse, there is still no such thing as a post-racial America in the selective world of online dating.

According to the post, the dating service analyzed 82 million messages sent in recent months, running the numbers in different ways. On its face, the result showed white dating-service users receiving more messages per capita than non-whites, even from non-white users. But OkCupid, the majority of whose users are white, did an interesting experiment, redoing the math on the hypothetical assumption that white users weren’t the dominant majority.

What if, for example, there were just as many Asian users on the site? What OkCupid found:

Our experiment tells us that, given equal numbers, Asians would actually overwhelming prefer to message other Asians.

And so forth, for every ethnic group. OkCupid’s Christian Rudder wrote in the post:

…I think there’s an assumption that at some point all the races will just kind of come together as one, like during Michael Jackson’s “Black Or White” video or like during a lawsuit against the estate of Michael Jackson.

The data we’re seeing, however, just doesn’t support a post-racial future, because even as the races mingle more, people still like to date someone who looks like they do. Asians strongly prefer Asians; Latinos, Latinos, and so on.

The OkCupid data has points in common with the results of a recent study done by UC Berkeley in collaboration with a different dating service, which analyzed data from a million singles looking for matches online.

That data showed that whites overwhelmingly prefer to date whites. However, black online dating-service users, especially men, were more open to dating people of other racial backgrounds. From that report:

The reluctance of whites to contact blacks was true even for those who claimed they were indifferent to race. More than 80 percent of the whites contacted whites and fewer than 5 percent of them contacted blacks, a disparity that held for young as well as for older participants.

At the same time, data from the Pew Research Center shows that one in seven new marriages is between people of different ethnicities, as reported in a recent package in the New York Times on the evolution of a more multiracial population.

The story had a nifty graphic on who is marrying whom. Chances are, though, they aren’t all meeting online.

FILED UNDER: Culture/Identity, Interracial dating, Interracial relationships, Mixed race, Online dating
February 1, 2011 | 9:31 AM | By

On the emergence of a mixed race nation

Photo by 24oranges.nl/Flickr (Creative Commons)

One of the most e-mailed and tweeted stories yesterday involved students from the University of Maryland, but it involved a subject very close to the heart of Southern California. The New York Times piece explored the emergence of a mixed race America created by immigration and intermarriage through the members of the university’s Multiracial and Biracial Student Association, a group of students of mixed racial and ethnic heritage ranging from black-white to Japanese-Irish who are proud to identify as such.

According to the story, one in every seven new marriages in this country is between people of different ethnicities or races (there’s a nifty graphic). Mixed race Americans are “one of the country’s fastest-growing demographic groups,” and racial statistics from the 2010 census, which will soon be released, will likely reveal more along the lines of this trend.

But a mixed race nation, even one with a mixed race president, doesn’t necessarily translate into a post-racial society. There was this perspective, which was interesting:

No one knows quite how the growth of the multiracial population will change the country. Optimists say the blending of the races is a step toward transcending race, to a place where America is free of bigotry, prejudice and programs like affirmative action.

Pessimists say that a more powerful multiracial movement will lead to more stratification and come at the expense of the number and influence of other minority groups, particularly African-Americans.

And some sociologists say that grouping all multiracial people together glosses over differences in circumstances between someone who is, say, black and Latino, and someone who is Asian and white. (Among interracial couples, white-Asian pairings tend to be better educated and have higher incomes, according to Reynolds Farley, a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan.)

Along those lines, it is telling that the rates of intermarriage are lowest between blacks and whites, indicative of the enduring economic and social distance between them.

There was also a thoughtful reaction to the piece in a blog titled Mixed Race America, the work of Jennifer Ho, a University of North Carolina professor of American and Asian American literature who is partly of Chinese Jamaican descent. Ho writes:

I suppose what seems new is the freedom with which people are choosing to identify as mixed race. That the idea that one must only choose a singular race out of loyalty or social stigma or ethnic nationalism no longer rules the day.

However, the academic in me can’t help but think about these choices occurring in the backdrop of a university setting. In other words, do mixed-race people feel as much choice as to how they identify if they are living in mono-racial areas where there may be a stigma to identifying as mixed-race or perhaps more accurately, to not identify within a particular racial or ethnic sphere would mean having charges of being a “sell out” or “acting white” leaving one in a socially vulnerable position–and would this also be exacerbated by one’s other, potentially minoritizing, identities, like being gay/lesbian/bisexual/non-Christian/atheist/other-abled/working-class/poor?

Good story, good questions.

FILED UNDER: Culture/Identity, Health/Education, 2010 Census, Mixed race