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<text id=93TT0407> <title> Dec. 02, 1993: Intermarried...With Children </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1993 Dec. 02, 1993 Special Issue:The New Face Of America </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> SPECIAL ISSUE:THE NEW FACE OF AMERICA Intermarried...With Children, Page 64 </hdr> <body> For all the talk of cultural separatism, the races that make up the U.S. are now crossbreeding at unprecedented rates. By Jill Smolowe--Reported by Greg Aunapu/Miami, Sylvester Monroe/Los Angeles, Andrea Sachs/New York and Elizabeth Taylor/Chicago Hostile stares and epithets were the least of their problems when Edgar and Jean Cahn first dated. Twice the couple--he a white Jew, she a black Baptist--were arrested simply for walking the streets of Baltimore arm in arm. When they wed in 1957, Maryland law barred interracial marriages, so the ceremony was held in New York City. Although Jean had converted by then, the only rabbi who would agree to officiate denied them a huppah and the traditional breaking of glass. As law students at Yale in the 1960s, the couple lived in a basement because no landlord would rent them a flat. In 1963 the Cahns moved to Washington, D.C., where they raised two sons, Reuben and Jonathan. By 1971, as co-deans of the Antioch School of Law, the high profile couple had received so many death threats that they needed bodyguards. The boys' mixed ancestry caused near riots at their public school. One principal said they "brought a dark force to the school" and called for their expulsion. Now the generational wheel has turned. In 1990 young Reuben married Marna, a white Lutheran from rural Pine Grove, Pennsylvania. Although both a rabbi and a minister officiated, none of Marna's relatives, except her mother, attended the wedding. Her father fumed, "I can't believe you expect me to accept a black person, and a Jewish one at that!" But with the birth last year of towheaded Aaron, Marna's family softened considerably. Intermarriage, of course, is as old as the Bible. But during the past two decades, America has produced the greatest variety of hybrid households in the history of the world. As ever increasing numbers of couples crash through racial, ethnic and religious barriers to invent a life together, Americans are being forced to rethink and redefine themselves. For all the divisive talk of cultural separatism and resurgent ethnic pride, never before has a society struggled so hard to fuse such a jumble of traditions, beliefs and values. The huddled masses have already given way to the muddled masses. "Marriage is the main assimilator," says Karen Stephenson, an anthropologist at UCLA. "If you really want to affect change, it's through marriage and child rearing." This is not assimilation in the Eurocentric sense of the word: one nation, under white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant rule, divided, with liberty and justice for some. Rather it is an extended hyphenation. If, say, the daughter of Japanese and Filipino parents marries the son of German and Irish immigrants, together they may beget a Japanese-Filipino-German-Irish-Buddhist-Catholic-American child. "Assimilation never really happens," says Stephenson. "Over time you get a bunch of little assimilations." The profusion of couples breaching once impregnable barriers of color, ethnicity and faith is startling. Over a period of roughly two decades, the number of interracial marriages in the U.S. has escalated from 310,000 to more than 1.1 million; 72% of those polled by Time know married couples who are of different races. The incidence of births of mixed-race babies has multiplied 26 times as fast as that of any other group. Among Jews the number marrying out of their faith has shot up from 10% to 52% since 1960. Among Japanese Americans, 65% marry people who have no Japanese heritage; Native Americans have nudged that number to 70%. In both groups the incidence of children sired by mixed couples exceeds the number born into uni-ethnic homes. Some critics fret that all this criss-crossing will damage society's essential "American" core. By this they usually mean a confluence of attitudes, values and assumptions that drive Americans' centuries-old quest for a better life. What they fail to acknowledge is that legal, educational and economic changes continuously alter the priorities within that same set of social variables. A few generations back, religion, race and custom superseded all other considerations. When Kathleen Hobson and Atul Gawande, both 27, married last year, however, they based their vision of a shared future on a different set of common values: an upper-middle-class upbringing in tight-knit families, a Stanford education and a love of intellectual pursuits. Unlike many other mixed couples, Gawande, an Indian American, and Hobson, a white Episcopalian of old Southern stock, have always enjoyed a warm reception from both sets of parents. Still, when Hobson first visited the Gawandes in Ohio, not every one of their friends was ready to celebrate. "One Indian family didn't want to come because they were concerned about their children being