Another interracial study that leaves out Asians
CVK
I feel like a broken record already, but hey, somebody needs to point this stuff out. As you may remember, back in October, Jen told you about Gallup’s annual Minority Rights and Relations poll, part of which asked questions about attitudes towards interracial relationships. From Jen’s original post:
The survey asked white, latino and black correspondents whether or not they had ever dated other races, including Asian, interestingly enough. But then Asians were not included in the questioning at all.
Now, the Pew Research Center has come out with its own study about attitudes towards interracial relationships. Its main findings include:
–Blacks (91%) and Hispanics (90%) are more accepting of interracial dating than are non-Hispanic whites (71%)
–Blacks (37%) are twice as likely as whites (17%) to have an immediate family member in an interracial marriage, while Hispanics (27%) fall in the middle of those two groups.
Hmmm… is anyone missing from this picture? Oh yes, those pesky Asians. Here’s what they have to say about us:
(There were not enough Asians in the national sample to permit any meaningful analysis of this population sub-group).
But then they go on to admit that…
According to Census data, the most common type of interracial couple in 2000 was a white husband married to an Asian wife; this pairing comprised 14 percent of all interracial couples.
Uh… if Asian/white is the most common type of interracial couple, isn’t it about time to change your frickin’ sampling methods so that you can actually talk to real-life Asians about this issue? I mean, there are certain segments of the Asian-American population where interracial marriage rates are damn near 50%! And yet in a national poll about this issue, Asians are still completely left out of the picture! To me, this is just stupidity and really, really irresponsible research.
Rachel S wrote:
Yeah, they need to do an over sample. If you’re going to look at intermarriage trends in this country (without focusing on a specific group), it doesn’t make sense not discuss Asian intermarriage. Although I have a little problem with the second quote from the study. The Census does not count Latinos as a race, and there are ore marriages between Whites and Latinos than there are between Whites and Asians, in part because there are more Latinos. However, if you look at the intermarriages rates, there are certain Asian groups that do have really high out marriages rates–i.e. Japanese. They needed to tell people this because many people don’t know.
Posted 27 Mar 2006 at 12:17 pm ¶
Darla wrote:
Natives are almost always left out of these studies too and there are many many interracial marriages/relationships. It’s disheartening that they’re continuously overlooked and only adds to the misconception that they are a people of the past.
Posted 27 Mar 2006 at 1:23 pm ¶
Rachel S wrote:
Good point Darla–I made a mini-critique of this study at my blog.
Posted 27 Mar 2006 at 3:41 pm ¶
Dave wrote:
Rachel S, I was going to make the same point about latino-white interracial marriage, but I see you made it first. It’s only fair … I got the information from your website, LOL.
Posted 27 Mar 2006 at 10:50 pm ¶
Anna wrote:
I’m half Nakotah (Native American) and we’re never mentioned in studies of mixed race, even though in many regions, all native people are mixed with Black or White. Also, the reason that Latino is not included as an ethnicity is because racial categorization is distinctly different in Latin American countries and there has been substantially more amalgamation. thus, the term Latino almost implicitly implies mixed race heritage, as a Latino person can be either White, Black, indigenous, Asian, or a combination of the four. Thus, a Latino person can claim the Latino ethnicity as well as one of many racial categorizations and Latinos from different countries can have substantially different appearances and cultures and thus cannot be considered as one united race.
Posted 28 Mar 2006 at 1:20 pm ¶
Dana wrote:
I’m a white woman married to an asian man and we frequently get comments about how unusual it is. I’ve also had people tell me that I’m not “really” in an interracial marriage because of the asian super race stereotype and because my husband was transracially adopted by a white family (like that cancels it out or something).
Posted 06 Apr 2006 at 12:17 pm ¶
Catherine wrote:
why is white woman and asian man marriage deemed as unusual, where i am from, i can think of 8 of them that i know personally……….
Posted 05 Jun 2006 at 9:15 pm ¶