On Loving and Racism

June 12, 2017, was the 50^th anniversary of the US Supreme Court decision Loving v Virginia, which overturned a Virginia state law making interracial marriage illegal. It finally eliminated all such racial bans across the US. There was considerable interest in the case in the US (see for example here and here). 

Mildred and Richard Loving

The case involved a white man, Richard Loving, who married a woman, Mildred Jeter Loving, who was of mixed African and Native American descent. They grew up in a mixed race community, and knew each other because Richard was friends with Mildred’s brother, with whom he shared an interest in car racing. Interracial marriage was illegal in Virginia at the time, so they had gone to Washington DC to get a marriage license. Shortly after they were married, they were arrested in July 1958, in the middle of the night, by an eager sheriff. They avoided jail by agreeing to leave Virginia, but were homesick in DC and so, with the help of civil rights lawyers, and even though they did not seek to be activists, they appealed their case all the way to the Supreme Court. Fifty years ago, in a unanimous decision that reversed decades of legal precedent for anti-miscegenation laws, the Lovings won their appeal and were free to live in marriage in Virginia.

One aspect of the story that few people realize, and that I was not aware of growing up in the US, is that these racial laws are not that old. The law used against the Lovings was the “Racial Integrity Act” of 1924. I understood that the laws were “an instrument of ‘White Supremacy’”, as Chief Justice Earl Warren had written in his unanimous opinion, but I did not understand, growing up, that these laws had to be strengthened and reinforced to continue to mark the lines between the races, and indeed to create the lines. Many earlier laws had been repealed from the 1860s to the 1880s (e.g. in Illinois, Michigan, and Washington). Similar laws were repealed in 15 states between 1948 and 1965, in many cases probably because they also discriminated against Asians (California in 1948, Indiana 1965; see full list here). The Loving v Virginia case overturned anti-miscegenation laws in the remaining 16 states, mostly in the Deep South.

Many articles celebrating Loving Day, as it has become known, comment on the increase in frequency of interracial marriage. According to Pew, the rate has increased from 3 percent in 1967 to 17 percent today. Public opinion has changed too: according to a University of Chicago GeneralSocial Survey poll, only 14 percent of nonblack adults say they are “very or somewhat opposed” to a close relative marrying a black person, compared to 63 percent in 1990. (Of course, this is what they say to pollsters; the real number is likely to be higher, since there is strong social pressure to be non-racist--which is actually good.)

But it is worth looking more closely at these figures. First of all, it is striking that whites are the group with the lowest rate of intermarriage, just 11 percent, compared to 18 percent for blacks. For Asians, it is 29 percent, and for Hispanics it is 27 percent. Even more striking is that 39 percent of US-born Hispanics and almost half (46 percent) of US-born Asians marry outside their group.

As an aside, black men are twice as likely as black women to marry outside their group (24 vs 12 percent), while Asian women (36 percent) are much more likely that Asian men (21 percent) to marry out. (See details from Pew here).

Since whites are the larger group, it is perhaps not surprising that mixing is less common than in the minority groups. But I wonder if a good deal of the intermarriage is within “people of color” and thus not having as much effect on whites as might be assumed.

Furthermore, much of the supposed intermarriage may be between people who are already “mixed” themselves. A Eurasian man, born to an Asian mother and white father, will legally be considered Asian (the US government defines race matrilineally), but may not be treated as “Asian” in white American society. His marriage to a “white” woman will not raise as many eyebrows as his mother’s marriage may have.

Similarly, a white man married to a Cuban-American woman may be considered a “mixed marriage” because she checks the box as “Hispanic,” but in terms of phenotypic appearance, it is possible she could pass for white… or at least as Italian. It may not really be considered by their families as a "mixed marriage."

The issue is really a matter of our definition of “race” and culture. In a NY Times article printing reminiscences of mixed marriages, many wrote about “cultural differences.” If the couples grew up in different countries, or in different subcultures within the US, this may be an issue. But the story of Loving v Virginia is about “race,” not about culture; it is about not being able to marry because of what one looks like. The whole issue of race in America is confused, and intermarriage is making it more so. “Hispanics” are recognized as an “ethnic group” but are put on the same order of difference as “race.” Yet clearly a Hispanic’s experience in the US will be different depending on whether they are an Argentine who looks white like Lionel Messi (or the Pope) or a Dominican who looks black and indigenous like the baseball player RobinsonCanó. 

Gradually, American definitions of “race” have to change. Chief Justice Earl Warren had questioned the notion of a “pure race” in his questions to the lawyer for the state of Virginia, but the final decision did not address that issue, focusing just on the idea that anyone should be able to marry whoever they want. As one commentator points out, it is unfortunate that the Supreme Court did not challenge the very concept of race.

