Guest Editorial

The Critical Number
By William Javier Nelson

When I was a teenager, I was witness to the extraordinary presidential election campaign of 1964. Pitting Barry Goldwater (the "warmonger") against Lyndon Johnson, it ironically resulted in putting into office a man who not only sent troops to South Vietnam, but also to my native Dominican Republic as well (spring/summer of 1965).

One of the peripheral happenings of that campaign was the non-viability of Nelson Rockefeller, then Governor of New York. Why? Rocky, they said, was a man who had divorced his wife, a practice substantially less common then than here and now in the 1990s. I remember those days well. A divorcee (particularly a female) conjured up images of fast, loose sex and volatile temperament. Moreover, divorce was so rare that many people not only had little personal experience with it, but also knew few others who had gone through it either.

We all know what happened after that. Divorce has skyrocketed such that it occurs in every other marriage. Although the negative potential of divorce is obvious, it has had the benefit of removing children from abusive parents and spouses from abusive partners. No one really knows to what extent this has happened because of the private nature of internal family relations. It isn't so much whether one knows of someone who has been divorced; it's how many of your friends besides yourself are divorced. It obviously has even affected presidential politics: a known divorcee, Ronald Reagan, won two elections with his divorce as a resounding non-issue.

So what's the point?

"Black"/"white" marriage, one of the strongest North American taboos, was even more rare in the early 1960s than divorce. Very few individuals even had peripheral experience with it. Now, though rare, it is common enough so that nearly all "black" North American college students I have taught over the years have some friend or relative who has married someone of another "race".

Moreover, the "black"/"white" intermarriage rate is rising, not falling. At some point, a critical number will have been reached so that such marriages will no longer be the novelties they certainly were and sometime are. With this "increased commonality", the negativity associated with "black"/"white" marriages will fall as well. Consider this quote from Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma, published in 1944:

(1) The concern for "race purity" is basic to the whole issue; the primary and essential command is to prevent amalgamation; the whites are determined to use every means to this end.
(2) Rejection of "social equality" is to be understood as a caution to hinder miscegenation and particularly intermarriage.
(3) The danger of miscegenation is so tremendous that the segregation and discrimination inherent in the refusal of "social equality" must be extended to nearly all spheres of life. There must be segregation and discrimination in recreation, in religious service, in education, before the law, in politics, in housing, in stores and in breadwinning. (Myrdal, page 58)

"White" sentiment against intermarriage still exists in substantial amounts, but all research points to a significant lessening of negative sentiment. Ironically, a good bit of present-day opposition to mixed couples and intermarriage comes from "blacks".

The "ordinariness" of divorce lessened its stigma, and, contrary to much public sentiment, allowed persons in bad marriages to have a better chance of getting out.

The ordinariness of "black"/"white" marriage is next.

At some point, the flood-gates of "black"/"white" marriage will open.

And it has racists ("black" and "white") tossing and turning at night.

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