Interracial Couples Not The Curiosity They Once Were. P-D 7/19/1996

Headline: INTERRACIAL COUPLES NOT THE CURIOSITY THEY ONCE WERE - THANK GOODNESS
Reporter: By Gregory Freeman

Publication: ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Last Printed: Fri., Jul. 19, 1996
Section: WAR PAGE Page: 5B Edition: FIVE STAR LIFT

WHEN MY WIFE and I married 17 years ago, we'd often encounter something most married couples never had to deal with:
    Stares. I'm black; Elizabeth is white. For some people, our union was considered unusual, and we'd often find people staring at us.
    In restaurants, on planes, at the Zoo, people would stare. Some would be subtle, glancing at us only when they thought we weren't looking. Others would be more overt, gazing upon us as if they expected us to develop stripes at any moment.
    Elizabeth and I even developed a coping mechanism: Usually, if we stared back, they would turn their heads, sometimes in embarrassment.

But something's changed over the years. We rarely find ourselves stared at anymore. Rarely do we draw a curious, hostile - or even a second - glance. Interracial couples, I've concluded, have become more accepted.

Interracial marriages aren't new, of course. Marriages between whites and Asians, for example, are as common and as accepted as coffee and doughnuts. But - perhaps for a variety of reasons - marriages between blacks and whites were considered taboo for years.

And while racial tension has been heightening, while heartbeats have been racing and blood pressure rising over issues like affirmative action, something else has been going on: Blacks and whites have been falling in love.

A new study says the number of black-white couples is rising sharply.
     The current edition of New Democrat magazine features a study that notes that of all new marriages by blacks in 1993, 12.1 percent were to white partners, up from 2.6 percent in 1970 and from less than 1 percent in 1960.
     The study is based on an examination of figures from the Census, from the National Center for Health Statistics and from the June current population survey. The figures in the study are conservative because several states - including California, Texas, Florida and the District of Columbia - don't report to the health statistics center or don't include race in the information they gather.
     The number of interracial couples remains small, making up about 1 percent, or 500,000, of the nation's 57 million marriages, the study says.

Timothy S. Sullivan, an economics instructor at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, authored the study with Douglas J. Besherov, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.
     "You don't go to a ballgame or a shopping mall or wherever these days without seeing interracial couples, so I wasn't surprised the numbers had increased, " he said. "But I was surprised by the magnitude."
     He expects to see the numbers grow.
     "We have more interaction between races than we once did, " he said. "It's only natural that more people would fall in love.
     "It's got to be a good thing for the country, " he said. "The children of these couples are going to be a force in the next 20-30 years. When we get to the point where 20 percent of the young adults in this country grow up in mixed race households, I hope we'll see fewer problems with racism."

Interracial marriages are still criticized in some circles of African-Americans, some of whom view the blacks in such unions as selling out. Some black women are critical of relationships between black men and white women, fearful that the pool of eligible black men, already small, will get even smaller.

Their concerns are understandable, but I don't put much stock in the "selling out" criticism, based on my own experiences. I dated black women before I met my wife, and I didn't go out looking for a white woman to date. We were friends first, back in college, and our friendship blossomed into a relationship.
We used to chuckle when the occasional self-proclaimed open-minded person would come up to us and say things like, "I think it's so wonderful that the two of you have decided to fight for civil rights and racial cooperation by marrying one another." We'd laugh because we were doing nothing of the kind. We weren't making a statement; we'd simply fallen in love.

I was raised to believe that people are the same. For me, the content of one's character, to paraphrase the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., is more important than the color of that person's skin. That's the way my wife and I have raised our son.

Based on the study, it's apparent that more and more people agree.

Gregory Freeman's column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Friday ... < deleted >

Daniel Schesch - Webweaver

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