Fryer claims that 90% of Americans mostly pray with representatives of their own race or nationality. In a typical American city, to ensure even distribution of white and black residents, 64% of the latter would need to be relocated to other areas. Even in public schools, relations among American teenagers are quite segregated: the average American student has 0.7 friends of another race.
However, the author believes, the most interesting indicator of segregation in American society is interracial marriage. For his analysis, Fryer uses statistics from 1880 to 2000. As Fryer shows, even today interracial marriages in the US are rare. Only 1% of whites, 5% of blacks, and 14% of Asians marry someone of a different race.
At the end of the 17th century, slavery in some southern US states was replaced by 'indentured servitude': a black worker was obligated to work for his master for a certain period, usually four to seven years, without any monetary payment, but receiving food, housing, etc. Whites began working in close contact with blacks. This led to rapprochement between them, and in some cases to cohabitation. The result was the first laws against racial mixing, which prohibited marriages, and in some cases sexual relations between people of different races.
Virginia and Maryland were the first states to adopt such laws, punishing their white citizens for intimate relations with black residents. According to Virginia law, any white citizen who married a representative of the black race was to be expelled from the state within three months. In 1705, the law was tightened, and in addition to exile, the violator was to serve six months in prison. In Maryland, according to law, if a white woman married a black man, she automatically became a slave of her new husband's master. One of the main purposes of these laws was to prevent the transfer of inheritance from white citizens to their black descendants. Subsequently, such norms began to be adopted to prevent marriages of whites with Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos. Interestingly, mixed marriages with Native Americans and Latinos were considered normal.
However, the laws did not particularly hinder such relationships. For example, the third US president (1801-1809) Thomas Jefferson had a long-term romantic relationship with his slave Sally Hemings. Jefferson lived in Virginia for a long time and even was governor of that state. He himself spoke out against interracial marriage, claiming it would negatively affect the US. The first rumors of Jefferson's unseemly behavior appeared in 1802 (he was married, and Hemings was his mistress or concubine). In 1998-2001, a series of genetic tests were conducted: comparing the DNA of Sally Hemings' and Thomas Jefferson's descendants. The studies showed that with 99.99% probability it can be asserted that Jefferson indeed had illegitimate children by a black slave.
Until 1967, when the US Supreme Court ruled that such bans were unconstitutional, 16 American states out of 50 still enforced them. Another interesting fact: in 1987, 35 US states prohibited white families from adopting black orphans. This rule was only repealed in 1996, after the adoption of a law prohibiting such a practice.
According to statistics cited in Fryer's study, in 1880, family unions between whites on one side and blacks or Asians on the other constituted only 0.1% of all marriages contracted by whites. Initially, white citizens preferred to start a family with blacks rather than Asians, although later the trend reversed. From 1880 to 1980, the share of marriages between white men and black women was less than 0.1% of the total. Since 1980, this indicator began to rise and by 2000 reached 0.2%. The number of marriages between black men and white women increased from 0.10% in 1970 to 0.45% in 2000. Currently, nearly 6% of marriages entered into by African Americans are with white women. Families formed by African American women with white men are about 2.9%. Unions between white men and Asian women were rare until 1960. Then their number began to grow, and by 2000 increased tenfold. Now this is the most common model of interracial marriage in the US.
Earlier, statistics indicated that interracial marriages were most often contracted between people with low levels of education. Between 1940 and 1960, white Americans without even a high school diploma were the most likely participants in interracial unions (0.1% of all marriages). At the same time, highly educated Americans very rarely formed such families. Nevertheless, starting in the 1970s, the situation began to change. In 2000, interracial marriages contracted by white men with a university education accounted for 0.4% of all unions of white men with a similar level of education. For white female university graduates, this figure was 0.25%.
Interestingly, Americans who have served in the military are generally more inclined to enter into interracial marriages. One explanation may be the fact that military personnel are much more often required to communicate and find common ground with representatives of other races. According to the study, starting in 1960, 'white' and 'black' veterans who served in the military are more likely to enter into interracial marriages than their peers who did not serve. By 2000, among 'white' veterans, interracial marriages accounted for 1.3%, among whites who did not serve – 0.9%. Similar figures for blacks are 6.9% and 4.3%. However, among veterans of Asian descent, the opposite trend is observed. By 2000, among Asians who did not serve in the military, the number of interracial marriages was 35%, while Asian veterans formed families with representatives of a different race in only 24% of cases.
The most common type of interracial marriage in the United States is a marriage between a white man and an Asian woman. Such unions account for 20% of marriages contracted by Asian women in the U.S., and 35% of marriages contracted by Asian women born in the U.S. The second most common type of interracial marriage is a union between a black man and a white woman. About 6% of marriages contracted by African Americans are such marriages.
In turn, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that in 2005, 422,000 marriages were contracted in the country where the spouses belonged to different races. The increase in the number of interracial marriages prompted the Census Bureau to change the questionnaire that Americans filled out during the national census. Usually, U.S. residents had to indicate their race. In 2000, for the first time, the answer option 'multiracial background' was added. Then 2.4% of the U.S. population (6.8 million people) stated that they had mixed racial background. Among young Americans (under 18), 4.2% had such background, among older generations – 1.9%. If in 1970 only one out of every 100 children born in the U.S. had multiracial background, then in 2000 it was one out of 19. In some states (for example, California), this figure was even higher - one out of 10. The largest number of Americans of mixed background in 2000 lived in the state of Hawaii (more than 24.5% of the state's population were people whose parents belonged to different races), the smallest - in Mississippi, West Virginia, Maine, Alabama and South Carolina (less than 1%).
According to sociologists at Stanford University, in 2005, out of 59 million married couples existing in the U.S., 7% consisted of spouses of different skin color. According to estimates from the National Center for Health Statistics, interracial families break up more often than those where both spouses are of the same skin color. The risk of divorce for a 'mixed-color' family existing for 10 years is 41%, for a 'monoracial' couple - 31%.
The most well-known interracial families are those formed by celebrities. For example, director and actor Woody Allen is married to an Asian woman, actor Robert De Niro to an African American woman, former U.S. Secretary of Defense (in the Bill Clinton administration) William Cohen to a black woman. In turn, U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama, golfer Tiger Woods, actors Keanu Reeves and Halle Berry had 'mixed-color' parents.