I am uncomfortable with the hope for more interracial marriage as a solution to America’s racial problems. It sounds like the inverse of eugenics, and it does not really address the racism at the root of discrimination. Racism is a cultural idea; it does not spring naturally from physical differences. There are  Yet, confusing categories does serve a purpose. We can call this the Sneetches Theory of antiracism, after the Dr. Seuss story of Sneetches with stars on their belly who discriminated against those who did not have a star. Technology to add and remove the star created confusion of categories, after which all lived happily together (see video of the story here). My father served in Puerto Rico during WWII, and he told me segregation in the military seemed ridiculous because brothers, with the same mother and father, would be assigned to “white” or “Negro” units, based on their physical appearance and the mood of the officer in charge on that particular day. Clearly “race” was a problematic category, and it undermined attempts to “keep them in their place.”

But ultimately, racism will be defeated through cultural change, not biological change. As in the story of the Sneetches, only when people agree to drop the categories will racism be overcome.

I heard a disturbing interview with Pat Buchanan on This American Life. Buchanan was asked how he felt that he had run for president three times in the 1990s and lost, but Trump took most of his ideas and won. (He said he was fine with it, happy the country is being saved.) In the interview, he defended his anti-immigrant position, a basically racist view, saying the country is already too divided, so the US should not let in non-white immigrants. He claims they do not assimilate. He thinks the US was better before 1960 when it was “majority European white” and when asked why he is against immigration, he says “I feel more comfortable with the folks [I] grew up with.” Until Trump’s election, these views were dying out with Buchanan’s generation. It remains to be seen whether the racism of the Alt Right is the last gasp of the reactionaries, or will be strengthened and emboldened by the Trump administration. In any case, I find it surprising and disappointing that intelligent people like Buchanan can say such racist things, fifty years after Loving v Virginia.

Racism and individualism

I heard a very interesting NPR Fresh Air interview withRichard Rothstein yesterday on the podcast while doing errands (transcript here). He has just published a book that shows how US federal government policies during the New Deal (1933-1941) had systematically discriminated against Blacks. He noted, for example, that the term “redlining” referred to government maps that had neighborhoods marked with a red line where government loans were not allowed because residents of those neighborhoods were Black. I thought I had heard him on Fresh Air before, so I googled his name. Sure enough, I found that he was a guest on Fresh Air almost two years ago.

In my google search, I stumbled across a right wing blog by Jack Coleman of the Media Research Center’s “News Busters” (which claims to expose "liberal bias") that has a severely distorted take on Rothstein’s argument, and it—and especially the comments section—show serious lack of understanding of social forces.

First the distortions. Coleman begins by implying that though FDR is an iconic leader for liberals, his record with the New Deal is problematic. He then includes a transcript of sections of the Fresh Air interview, with key parts in bold, to highlight the facts raised by Rothstein. These facts (accurately reported) include:

• The Public Works Administration of the New Deal had explicit segregation policy, “So public housing policy created racial segregation where none existed before.”
• The Federal Housing Administration would not give loans to Blacks, so the suburbs that sprang up after WWII were all white.
• “Public housing became all-black in the inner city. And these two policies -- of public housing and Federal Housing Administration subsidization of suburbs -- are the two major factors that have created the segregation that we know today.”

 Coleman also highlights a part of the interview where Rothstein mentions that George Romney (Mitt’s father and former governor of Michigan) had tried, as Nixon’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, to only offer federal funds to communities that desegregated, but was blocked by the Nixon administration. He somehow thinks this exonerates Republicans from being charged with racism; seems to me it only exonerates Romney the Elder. Coleman also notes that unions prevented Blacks from joining, and that this discrimination was endorsed by the National Labor Relations Board, so was not merely a local action. Only after 1964 was this reversed. Again, this is supposed to indict all labor unions (American conservatives hate unions), but my take is that racism was deep-seated and made worse by state action, not that racism was somehow inherent in labor unions.

Rothstein’s point is made clear when he notes that for most Americans, homeownership is the main way that wealth was created and accumulated, and since subsidized home ownership was not possible for Blacks, it resulted in much lower levels of wealth for Blacks. While Blacks earn 60% as much as whites, they own only 5% as much wealth as whites. This provides Blacks with less of a buffer, which is why Blacks suffered more than whites from the Great Recession of 2008.

(As an aside, Rothstein repeats many of these points in his 2017 interview, including these 60% and 5% numbers. I checked the transcripts to see if the 2017 interview was not a repeat of the 2015 interview, but it is a new interview, albeit with some repetition. A good interviewee knows how to tell a story and focus on the core message, even if he/she is repeating himself. If I had been interviewed, I might have assumed listeners had heard me the first time, or would be annoyed by my repetition. As it happens, I only vaguely remembered the first interview, so he was right to repeat himself.)

Coleman’s take on all this is to imply that liberals have suppressed this information because it conveniently “perpetuates the myth that the Republicans are solely responsible for racism in this country.” This “myth” is, in fact, a surprise to me. A myth of a myth. While the Republicans are indeed the party of racism today, they were clearly the opposite from Lincoln through to Eisenhower. Coleman displays fake surprise that a Berkeley professor would do such research, and that such a story would end up on “liberal media.” This is rather disingenuous, since it is liberals in general who are concerned with questions of inequality (conservatives assume a free market would reduce inequality; they do not believe Picketty). Coleman likes the story only because he thinks it undermines the ideals and practices of the New Deal, which conservatives love to hate.

