Cultural Differences

1 R C U L T U R A L D I F F E R E N C E S J E N N I F E R A C K E R In Dubai, I was taken for a prostitute. It was late, maybe midnight, far away from the city center in a bizarre hotel – a sprawling, deserted complex next to the largest horseracing track in the world. No races were scheduled that weekend, and the place was empty. Luxury hotels in the United Arab Emirates are oversta√ed, so we weren’t surprised that one porter opened the taxi door, a second held the door of the hotel, and a third greeted us in the lobby and followed us down the hall toward the elevators, chatting . But there was something o√, something too attentive. The first time he said it, his words were muted. Only after he’d repeated himself, urgently and pleading, Sir, you must register your guest, did we understand, did the man at my side stop, point to me, and say, That’s my wife. At the end of a tour of Fatehpur Sikri, the remains of a Mughal royal city outside Agra, India, our guide asked us, ‘‘You are . . . friends?’’ It was fine, we laughed it o√; we corrected ticket takers who separated us in entrance lines. No, he’s with me; I’m with her. We lived nearly a year in the UAE and visited, for the first time, both of our ostensible homelands – India and Israel. We’d been told we’d feel it, an ancestral sense of belonging. But we were as 2 A C K E R Y baΔed and alienated as any stranger in a strange land. We’d miss a joke or a phrase and one of us would whisper, What just happened ? The other would shrug and smile and say, Don’t ask me, they’re your people. Our marriage was suspicious, and he – was he really American? Did he really not speak any Hindi, or even Gujarati? My husband finally lost patience with the Israelis in Jerusalem who doggedly believed he’d grown up in India, asking, Which city? Hindu or Muslim? We weren’t in the provinces; didn’t anyone know what contemporary America looked like? Now that we’ve been around the world as a couple and have been repeatedly asked to explain ourselves in places that are modern but far from heterogeneous when it comes to relationships, we’ve become more aware not just of our individual ethnicities but, in particular, of our relative rareness in joining them. But what about in America: Are we odd here, too? Yes and no. Of all American marriages, 10 percent are interracial , as of 2015, up from 8 percent just five years earlier. In 1967, the year the Supreme Court legalized marriage across racial lines in Loving v. Virginia, the percentage of intermarriages among newlyweds was 3, a number that increased fivefold to 17 by 2015. These numbers continue to rise. And objections among family members and adults in general continue to fall. Thirty-nine percent of Americans now say that marrying someone of a di√erent race is good for society, compared to 24 percent in 2010. But just when we think we’re beginning to understand how America is changing, the picture fragments. Fascinatingly, rates and incidence of intermarriage vary hugely by gender, race, education , age, and geography. For example, in 2010, as counted by that year’s U.S. Census, the majority (68 percent) of intermarriages had one white spouse (probably because whites are still the largest racial group in America), even though the percentage of whites who ‘‘married out’’ was relatively low – 9 percent, compared with 17 percent of blacks, 26 percent of Hispanics, and 28 percent of Asians. Asian women were twice as likely as Asian men to marry out, while the opposite was true among blacks. (Thirtysix percent of Asian women married out, compared to 17 percent of men; 24 percent of black male newlyweds married outside their race, while only 9 percent of black women did.) The American C U L T U R A L D...