The younger members of these groups tend to be British-born, the elder ones often are immigrants. Many of the inequalities of wealth and power that defined the empire continue, at times spawning inner-city despair, courtroom battles and outbursts of violence in the streets. But when it comes to the choices that go to form new families, it's often a different story. A survey published last year found that about half the black men of Caribbean descent born in Britain who were married or living as married had paired with a white. About a third of black women of Caribbean descent born in Britain had done so.
Anecdotal evidence confirms the numbers.
In television comedies and dramas, romance routinely cuts across racial lines. Finding analogous numbers for the United States is difficult, but those that are available suggest much lower rates of interracial marriage. For instance, two scholars who specialize in population studies, Douglas J. Besharov of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research and Timothy S. Sullivan of Southern Illinois University, concluded in a study that in 1993 about 8.9 percent of black men who married in the United States married whites, while 3.9 percent of black brides married whites. Britain's figures turn upside down the racial relations of empire days. Theories abound about why things are so much more relaxed at home.