By Victor Greto
They are relationships not in black and white but in living color.
And in the past three decades, they have quietly but substantially changed the look of the American family.
It has been 34 years since the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional the laws of 15 states — including Florida’s — that prohibited marriage between the races. According to the latest annual Current Population Survey, a national sample survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, one of every 20 married couples in the United States is interracial or interethnic. Marriages between blacks and whites have increased by 1,000 percent since 1960.
About 3 million intergroup couples in the country testify to what a recent national survey of mixed race couples has found: that America is more tolerant and accepting of intergroup relationships, including the children of those unions.
“Her race didn’t matter to me,” says Barry Pohlman, 36, who is white, about his wife, Teisha, who is black and Bahamian. They live in Pompano Beach.
“And it wasn’t the first time I dated interracially,” says Pohlman, who was born and raised in Ohio. “My grandmother was concerned for the kids — worried about their acceptance. But with my parents and siblings, I had no trouble.”
Their three children, Autumn 8, Audric, 6 and Aukeem, 1, “understand they’re both black and white,” says Teisha, 35. Arguments with her husband, she says, “are never about race, just typical husband and wife things — over money, the kids.”
According to the sociologists and statisticians who study family demographics, those who are in intergroup relationships tend to live in areas where races and ethnic groups are mixed — like South Florida. They are relatively independent and strong-willed, make above-average incomes and have gone to college.
Florida, with its burgeoning multicultural population, is tied for third with New York in the number and percentage of intergroup marriages in the country, behind the behemoth, California, and second-place Texas.
Those four states account for almost half of the nearly 3 million intergroup marriages in the country, according to the survey. Altogether, intergroup marriages account for more than 5 percent of married couples in the country.
These couples tend not to be color conscious, though they are repeatedly confronted with bureaucracies — the Census Bureau, medical and educational forms — that seem more obsessed than ever with racial distinctions.
Jonell Weidman, 33, a black Jamaican, is married to David Weidman, 35, who is white and originally from Evanston, Ill. Their children are autistic, so the couple often is forced to fill in forms that demand to know the children’s race. Jonell marks “white.”
“People will look weird at us and tell us we filled it out by mistake,” she says. Once, Jonell left the box blank. The nurse asked about it, and Jonell said her son didn’t have a race. “Can’t you skip over it?” Jonell asked.
She was told no, so she marked white. The nurse looked in disbelief and said, “What are you?”
“I’m not African-American,” Jonell says, “so what do I put?”
Heather Jones, 25, and Cesar Taveras, Jr., 23, see their relationship — and their unborn children — as integrating symbols for a new society.
Jones, originally from Ohio, and Taveras, who was born in Brooklyn, met at Parkway Middle School in Fort Lauderdale.
“I don’t see his color or cultural difference,” says Jones, who is white. “We see how much we love each other. Both of us are excited that our kids will be both white and Hispanic.”
“It’s exciting, because we’re starting a tradition,” says Cesar, who is Hispanic.
“Building a person that will symbolize a unity between the two cultures,” Heather says.
“We’re trying to break tradition to create new tradition,” Cesar says.
According to statistics culled from the latest Current Population Survey, William H. Frey, a demographer with the Milken Institute and the University of Michigan, Florida claims 180,255 intergroup marriages, or about 6 percent of married couples in the state.
Like California, Texas and New York, the state has become a magnet for immigration.
South Florida has become the state’s leader in diversity, according to the latest 2000 census numbers, with Hispanic growth outpacing both blacks and whites.
“It’s increased at a dramatic pace,” says David Harris, a University of Michigan sociologist who has done extensive surveys on both intergroup marriages and couples who live together.
“It’s in part due to the civil rights movement, but even more to increasing immigration,” an important factor for growing intergroup relationships in South Florida, particularly Hispanic-white and Hispanic-black unions.
Though black and white unions have increased, Harris says, Hispanic and white unions are increasing more quickly
More than 16 percent of Asians and Hispanics marry outside their groups, while only about 6 percent of blacks and about 3 percent of whites do.
History has a lot to do with the differences in those numbers, Harris says. The legacy of slavery and segregation has yet to soften.
Jennifer Hudson, 33, and Bob Jaansens, 35, say their relationship’s issues are less about race than money, but “we have interesting discussions about race,” says Jaansens, who is white and was born in Belgium. The couple lives in Hollywood.
“She calls me naïve,” Jaansens says. “I’m cognizant that people care about race, but I don’t feel I should live my life differently because of that.”
On the other hand, Hudson says she’s learned that in growing up black, “you’re always told you have to be better” than whites to be successful — and to simply ignore those real world pressures is naïve.
Nearly a third of Hispanics and Asians born in the U.S.i.e., these are national stats marry outside their groups. Recent immigrants mostly marry within their own group, but the longer they’re here, the more likely they are to marry outside their groups.
Hike all those numbers up by about 16 percent and you will get a more realistic figure for all intergroup unions, which include both marriages and people who live together.
Distilling numbers from the 1990 census, Harris and the University of Michigan Institute of Social Research found that one in six intergroup unions are cohabitations.
From those figures, Harris found that blacks and whites are much more likely to live together than to marry — it’s easier to handle societal pressure if the union is not legally official — and he expects the numbers to increase as contact intensifies.
Contact, many experts say, is the key to the recent proliferation of intergroup marriages and relationships.
“It’s definitely a question of exposure,” says T. Joel Wade, a professor of psychology at Bucknell and an expert on interracial relationships.
“We no longer have forced segregation,” Wade says. “[The different races] work and go to school together; and what happens, they find out, is that though we have different skin tones and backgrounds, we’re similar in a lot of ways, which breeds attractions.”
