THE BLENDING OF THE UNITED STATES

ical pot was in the wrong place. Interracial and multiethnic fusion started after World War II and happened in the suburbs. City folk moved from their Italian, Irish, Polish or Jewish urban neighborhoods into diffuse suburban settings, then sent their kids to large public universities, throwing them together with youngsters from other ethnic backgrounds who, nonetheless, came from families with similar lifestyles.
"Most people meet their potential partners either at college or when they start working," said sociologist Lee, a University of Richmond (Virginia) professor who is spending some time as a visiting scholar at Portland (Oregon) State University. "When you have a college education, you're likely to be in a milieu where there will be people of all kinds of ethnic backgrounds, and that increases the chances of marrying someone different from your own ethnic background." Lee is a case in point, having met her husband, Edmonston, director of Portland State's Center for Population Research and Census, when they were students.
David Tseng, a special assistant in the U.S. Department of Labor's Pension and Welfare Benefits Administration, tells a similar story. His mother came from Ecuador; his father was the son of a Chinese diplomat in Washington. Their marriage in the late 1950s was unusual for the time. But, says Tseng, "I think it helped that the people with whom they were friendly and socialized with were educated and intelligent and comfortable with people from other lands and cultures."
That dynamic is now routinely seen among native-born Asian Americans and Hispanic Americans. "We're seeing very high rates of intermarriage for Hispanics and Asians who are living in fairly integrated areas outside their traditional areas [of concentration] in the Southwest and West," Edmonston pointed out. He cited a study that showed an 80 percent exogamy rate for young, native-born Asians in New England (the U.S. Northeast), for example.
Ironically, the rise in immigration and the trend toward multiculturalism that so many analysts view as major factors leading to divisiveness actually contribute to this blending of races and ethnic groups. "Once you fragment ... the society into so many different ethnic origins, you make it mathematically less and less likely to meet somebody of your own ethnicity," said Wattenberg. "That's what happened, basically, to the Jewish population."
Whether blacks will follow other minorities into the melting pot remains a subject of debate. Skeptics point to the much smaller proportion of black-white marriages and say it won't happen soon. Others respond that the statistical base is very small ause, until 1967, such marriages were illegal in 19 states.
Countervailing Forces
While many forces are at work to facilitate intermarriage, others militate against it. This is particularly the case for African Americans.
The growing segment of the black community that is going to college, entering the middle class and moving out to the suburbs is also following the general trend toward intermarriage. This tendency is particularly noticeable in California and in cities such as Dallas (Texas), Las Vegas (Nevada) and Phoenix (Arizona), where residential segation has been less pronounced than in the older northeastern and midwestern U.S. cities, according to Reynolds Farley, who has studied African American residential patterns. In California, for example, among 25-to-34-year-old African Americans, 14 percent of the married black women and 32 percent of the married black men had spouses of a different race, Edmonston noted.
But in the isolated urban neighborhoods of the U.S. Northeast and Midwest, the old pattern remains. "There is a considerable fraction of the black population that still lives in inner-city areas -- in Detroit, Chicago, New York City -- that has not been caught up in dynamic economic growth," said Farley, formerly a professor at the University of Michigan and now a vice president of the Russell Sage Foundation in New York City. "They've been left behind, and they are quite far out of it."
Another countervailing force is immigration. Immigrants generally don't marry outside their racial or ethnic group. Their children do to some extent, but out-marriage really is most prevalent in the third generation. The most recent large-scale wave of immigration has produced only first- or second-generation Americans.
Regardless of the real dee of racial and ethnic intermixing that goes on, the test of a blended society will be the proportion of people who identify as multiracial or multiethnic. Until now, that percentage has been small. That's partly ause people tend to assume the racial or ethnic identity of one parent -- often the minority parent, in the case of blacks and Hispanics. But to a large extent, that identity has been imposed by society.
"I have a Spanish name and I speak Spanish, so people see me as being of Spanish origin," DelPinal, the Census Bureau official, explained.
Racial identification can stem from other sources, such as heightened ethnic pride or the opportunity to benefit from affirmative action and other programs. Over the last few decades, having Native American ancestry has apparently ome popular. Between 1970 and 1980, the number of people who checked "American Indian" on their census forms w from 800,000 to 1.4 million, a much faster increase than could be accounted for by births minus deaths. "People decided they wanted to identify as American Indians, to some extent ause of rising ethnic consciousness," observed Jeffrey S. Passel, director of the Immigration Policy Program at the Urban Institute and a former director of the Census Bureau's Population Division.
It is this positive approach to racial or ethnic identification on which liberal elements of the Jewish community are trying to capitalize. For two millennia, exogamy was a major transssion for Jews. (In many communities, prayers for the dead were recited for a Jew who married a non-Jew.) As a result, out-marriage was rare. Before World War II, it amounted to less than seven percent of Jewish marriages, according to Mayer of CUNY. But in 1970, a National Jewish Population Survey discovered that in the previous five years, 30 percent of new Jewish marriages were to non-Jews. By 1990, that figure was more than 50 percent.
After many meetings, much soul-searching and a lot of acrimonious debate, various synagogue groups in the most liberal denominations and Jewish civic organizations decided to reverse their approach. They still try to discourage intermarriage, but once it occurs, they tend to welcome new interfaith families.
Rabbi Daniel G. Zemel of Temple Micah, a Reform congation in Washington, was one of those who switched positions. In 1979, when he was ordained a rabbi, Zemel recalled recently, "I felt those rabbis who officiated at intermarriages should be excommunicated from the rabbinical associations. Since that time, my thinking has changed enormously." However, he said, he still does not personally officiate at interfaith marriages. "I think if you can find ways to conceive of a diverse, heterogeneous Jewish community, then that's what we'll be looking at in the future," he said. But, he acknowledged, that will require a revolution in outlook for that component of the Jewish community that has been tied together more by European ethnic roots than by its religious practices.
The sea change contemplated by Zemel is in some ways analogous to the shift required by the United States as it transforms itself from a mostly white nation to a multiracial, blended society. The first step down that path is probably figuring out just who we are. And that requires an accurate count of all colors and the various shades in between.
----------
Rochelle L. Stanfield, a former staff correspondent for National Journal, is a Washington, D.C.- based freelance writer specializing in demographics and urban affairs.

┨网页设计特效库┠ http://www。z┗co⊙l。com/网页特效/