In one of the opening scenes in the movie of Terry McMillan’s novel “Waiting to Exhale,” the character Bernadine Harris, played by Angela Bassett, turns to her husband, who had just announced he is leaving her for a white woman.
“Wait a minute,” she shouts. “I give you 11 . . . years of my life, and you’re telling me that you’re leaving me for a white woman?”
“Would it be better if she were black?” he replies.
“No,” she says, narrowing her eyes in rage. “It would be better if you were black.”
The outrage in that scene reflects a smoldering anger in the African-American community and touches an issue of race relations that lingers in America decades after the stormiest years of the civil rights movement.
At a time when interracial marriages in the U.S. are occurring at record rates among whites, Asians, Hispanics and American Indians, unions between whites and blacks remain rare.
Although such marriages have increased in recent years, the number of African-Americans marrying whites trails dramatically behind the number of marriages among whites and Hispanics, Asians and American Indians.
A confluence of factors including history, prejudice and differing concepts of beauty are used by experts to explain the resistance to intermarriage in the African-American and white communities.
Those who have studied these phenomena say black women and white men remain those most opposed to intermarriage. African-American women insist on group loyalty and resent white women for removing black men from a historically small pool of available mates. White men resist for historical reasons of prejudice, these experts say.
Because of early death rates, violence, incarceration and greater participation in military service, there are only five eligible black men for every 10 black women looking for mates, according to Larry Davis, a professor of social work and psychology at Washington University in St. Louis.
The resistance to black-white marriages continues despite much wider acceptance of other interracial unions.
Among Hispanics between the ages of 25 and 34 born in the United States, about 31 percent are married to whites, according to an analysis of 1990 U.S. Census Bureau data by Reynolds Farley, a demographer with the Russell Sage Foundation, a private social science research group.
The same study found that 36 percent of Asian men in that age group were married to white women and 45.2 percent of Asian women were married to white men. Among American Indian men the rate was 52.9 percent, and among Native American women it was 53.9 percent.
By contrast, 8 percent of African-American males and 4 percent of black women are married to people of different races.
A recent opinion poll conducted for Knight Ridder Newspapers indicates that Americans are more accepting of interracial marriages but approve of black-white marriages much less than they do unions between other racial groups.
“What we found was, despite the growing tolerance seen over the years, the combination that continues to attract least approval is black-white marriages,” said Larry Hugick, director of media and political surveys for Princeton Survey Research Associates, based in Princeton, N.J.
“You can only speculate that the reason is skin color,” he said. “Skin color is the last barrier– bigger than language and culture.”
Academic experts who long have studied this conclude that skin color, along with socioeconomic factors, plays a major role in influencing choices of mates.
“Men marry for two reasons: beauty and prestige,” said Washington University’s Davis, author of “Black and Single,” a book about romance among African-Americans. “Black women (historically) brought neither the standard of beauty nor the status. For black guys, white women brought both.”
Historical circumstances clearly have left a legacy that still affects marriages between blacks and whites.
An 1883 U.S. Supreme Court decision allowed states to impose laws forbidding a black man to have sex a white woman. Outrage over the marriage of heavyweight boxing champ Jack Johnson to a white woman in the first years of the 20th Century prompted dozens of states to ban interracial unions. The Supreme Court did not strike down miscegenation laws until 1967.
History is replete with the lynchings of black men and boys– including Chicago teen Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955–by angry white mobs for merely looking at a white woman.
As a result, black-white interracial marriage remains a highly charged subject among African-Americans, a subject that conjures up images of white-on-black rape during the slavery days and stirs strong opinions about social taboos, racial stereotypes and cultural preservation.
Julia Hare, a San Francisco-based psychologist and author of “How to Find and Keep a BMW (Black Man Working),” asserted that while some blacks marry whites strictly for love, a large number of American-Americans enter into such unions in an attempt to climb the social ladder.
“Highly successful black men will marry a white woman because she gives him his whiteness. He thinks, `I’m not a full man until I have what the white man has–his woman,’ ” Hare said. “His economic stature is what he gives her.”
Earl Ofari Hutchinson, a Los Angeles-based psychologist, said the O.J. Simpson case for many reinforced stereotypes about black men preying on white women. However, he rejects the notions that blacks are driven to marry whites because of self-hatred, low self-esteem or the “forbidden fruit” syndrome.
With the artificial barriers of segregation gone, he said, whites and blacks have been able to discover common interests through interaction in public schools, on college campuses and in the workplace.
“People in these relationships have common desires and love, admiration and respect for each other,” said Hutchinson, who has written extensively on the subject. “You can’t regulate relationships. People fall in love because they fall in love.”
Other experts say the changing economic status of black women as they move into professions and corporate life where they interact with a wider range of people also will affect the rate of intermarriage with white males.
“As black women do better economically, you will see more black women marrying white men,” Davis said.
Clayton Majete, a professor of sociology and anthropology at New York’s Baruch College, has followed the lives of 450 black-white couples around the country for the last ten years.
“Interracial marriages do significantly better and last longer than same-race marriages,” said Majete, suggesting that shared adversity played a role. “People getting involved in an interracial marriage know it is going to be hard.”
There are many examples of happy and highly successful unions between African-Americans and white people.
With more than 2 million mixed-race marriages in California, Joe and Elizabeth Hicks are hardly an anomaly. He is an African-American, she is a white Jew, and they have been married for 17 years. They met during their student days at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
They have found open-minded attitudes to such unions in California and have not experienced any blatant discrimination.
Occasionally they encounter stares, raised eyebrows and whispers from people they assume don’t approve of their relationship.
“The most dramatic reaction comes from African-American women,” Joe Hicks, 57, executive director of the Los Angeles Human Relations Commission. “They say, `Here’s another brother with a white woman.’ “
The Hickses have attempted to give their 10- and 7-year-old daughters equal exposure to their background–African-American, American Indian, Jewish, Russian and German. They have not pressured them to identify with any one group.
As a civil rights activist, Hicks said he hopes such successful marriages will help break down racial barriers.
Jerri-Anne Garl, a white, is married to Charles Smith, an African-American. Like the Hickes, the couple, from Evanston, Ill., have been married 17 years, and they said they have experienced only one major act of discrimination: They were denied an apartment.
Garl and Smith, who met in college, discovered they had much in common, including parents who grew up in rural communities. “We found we had a lot of the same values and interests,” Garl said.
Garl said she and her husband are raising their 15-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter to be comfortable among all races. The couple helped found an Evanston chapter of Interracial Family Network.
“On my most optimistic days, I’d like to think that at some point in the future, race will not be recognized as the first thing people think of when they describe a person,” said Garl, 46.
“I’m not saying we shouldn’t recognize differences. But I hope we can get to a place where we value our friendships based on the kind of people they are and not prejudging people by racial categories.”