Don Artman, 47, who is white, met Paula King, 38, who is black, while both worked at a community college in Ann Arbor, Mich.
“It was a gradual thing,” Paula says. “We talked several times before he asked me out on a date.”
“It crossed my mind that she was black,” says Don, who was married but separated from his wife at the time.
“He was the first white guy I said yes to a date,” Paula says. “My mom’s father is biracial, so my family doesn’t see color as an issue.”
They were married this past summer in Key West, and now live in Pompano Beach.
The majority of 22 intergroup couples interviewed say they either lived in mixed neighborhoods when they were young, or were raised by their parents to be open-minded about race.
Floyd and Loren Walker grew up in Columbia, Md., a mixed-race community, and moved in together there when she was 17 and Lloyd was 22. He is black and she is white. They live in Coral Springs.
“We met when I was 16,” says Loren, 28. “When I first knew him, I blew him off. He was messing around with everyone.”
Floyd’s promiscuity was a problem for Loren, and her parents objected to his drinking and his penchant for getting into fights — but not his race.
“It was only a problem with my mom because he drank a lot,” Loren says. “They raised me open-minded.”
Floyd, 33, was born in Jamaica and as a child moved with his family to Columbia. His father left the family when he was young, Floyd says, and his mother “taught me to love everyone.”
“I never really knew about race until I came to U.S. I have white uncles, Jamaican Indians in my family,” he says.
According to Wade, intergroup sexual attraction cuts across both class and cultural lines.
Wade, who is black, has concentrated his studies especially on black-white relations.
When a white female and a black male are in a relationship, he says, “you’re going to find white males and black females most opposed.”
Much of the resentment is based on history, Wade says.
“There’s a fear that somehow the culture will be stolen,” Wade says. “It’s a product of the forced segregation of the races.”
White male/black female relationships are less common, also because of historical reasons, Wade says.
“There has always been contact between white males and black females,” Wade says, and much of that during and after slavery included assault and rape. This fact, Wade says, “has engendered reluctance among black women to engage in white relationships.”
Hudson says that her father did not openly object to her relationship with her white husband, but she says, “I feel like my dad has an issue with it. Once when I dated a white guy in college, he told me, ‘White men have been raping black women for so long.’.”
Even so, Wade’s statement may be a hazardous generalization to make in South Florida, where a significant number of black women involved in intergroup marriages and relationships are not African-Americans, but Jamaican-Americans, Bahamian-Americans and Cuban-Americans, several of whom express a cultural chasm between themselves and African-Americans.
Marioli Schaeffer describes herself as a “mulatto Cuban,” and her background includes Spanish, African, Chinese and French.
Born in Havana, Marioli, 27, met her husband, John, 38, when he visited the island on business. John, a native of Pittsburgh who lived in Belize, was looking into business prospects there.
He courted her and they moved to Belize. They married in 1998. When the economy soured, they moved to South Florida.
Marioli’s feelings about the hectic pace of South Florida and her contact with African-Americans are ambivalent.
“African-Americans don’t accept that you’re with a white person,” she says. “I notice looks in people’s faces, like, ‘hmmm…..’.”
At a local Walgreen’s, she says, a black woman refused to serve her husband because she was with him.
Though there are no reliable statistics on intergroup divorces or break-ups, Anne Rambo, an associate professor of family therapy at Nova Southeastern University in Davie, says that anecdotally she has found that intergroup marriages and relationships are stronger because of the differences in cultural backgrounds.
“Those who come from the same background often assume they know each other,” Rambo says. “Interracial and interethnic couples who make it work make a commitment in finding out what the other person is like. They are more sensitive to each other.”
And many of them have already been through the mill.
“When people marry in that kind of situation,” Rambo says, “they may have a somewhat stronger commitment, since they’ve already been tested.”
When she counsels intergroup couples, race is almost never an important factor, she says. “I’ve never seen it be the issue in couples therapy. The issue is how we can get along with each other.”
Christopher Burnett, director of marriage and family therapy at NSU, says intergroup couples often may be more “intransigent” toward both society and their own families.
“With an interracial couple that’s younger,” he says, “a lot of times it’s for one of them, say the woman, to make a declaration of independence from the will of her family. Even if the relationship isn’t going too well, she’ll be damned if she’ll let the family be right, that she made the wrong choice. That consideration of family or societal pressure may have the effect of keeping people in the relationships.”
If the couple decides to stay in the relationship for those reasons, Burnett says, “The decision is more reactive than thoughtful: the person will not think of their own well being but more about not letting family or the outside world think they’ve made a mistake.”
Burnett says that in the 20 years he’s been counseling intergroup relationships, he’s noticed that they “ask a lot of the same type of questions that others ask, especially about behavior. But also a great percentage of the conversations is about managing the people or social networks around them.”
Wade says that the inevitable increase in intergroup marriages also may reflect a more pragmatic, experience-based sense of self among younger people.
“Who we are is a product of the places we’ve been and the experiences we’ve had,” Wade says, “and as we have more experiences with others, that’s who we’ll be.
“It’s a more pragmatic and more functional view of yourself; you’re not limiting yourself or your experiences. It’s a new sense of self that comes with the territory: whether you’re in an intergroup relationship, or are the product of that relationship.
“No one knows who I am,” says Marie Rodriguez, 34, the daughter of a Hispanic father and a Vietnamese mother, who resembles her mother. “They always judge me from the outside.”
She recently married Joel Kamphuis, who has a Dutch background and was born in Michigan.
Why? “We have the same morals, principles, strength of character,” she says.
Like millions of other Americans, Rodriguez has found herself by looking within, regardless of her color, race or ethnicity.