or theirloneli- ness by marrying each other. Yet, when was the last time you saw anAsian man and a black woman together? Black-man/Asian-woman couples arestill quite unusual, but Asian-man/black-woman pairings are incomparablymore rare.Similar patterns appear in other contexts:3a. Within races: Black men tend to most ardently pursue lighter-skinned,longer-haired black women (e.g., Spike Lee's School Daze). Yet black womentoday do not generally prefer fairer men.3b. In other countries: In Britain, 40 per cent of black men are married toor living with a white woman, versus only 21 per cent of black women marriedto or living with a white man.3c. In art: Madame Butterfly, a white-man/Asian-woman tragedy, has beenpack- ing them in for a century, recently under the name Miss Saigon. Thegreatest black-man/white-woman story, Othello, has been an endless hit inboth Shakespeare's and Verdi's versions. (To update Karl Marx's dictum:Theater always repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as opera, and finallyas farce, as seen in that recent smash, O.J., The Moor of Brentwood.) MaybeShakespeare did know a thing or two about humanity: America's leadingportrayer of Othello, James Earl Jones, has twice fallen in love with andmarried the white actress playing opposite him as Desdemona.4. The civil-rights revolution left husband-wife balances among interracialcouples more unequal. Back in 1960 white husbands were seen in 50 per centof black-white couples (versus only 28 per cent in 1990), and in only 62 percent of white-Asian couples (versus 72 per cent). Why? Discrimination,against black men and Asian women. In the Jim Crow South black men wishingto date white women faced pressures ranging from raised eyebrows to lynchmobs. In contrast, the relatively high proportion of Asian-man/white-womancouples in 1960 was a holdover caused by anti-Asian immigration laws thathad prevented women, most notably Chinese women, from joining the largelymale pioneer immigran...