Implicit in Coleman’s critique is also the idea that if it had not been for “government interference,” there would not have been any discrimination. That is not how most liberals will take this story. They will see it as a case of how despite the liberal intentions of the FDR administration, Black interests were sacrificed because of racist notions at the time. Liberals will not see this story as undermining the New Deal. But conservatives are right that “good intentions” and government programs have the potential to cause great harm. Of course, not acting can also cause or perpetuate great harm.

The most up-voted comments to Coleman’s blog shows that right wing Americans are intensely individualistic. One comment is a resentful attack against “victimhood”, particularly of “blaming conservatives and Republicans, and whites in general.” Addressing Blacks, he/she says:

Stop blaming whites, stop blaming slavery, stop blaming Jim Crow and segragation [sic] and start taking an independent initiative to make a better life for yourself and your family. Continue to blame whites and don't be surprised to find your children and grandchildren still living in ghettos for generations to come.

 A comment to this comment says:

Until a spotlight is turned on black inner city culture...nothing will change. It's not about race...but it's always been about culture. Getting an education, being married, and bringing up your children to do the same is a large part of the answer. Why can't anyone say that in public today?

Because it is simplistic and wrong?

That writer falls back on the common “blame the victim” argument: Blacks are poor because of their individual behavior, because of their (implicitly) dysfunctional culture. Americans are intensely individualist and ahistorical. These commentators are not interested in how the past affects the present. Interestingly, they are not even following the logic of the blog (and the book), which is that federal government intervention made poverty worse for Blacks. These readers assume that by getting an education, being married, etc., one can single-handedly pull oneself up by the bootstraps, as the expression goes. The institutional factors like redlining that disadvantaged Blacks are completely ignored. While Rothstein is making institutional racism even more dramatically clear with his research, these commentators insist on individuals being Horatio Alger. They are saying, OK, racism happened, but get over it! Move on! If only it were so easy.

There are important individual choices that each person makes that affect their lifecourse. But any basic social science course (by which I mean sociology, anthropology, political science; not economics) will also teach us that we do not make these choices entirely freely. Interestingly, conservatives in Europe are more aware of the importance of institutions and historical forces in shaping our individual choices. American conservatives have perhaps studied too much economics, and reduce everything to the individual. We need better ways of integrating the structural forces of society with individual choices. This has, in fact, been one of the main issues in anthropology over the past 40 years. But there is little hope for the US politically if many people cannot see structural forces, and even misread research like Rothstein’s and think it only means individuals need to make better choices.

Innumeracy

The inability of the press to report poll and survey results is astonishing. The most recent glaring example comes from the BBC.  In an online article on interracial marriage,  the second paragraph reads:

The study, done by Pew Research Center also shows increasing public acceptance of intermarriage, with 43% saying it as been a societal change for the better.

I actually found this rather alarming, in that it suggests 57% of Americans either thought it was a change for the worse or were not sure.  But as I suspected, it is the lack of understanding of statistics (or at least poor writing) that led to this unfortunate sentence.  The beauty of the web is that I can go to the original, and find out what they actually said:

More than four-in-ten Americans (43%) say that more people of different races marrying each other has been a change for the better in our society, while 11% say it has been a change for the worse and 44% say it has made no difference.

In fact, the "made no difference" is probably the "correct" non-racial answer; "for the better" is a racial PC answer. The original report also goes on to indicate that this is part of a major change in attitudes over the past 25 years:

Also, nearly two-thirds of Americans (63%) say it “would be fine” with them if a member of their own family were to marry someone outside their own racial or ethnic group. In 1986, the public was divided about this. Nearly three-in-ten Americans (28%) said people of different races marrying each other was not acceptable for anyone, and an additional 37% said this may be acceptable for others, but not for themselves. Only one-third of the public (33%) viewed intermarriage as acceptable for everyone.

 This is also reported in the BBC report, but the contrast is not made as clearly. This is not entirely the BBC's fault, because the questions were apparently not the same in the two surveys.

The Pew report itself is worth reading; among the interesting discoveries (quoting the executive summary):

Gender patterns in intermarriage vary widely. About 24% of all black male newlyweds in 2010 married outside their race, compared with just 9% of black female newlyweds. Among Asians, the gender pattern runs the other way. About 36% of Asian female newlyweds married outside their race in 2010, compared with just 17% of Asian male newlyweds. Intermarriage rates among white and Hispanic newlyweds do not vary by gender.

About one-in-five (22%) of all newlyweds in Western states married someone of a different race or ethnicity between 2008 and 2010, compared with 14% in the South, 13% in the Northeast and 11% in the Midwest.

More than one-third of Americans (35%) say that a member of their immediate family or a close relative is currently married to someone of a different race.