influenced," Hobson says. Their wedding in Virginia was a harmonious blend of two cultures: although Kathleen wore a white gown and her minister officiated, the ceremony included readings from both Hindu and Christian texts. Tortured solutions to mixed-marriage ceremonies are common. Weddings, like funerals, are a time when family resentments, disappointments and expectations bubble to the surface. The tugging and tussling over matters that may seem frivolous set the stage for a couple's lifelong quest to create an environment that will be welcoming to both families, yet uniquely their own. Accommodation and compromise only begin at the altar. The qualities that attracted Dan Kalmanson, an Anglo of European extraction, to Yilva Martinez in a Miami reggae club--her Spanish accent, exotic style of dance and playfulness--had a more challenging echo in their married life. After they wed in 1988, Ignacio, Yilva's then eight-year-old son by a previous marriage, moved from Venezuela to join the couple. Dan, 33, spoke no Spanish, the boy no English. The couple decided to compel Ignacio to speak English. He caught on so fast that his Spanish soon degenerated. Says Yilva: "We have literally forced him to learn Spanish again." For Yilva, 35, the struggle is not just to preserve her native tongue; she also wants to suffuse her home, which has grown with the addition of Kristen, 3, with the Latin ethic that values family above all else. "Here, you live to work. There, we work to live," she says. "In Venezuela we take a two-hour lunch break; we don't cram in a hamburger at MacDonald's." Children also force mixed couples to confront hard decisions about religion. Blanche Speiser, 43, was certain that Mark, 40, would yield if she wanted to raise their two kids Christian, but she also knew that her Jewish husband would never attend church with the family or participate in holiday celebrations. After much soul searching, she opted for a Jewish upbringing. "I knew it would be O.K. as long as the children had some belief," she says. "I didn't want a mishmash." Although Blanche remains comfortable with that decision and has grown accustomed to attending synagogue with her family, she admits that it pricks when Brad, 7, says, "Mommy, I wish you were Jewish." Other couples expose their families to both religions, then leave the choice to the kids. When it comes to racial identity, many couples feel that a child should never have to "choose" between parents. The 1990 U.S. census form, with its "Black," "White" and "Other" boxes, particularly grated. " `Other' is not acceptable, pure and simple," says Nancy Brown, 40. "It is psychologically damaging to force somebody to choose one identity when physiologically and biologically they are more than one." Nancy, who is white, thinks the census form should include a "Multiracial" box for her two daughters; her black husband Roosevelt, 44, argues that there should be no race box at all. Both agree that people should be able to celebrate all parts of their heritage without conflict. "It's like an equation," says Nancy, who is president of an interracial family support group. "Interracial marriage that works equals multiracial children at ease with their mixed identity, which equals more people in the world who can deal with this diversity." The world still has much to learn about living with diversity. "What people say, what people do and what they say they do are three entirely different things," says anthropologist Stephenson. "We are walking contradictions." Kyoung-Hi Song, 27, was born in Korea but lived much of her youth abroad as her father was posted from one United Nations assignment to the next. Despite that cosmopolitan upbringing, her parents balked when Kyoung-Hi married Robert Dickson, a WASP from Connecticut. They boycotted the 1990 wedding, and have not contacted their daughter since. The Dicksons hope that the birth of their first child, expected in April, will change that. Intolerance need not be that blatant to inflict wounds. If Tony Jeffreys, 34, and Alice Sakuda Flores, 28, have a child, that hypothetical Japanese-Filipino-German-Irish-Buddhist-Catholic-American will become flesh and blood. In their one year of marriage, Tony says, "I've heard friends say stupid stuff about Asians right in front of Alice. It is real hypocritical because a lot of them have Mexican or black girlfriends or wives." Sometimes the more subtle the rejection, the sharper the sting. Says Candy Mills, 29, the daughter of black and Native American parents, who is married to Gabe Grosz, a white European immigrant: "I know that people are tolerating me, not accepting me." Such pain is evidence that America has yet to harvest the full rewards of its founding principles. The land of immigrants may be giving way to a land of hyphenations, but the hyphen still divides even as it compounds. Those who intermarry have perhaps the strongest sense of what it will take to return America to an unhyphenated whole. "It's American culture that we all share," says Mills. "We should capitalize on that." Perhaps her two Native American-black-white-Hungarian-French-Catholic-Jewish-American children will lead the way. </body> </article> </text>