ts. As late as 1930 Chinese-Americans were 80 per centmale. So, the limited number of Chinese men who found wives in the midtwentieth century included a relatively high fraction marrying white women.In other words, as legal and social discrimination have lessened, naturalinequalities have asserted themselves.5. Keeping black men and white women apart was the main purpose of Jim Crow.Gunnar Myrdal's landmark 1944 study found that Southern whites generallygrasped that keeping blacks down also retarded their own economic progress,but whites felt that was the price they had to pay to make black men lessattractive to white women. To the extent that white racism persists, itshould limit the proportion of black-man/white-woman couples.SINCE these inequalities in interracial marriage are so contrary to conven-tional expectations, what causes them? Academia's and the mass media'spreferred reaction has been to ignore husband-wife disproportions entirely.When the subject has raised its ugly head, though, they've typically tossedout arbitrary ideas to explain a single piece of the puzzle, rather thanaddress the entire yin and yang of black-white and white-Asian marriages.For example, a Japanese-American poetry professor in Minnesota has writtenextensively on his sexual troubles with white women. He blames theinternment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Presumably, thesimilarity of frustrations of Chinese-American men is just a coincidencecaused by, say, China losing the Opium War. And the problems of Vietnamesemen stem from win- ning the Vietnam War, etc. But piecemeal rationalizationsare unappealing com- pared to a theory which might explain all the evidence.The general pattern to be explained is: blacks are more in demand ashusbands than as wives, and vice-versa for Asians. The question is, whataccounts for it?The usual sociological explanations for who marries whom (e.g.,availability, class, and social approval) never work simultaneousl...
