Asian-American Interracial Marriages Declining

Here's some encouraging news for those Asian-American guys out there who feel like they're getting shafted by their Asian/Asian-American sisters. Joan Walsh of Salon writes a fascinating article regarding the changing economic landscape of white America**. So what does this have to do with declining Asian-American out-marriage rates? Keep reading.

Walsh asserts that outside the top 1% of America's wealthy, which I think is grossly exaggerated considering how many white Americans are upper middle class earning high incomes, the rest of the 99% of the working white class is riding an economic decline. On top of that, by the mid-century white Americans will technically be a minority. Assume these two observations as fact and one can extrapolate the following implications.

If indeed white Americans end up becoming a minority, they may find it harder to lean on their social crutches of "white privilege" which has given them exposure to countless opportunities that people of color are disadvantageously denied from. I do understand that just because you're white doesn't mean you automatically got it made. Remember that scene from Higher Learning where the white guy struggles in his engineering math class because all the Asian students are destroying their exams? Or what about all those white guys who are terrible on the dance floor? In all seriousness though, consider white Americans born and raised in communities like Chisago County where lower middle class to poverty-stricken is the norm. These same white folks are in their own unique struggle, though it is ironic that they criticize big government while they also depend on their handouts for sustenance! That's a whole other issue worth blogging.

However, the second implication is all the more interesting and pleasantly surprising. As the Asian-American minority continues it's economic ascendancy, fewer Asian-Americans are marrying outside of their race (I'll assume what she means is that AA women are not out-marrying as much). Walsh writes,

Asian-American median income is higher that white median income, and growing faster. Asian-Americans have higher college completion rates than whites, and the gulf is widening. In California, Asian kids are twice as likely than whites to earn grades that make them eligible for the University of California system, and they now make up a majority of the flagship UC-Berkeley campus, where just under a third of students are white...

MaSir's Commentary: Asians (29.4%) are twice as likely than whites (14.6%) to earn grades making them UC eligible. That means 60% of the other Asians are probably going to community college to save money and the remaining 10.6% are getting their ass beat by their parents right now as we speak.

In “Suicide of a Superpower,” poor Pat Buchanan seemed to believe that the rapidly growing number of Asian-Americans in the nation’s top schools had to do with affirmative action. I used to hear the same thing from clueless white people back before the passage of Ward Connerly’s Prop. 209 in 1997, which abolished affirmative action. Of course they were wrong — Asian-American students were succeeding the old-fashioned way, with hard work. Since then, of course, the white proportion of UC students has continued to decline, even without affirmative action.

Living in California it’s easy to see subtle and not so subtle signs of white status anxiety, real and imagined, even beyond school enrollment issues. I was intrigued to see, in a recent Pew Research Center survey of intermarriage trends, that intermarriage rates are going up for every group, except for Asian-Americans, whose rates have long been among the highest, but which are now coming down. Twenty years ago, when I was first writing about California’s racial frontier, sociologists explained high rates of Asian “out-marriage” as a kind of status-seeking: “marrying out” was a way of “marrying up.” Whites sought out Asian partners, in this analysis, as the closest surrogate for whites and as partners who in some settings might even represent their “marrying up.” Whatever the motive behind their pairings, white/Asian couples have the highest income of any pairings, Pew found, including white/white and Asian/Asian, and were far more likely than any other group to have college degrees. But it’s noteworthy to me that the Asian “outmarriage” rate has dropped significantly over the last few years; from just 2010 to 2008, the percentage of American-born Asians newlyweds who married whites dropped from 47% to 38% — a result of a larger Asian population in the U.S., as well as a sign Asian-Americans may no longer need to marry out to marry up. 

MaSir's Commentary: What a hot couple! HANDLE IT.

Now for some of you, a 9% decrease may seem negligible, but that is hardly the case. A decline like this is staggering when considering that it's happened in a span of just two years. What this tells me is that Asian-American men are finally gaining some socioeconomic steam which is trickling over to the mainstream, and those Asian-American women who would've given their Asian-American brothers the cold shoulder beforehand are finally taking notice.

As my dad once told me that as an Asian-American, I would have to deal with racism throughout my life, and in order to turn that negativity into something positive, I would have to excel a lot more than the average hard working white person in order to gain the same level of respect due to what Walsh and sociologists label as "white privilege". Asian-Americans must prove their value through performance, not just by complaining. But once the number of successful and upper middle class Asians reach that certain critical mass, that is when they will galvanize to raise their voice and become a force to be reckoned with.

**http://www.salon.com/2012/03/04/whats_the_matter_with_white_people/singleton/