Torontonians pride themselves on living in what has been described as one of the most multicultural cities in the world. My own itinerary reflects this diversity. On a given shopping day I might get some cheese and tuna in the Italian district, buy fruit at a stand run by a Korean family, and perhaps dine at an East Indian restaurant. The church I attend on Sunday boasts congregants from five different continents. To top it all off, the priest himself is one half of a mixed couple (he’s German; his wife is Chinese).
Indeed, mixed couples are a common sight in this city. They hardly raise eyebrows nowadays – then again, at least in downtown Toronto neither do same-sex partners holding hands. All this is not to say that Toronto, or Canada in general, is some kind of racial utopia. On the other hand, miscegenation is not the burning issue that gay marriage, Canada’s role in Afghanistan or abortion is. Consequently until now there has been little hard data available on the prevalence of intermarriage in Canada or the characteristics of people involved in it. So it came somewhat as a surprise when in the summer of 2004 researchers Anne Milan and Brian Hamm released a report in the magazine Canadian Social Trends entitled “Mixed Unions†that dealt with the very subject (to view the full report, go to http://dsp-psd.pwgsc.gc.ca/Collection-R/Statcan/11-008-XIE/0010411-008-XIE.pdf).
In their study Milan and Hamm looked at data from the 1991 and 2001 national censuses. In 2001 3.2% of all Canadian couples were in an interracial and/or inter-cultural relationship, up 35% from 1991. Most (2.8%) consisted of a White person and a visible minority, while the other 0.4% involved members of two different ethnic minority groups. People in mixed unions tended to be younger and more educated than the general population, a finding the authors attributed to several factors. First, younger individuals and those with more education may hold more liberal attitudes towards intermarriage (for the purpose of this essay, the term “marriage†as in “outmarriage†or “intermarriage†will refer to both official marriages and common-law unions). Opportunity plays a role as well: immigration from non-European countries has risen in recent years, and in Canada at least, non-Whites are disproportionately represented among university students. The authors found too that mixed couples were more likely to live in urban areas and to have children at home.
Hamm and Milan compared out-marriage rates among nine minority groups: Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, Southeast Asians, Filipinos, South Asians (people from India, Sri-Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh), Arabs/West Asians, Blacks and Latin Americans. The highest was for the Japanese, 70% of whom had a non-Japanese partner. The authors theorize that Japanese Canadians’ high level of exogamy is due to the fact that most of them were born in this country and have more or less assimilated into its society. They were followed by Latin Americans, who out-married at a rate of 45%, and then by Blacks at 43%. At the other end of spectrum were South Asians, Chinese and Koreans, with rates of only 13%, 16% and 18% respectively. As many members of these communities live in ethnic neighbourhoods (Toronto for instance boasts at least two Chinatowns, a Little India, and a small Korean area), they have a lower chance of meeting someone outside their own cultural group. Filipinos, Southeast Asians and Arabs/West Asians fell between these two extremes. Visible minorities also differed in terms of who among them crossed the ethnic line. Black, South Asian and Arab/West Asian men were more likely to marry or date outside their community than were their female counterparts, whereas the opposite was true among the six other groups.
I noticed a few weaknesses in the study. The most obvious one is the omission of Aboriginals, that is Canadian Indians, Inuit and Métis. Though the Canadian government classifies Aboriginals not as a visible minority but in a category of their own, it might be interesting to compare their outmarriage rate to that of other non-Whites. In addition, the authors’ designation of a particular minority as a group in its own right seems a bit arbitrary at times. For example, while Chinese and Koreans are placed in separate categories rather than subsumed under the heading of “Asian†or “East Asian,†African and Caribbean Blacks are lumped into a single one. Thus a Chinese-Korean couple would be considered “mixed†but a Nigerian-Jamaican one would not, even though the cultural differences between the latter would probably exceed those between the former.
Given that Canada and the United States share not only a border but a number of cultural traits, it is worth comparing their intermarriage rates. In Canada 3.2% of all couples fall into the “mixed†category, whereas only 2.0% in the States do. Some might conclude this disparity stems from the fact that Canadians are supposedly less racist than their neighbours to the south. A closer look at the data, though, challenges this notion. To use an example, American Blacks marry out at a rate of less than 5% compared with 43% among their Canadian counterparts. Though at first glance these figures appear to support the racism hypothesis, at 12% of the US population African Americans have a much easier time finding partners within their own community. Blacks in contrast make up only 2% of Canada’s population, so they are in a sense “forced†to seek mates from other ethnic groups. In addition, Asians in the United States exhibit a higher level of exogamy than those in Canada. Hence demographics as opposed to discrimination is the more likely explanation for the intermarriage gap between the two countries.
Many people wonder whether the trend towards greater intermarriage will continue, possibly to the point where Canada becomes a gigantic racial melting pot in which everyone is of mixed race. The safest answer: hard to tell. History shows us that patterns can sometimes reverse themselves. For instance, Asian-White pairings in the States have actually dropped in the last decade or so, perhaps because of increased immigration from Asia. Similar findings were recently reported from Canada as well. As one commentator for the Asian-American publication A Magazine stated, assimilation is not something that Asians do automatically. The same may be true of other minorities too.
A related question is whether if Canada does indeed end up being a racial melting pot racism will disappear. Some might argue that if everyone were racially mixed, there would be nobody left to discriminate against or for that matter do the discriminating. The example of real-life melting pots, however, is not very encouraging. In Latin America, for instance, people with lighter skin and more Caucasian features still enjoy higher social status than their darker brethren (just look at beauty pageant winners in the region). Even in predominantly monoracial societies individuals of mixed race are not immune to being prejudiced. A French-Canadian friend of mine was nearly disowned by his mother for dating a Guatemalan girl with dark skin and strong Amerindian features, although the mother herself had a Native grandparent. My friend was in effect expected to “lighten the line.†While there may be many reasons to rejoice over increased intermarriage, the potential to create a more egalitarian society is not one of them.
In my opinion the only guarantee is that the face of Canada will continue to change. So I’ll show the new face of Canada by presenting a picture of my daughter, who is of mixed Italian, Spanish, Irish and North American Indian descent.
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