Inside the Mixed Marriage: Accounts of Changing Attitudes, Patterns, and Perceptions of Cross-Cultural and Interracial Marriages

Abstract

Inside the Mixed Marriage: Accounts of Changing Attitudes, Patterns, and Perceptions of Cross-Cultural and Interracial Marriages. Walter R. Johnson & D. Michael Warren (Eds.). Lanham, MD: University Press of America. 1994. 280 pp. Hardcover ISBN 08191-9205-8. $47.50 cloth, $26.50 paper.Mixed and Matched: Interreligious Courtship and Marriage in Northern Ireland. Raymond M. Lee. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. 1994. 154 pp. ISBN 0-8191-8480-2. $31.50 cloth.Most of our lives are spent in a closed social environment. We seldom go our class, race, ethnicity, or religion to explore the richness of others who are not like us, instead living endogamous lives surrounded by people who are similar. Selecting people with similar backgrounds to ourselves for marital partners was taught to most of us as children as normal behavior. However, as we progress through the last decade of this century, attitudes are rapidly changing about who is an acceptable partner for dating and marriage. Some academics are reflecting this change by exploring the individual relationships of those who have married outside of their groups. Johnson and Warren's excellent new book on mixed marriages chronicles the lives of cross-cultural and interracial marriages and gives historical and current United States demographics on such marriages. Many personal accounts are given in this book, allowing the reader to arrive at his or her own conclusions. The authors' approach is one of presentation rather than strict analysis.In Inside the Mixed Marriage, Johnson and Warren share their own personal experiences, as do others who come from a wide background of social classes and statuses. In all, there are 17 still-married couples whose histories are included in this book. The authors state up front that these narratives are not meant to be a representative sample of people who are in mixed marriages, and that the book is not designed to construct a theoretical analysis of mixed marriages. Despite these intentional limitations, this work adds a much-needed, new, and positive study to the literature on mixed marriages. Other family scientists can gain a tremendous amount of knowledge from this book about how to approach other investigations on mixed marriages. As the introduction so aptly points out, past literature on this subject has been overly studied from a negative viewpoint, often portraying the minority person as interested in marrying someone of the majority group purely for the increase in status. The strength of this book lies in interpersonal accounts that go a long way towards showing that this viewpoint is weak and ethnocentric at best.Organizationally, the book is broken down into four parts. Part 1 has four chapters that define and explore some of the mixed relationships from a cross-cultural and cross-racial perspective, mainly focusing on black-white Western relationships. Part 2 concentrates on the adjustment the couples must go through in preparing for marriage and also after marriage. Chapter 8 is a must-read from this section. It points out that the difference between the terms cross-cultural and interracial may lie in one's point of view. …