BLACK AND WHITE AND WED ALL OVER: Verrrry interesting article from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Black female/white male intermarriage, after remaining at the same low level for decades, recently has begun to rise.

Mickey Kaus, of course, suggests that welfare reform may be part of the cause. (Black women now realize that they need husbands, and there just aren’t enough marriageable–employed, non-jailed, etc.–black men to go around, plus black men don’t have many incentives to treat black women well unless they genuinely think black women will start dating non-black men.) This theory assumes, though, that the intermarriage increase is occurring in poorer populations, where welfare reform would be likely to affect women’s needs and cultural expectations. In general, the ghetto isn’t where a lot of deep black-white interpersonal ties are forged, you know?

I wonder to what extent immigration (is this black women from Atlanta dating white men from Atlanta, or is this Jamaican women dating Croatian men?) and general getting-beyond-race-obsessions play a role. The former is fantastic insofar as it shifts our focus from “race” (an incredibly crude pseudo-scientific category) to culture and ethnicity. That shift offers a lot more hope for American race relations–staying stuck in the old “black, white, and other” mindset keeps us forever tangled in the past, mining statistics looking for confirmations of our own resentment, and also causes us to make a hundred unjustified assumptions about people we’ve just met. (Whereas awareness of ethnicity and culture only causes about fifteen unjustified assumptions per person!)

Anyway, so, if this is about how pretty Halle Berry is, maybe she did deserve that Oscar…!