Table Of ContentThe New Americans
Recent Immigration and American Society
Edited by
Steven J. Gold and Rubén G. Rumbaut
A Series from LFB Scholarly
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Intermarriage across Race and
Ethnicity among Immigrants
E Pluribus Unions
Charlie V. Morgan
LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC
El Paso 2009
Copyright © 2009 by LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC
All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Morgan, Charlie V., 1972-
Intermarriage across race and ethnicity among immigrants : E pluribus
unions / Charlie V. Morgan.
p. cm. -- (The new Americans : recent immigration and American
society)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-59332-294-6 (alk. paper)
1. Intermarriage--United States. 2. Interethnic marriage--United
States. 3. Interracial marriage--United States. 4. Immigrants--United
States. I. Title.
HQ1031.M67 2009
306.84'60869120973--dc22
2008043887
ISBN 978-1-59332-294-6
Printed on acid-free 250-year-life paper.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Introduction 1
Chapter Two
History and Theory 11
Chapter Three
Conceptualization and Methodology 37
Chapter Four
Deconstructing Intermarriage in the United States 51
Chapter Five
Mixed Relationships Among Children of Immigrants in Southern
California 83
Chapter Six
Clarifying Race and Ethnicity in Mixed Relationships 115
Chapter Seven
Gender and Informality in Mixed Relationships 145
Chapter Eight
Summary and Conclusions 177
Appendixes 193
References 217
Index 225
v
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Acknowledgments
I am most indebted to my mentor Rubén G. Rumbaut. This project was
born out of innumerable discussions with Rubén in graduate seminars,
while teaching “Race and Ethnicity” as his teaching assistant, while
“deeply familiarizing” ourselves with various data sources as his
research assistant, over meals, at conferences, and even at the airport
when we got snowed in and spent the night there. I express my deepest
appreciation to Rubén for the numerous ways in which he taught me
the true value and spirit of empirical research, as well as his generous
financial support. Most importantly, I thank him for granting me access
to his data sets. He not only taught me about the profession of
sociology, but also “professionalized” me into the discipline—even if it
was more than I wanted to know at times.
I would like to thank John M. Liu. He was always there when I needed
to talk to someone about particular issues and ideas that I was wrestling
with. I am most grateful for his openness, time, and patience. In
addition, I would like to thank Linda Vo, Jen’nan Read, Dorothy
Fujita-Rony, Ted Fowler, Phil Cohen, David Snow, and Matt Huffman
(among other professors in sociology and outside of sociology) for their
ideas and encouragement. I treasure the memories and friendships that
were formed.
I received support from so many people (too numerous to name). Here
are some of those people who deserve the most thanks: Monica Trieu,
Goldie Komaie, Mark Leach, Roberto Gonzales, Makiko Fuwa, and
Yuki Kato. I grew close to all of them and made lifelong friends. I am
also grateful for others who supported me in various forms along the
way: Danielle Rudes, Becky Trammell, Sabeen Sandhu, Sharon Oselin,
Rosie Tafoya-Estrada, Carol Glasser, Diana Pan, Hien Park, and Allen
Kim. In addition, I would like to thank Arisbeth Diaz and Lisa Nguyen
for their invaluable assistance analyzing and writing up the in-depth
interviews. Many of my key insights came during our brainstorming
sessions.
Finally, I would like to thank my colleagues at Brigham Young
University. They have continually encouraged me and made this book
possible.
vii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Besides superstardom, Barack Obama, Tiger Woods and
Derek Jeter have another common bond: Each is a child of an
interracial marriage.
—David Crary (2007)
Everywhere we turn, we see images of “interracial marriages.” Back in
1967, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, in which Sidney Poitier’s
character falls in love with Katharine Houghton’s character, marked the
first time a major film featured an interracial couple. Now it is much
more common, as witnessed by the numerous movies featuring
interracial couples, such as Die Another Day and Monster’s Ball, where
Halle Berry falls for Pierce Brosnan and embraces Billy Bob Thornton.
Interracial couples are becoming more popular on TV as well:
characters played by Sandra Oh and Isaiah Washington on Grey’s
Anatomy are just one example. Recently, popular books such as
Interracial Intimacies by Randall Kennedy (2003) and Interracial
Intimacy by Rachel Moran (2001) have focused on interracial
relationships. Newspaper headlines such as “Blacks, Whites and Love”
(Kristof 2005) and “Interracial Marriages Surge Across U.S.” (Crary
2007) are commonplace. Even recent research reports, such as the Pew
Research Center’s “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” (Taylor, Funk,
and Craighill 2006) and the Population Reference Bureau’s “New
Marriages, New Families: U.S. Racial and Hispanic Intermarriage”
(Lee and Edmonston 2005), have focused on interracial marriages.
1
2 Intermarriage Across Race and Ethnicity Among Immigrants
What with celebrities such as Barack Obama, Tiger Woods, and
Derek Jeter, who are “each . . . a child of an interracial marriage”
(Crary 2007), we are continually reminded of intermarriage. It is no
wonder there is so much interest in interracial marriages. Most of these
examples from media coverage of interracial marriages focus on black-
white couples. Even Crary’s (2007) article is clearly centered on
interracial marriages between blacks and whites:
Since the landmark Loving v. Virginia ruling, the number of
interracial marriages has soared; for example black-white
marriages increased from 65,000 in 1970 to 422,000 in 2005,
according to Census Bureau figures. Factoring in all racial
combinations, Stanford University sociologist Michael
Rosenfeld calculates that more than 7 percent of America’s 59
million couples in 2005 were interracial, compared to less than
2 percent in 1970.
However, the story of interracial relationships in the United States is
not so simple. What is often left out of these discussions of interracial
relationships is that mass waves of immigration started coinciding with
the Loving v. Virginia antimiscegenation ruling in the late 1960s. Of the
three celebrities mentioned above, Barack Obama is the son of a black
Kenyan and a white Kansan. How often do we hear of debates about
immigration when discussing Obama? Even more telling is Tiger
Woods, the famous “black golfer” who is more Asian than black: Tiger
is one-fourth Chinese, one-fourth Thai, one-fourth African American,
one-eighth Native American, and one-eighth Dutch (Weisman 2001).
In focusing on black-white interracial couples, scholarly and
popular interests fail to factor in how the recent immigration patterns
impact interracial marriages. First, black-white couples represent only 8
percent of all interracial couples in the United States (Lee and
Edmonston 2005).1 The majority of interracial couples involve a
partner from either Asia or Latin America, usually as a direct result of
post-1960 immigration. Second, the rate of intermarriage increase
1. This number does not include blacks who identify themselves as multiracial.
Including those people would not increase the overall percent by much, since
only 4 percent of blacks identified themselves as multiracial in the 2000 Census
(Lee and Bean 2003).
Description:Morgan examines the relationship between assimilation and intermarriage. In studying mixed relationships, he finds that ethnicity, in the form of language and religion, is more important than race. Males and females were more likely to find themselves in coethnic relationships as they imagined the r
