Andrew Sullivan: On-line dating and the increase in interracial marriage:

2017/10/14 Leave a comment

Interesting:

Just when I had given up on the web, I stumble across some new data. Yep, it appears that dating apps are changing our society, by becoming the second-most common way straights meet partners, and by expanding the range of people we can meet. (For gay men, it’s almost the only way people meet for sex and relationships.) But here’s what’s intriguing: Correlated with that is a sustained, and hard-to-explain, rise in interracial marriage.

Or so say two researchers, Josue Ortega at the University of Essex in the U.K. and Philipp Hergovich at the University of Vienna in Austria. Money quote: “It is intriguing that shortly after the introduction of the first dating websites in 1995, like Match.com, the percentage of new marriages created by interracial couples increased rapidly,” say the researchers. “The increase became steeper in the 2000s, when online dating became even more popular. Then, in 2014, the proportion of interracial marriages jumped again.” That was when Tinder took off.

No, there’s no causation proven, but the authors, running various computer models on the effects of wider online social networks, are stumped to come up with an alternative explanation. (Fewer white people as a proportion of the population can’t account for the sharpness of the rise.) Again: “The researchers start by simulating what happens when extra links are introduced into a social network. Their network consists of men and women from different races who are randomly distributed. In this model, everyone wants to marry a person of the opposite sex but can only marry someone with whom a connection exists. This leads to a society with a relatively low level of interracial marriage. But if the researchers add random links between people from different ethnic groups, the level of interracial marriage changes dramatically.” Even more encouraging, the marriages begun online seem to last longer than others.

I wonder if online dating doesn’t just expand your ability to meet more people of another race, by eliminating geography and the subtle grouping effect of race and class and education. Maybe it lowers some of the social inhibitions against interracial dating. Online, people don’t have to flirt with someone of another race while being observed by their peers, and more people have the courage of their own desires. It’s always seemed to me that racism is deeply ingrained in human nature, and always will be, simply because our primate in-group aversion to members of an out-group expresses itself in racism, unless you actively fight it. You can try every law or custom to mitigate this, but it will only go so far. But blur the races with miscegenation, and you add one more powerful solvent to the racism we all have somewhere in our lizard brains.

Source: Andrew Sullivan: Trump’s Mindless Nihilism

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Where is the love: How tolerant is Canada of its interracial couples?

2016/10/05 Leave a comment

Minelle Mahtani’s study of mixed couples:

Is love the last frontier of racial bigotry in Canada?

It’s a question that intrigues Minelle Mahtani, who has dared to ask whether interracial couples and their families still test the limits of tolerance in this country.In her recent book Mixed Race Amnesia: Resisting the Romanticization of Multiraciality in Canada, Mahtani, an associate professor in human geography and journalism at the University of Toronto Scarborough, questions whether we’ve not just put rose-coloured glasses on our multiculturalism, especially where mixed-race families are concerned.

While interracial relationships are on the rise in Canada (we had 360,000 mixed-race couples in 2011, more than double the total from 20 years earlier), the numbers remain slim. Just 5 per cent of all unions in Canada were between people of different ethnic origins, religions, languages and birthplaces in 2011, the last year Statistics Canada collected such data. That figure rises only marginally in urban areas: Just 8 per cent of couples were in mixed-race relationships in Toronto, 10 per cent in Vancouver.

How do people in interracial relationships experience that multiculturalism on the ground, when they introduce their boyfriends and girlfriends to family, or hold hands on a date? How do mixed-race families and their children feel about it, in their communities and in their schools?

Mahtani was the keynote speaker at last month’s Hapa-palooza, an annual festival celebrating mixed heritage in Vancouver, and she will present at the next Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference in California in February. She spoke with The Globe and Mail about the daily realities of mixed-race families.

How tolerant are Canadians of interracial relationships today?

It’s an early kind of euphoria around celebrating multiracialism in Canada. We’ve romanticized this notion far too quickly. All the numbers from Statistics Canada show that yes, we are seeing more interracial relationships, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that the racism is decreasing. People who are in interracial relationships are still experiencing a lot of racism.

What kind of criticism do mixed-race people in this country still get for their dating choices?

So much depends on where the relationship is happening and the class background of the people who are getting involved. Even though there’s a greater tolerance of interracial relationships, some researchers talk about this as a kind of “repressive tolerance”: it’s not quite acceptance but a kind of toleration.

So many of the mixed-race people I interviewed spoke about the challenges that their own parents faced as interracial couples. We’re talking about kids whose parents met in the seventies and earlier when there was much more outright, blatant racism experienced by interracial couples.

Source: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/relationships/where-is-the-love-how-tolerant-is-canada-of-its-interracial-couples/article32206930/

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