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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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Overall, while whites have the largest amount of people intermarrying simply due to sheer logistical numbers, they are statistically the least likely to date outside of their race, and relatively equal rates for both men and women. I brought this up to him the next time I saw him, and he was quite shocked at this. He brought up an interesting question.

Wouldn't a lot of this phenomenon be due to the simple number of potential out-of-race partners? Whites are still a large majority in the US, so you would be much more likely to marry a white person no matter who you are (although there is of course still segregation by proximity, work, education, language, etc). This is true for whites, and blacks, but the latter is inter-racial while the former is not. Similarly the 54% for Asian women--Asians are only a few percent of the population. This number still means that Asian women strongly "prefer" marrying intra-race. If they married randomly, and are about 5.4% of the population, the inter-racial portion would be a whopping 95%! (I put "prefer" in scare quotes because it's probably a combination of personal preference and other factors that simply have them in contact with more

What this can't easily explain, and is therefore more interesting, is within-race differences; such as this fact:

The most dramatic gap in all the data exists between college educated black men and women... Black men are twice as likely as black women to have a spouse of a different race or ethnicity (24% vs. 12%).

This is quite interesting. There might still be interactions with the size of the available population (blacks are less likely to be college educated, and I have no idea if there is a gender gap here) but it would probably be more complicated to compute.

She wants to have a Hindu wedding; I want to make Christian vows

FWIW I know at least one Hindu/Jewish couple who just had both types of ceremony. Possibly this comes down to how strictly religious you are individually, since I definitely know several inter-religion marriages.

Most of the successful interracial relationships I’ve ever seen have always had a shared religious belief between them.

Possibly related: there are multiple memes like this that I've found on /r/PCM (another one involves a more modernly-dressed white man and hispanic woman but is basically identical).