Stumbled upon this survey from Britain which shows that ‘Asians’ are the most averse to interracial relationships. I put Asian in quotes because that means something different on the other side of the pond then in the USA; here Asian is a catchall group with East Asians as the most representative perception and South Asians as outliers. In the UK Asian is almost totally synonymous with South Asian, and Chinese have their own classification. The survey results are not particularly surprising, British Asians are the most reluctant to admit the possibility of interracial relationships. Additionally, the accuracy of the survey gains credibility insofar as the aversion to blacks is stronger than to whites. There is a strong skin color prejudice within the South Asian community and the beauty norms tend to result in people of African origin as being perceived as ugly while the ideal type is close to southern European in appearance. Frankly, I am surprised as to the relatively small gap between toleration of interracial relationships between whites and blacks knowing what I do of the prejudice and racism among South Asians toward the one major racial grouping with darker skin color. In any case, there are two major issues that I wonder about in relation to this survey:
1) Whites are generally much more sensitive and politically correct than non-whites because they have to be (i.e., the perception that non-whites can’t be racist results in a lot of complacency and a surfeit of frankness on occasion). I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the gap is simply due to the fact that South Asians feel no need to mask their racialist sentiments because they’ve never been asked by society to engage in this.
2) The attitudes toward homosexuality were broken down by religion in the survey, and it shows that Muslims are far more condemnatory than Hindus, Sikhs or Christians. That suggests to me that religion, and Islam specifically, is the issue that dare not speak its name. Much of the aversion to interracial marriage may simply be a proxy for an aversion to interreligious marriage, since about half of South Asians are Muslim and the overwhelming majority of Muslims are South Asian in the UK.
Related: 2001 Census analysis of interethnic marriage patterns. No surprises, they track the results above.
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