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.
Another theory is that Britain is simply doing what it's always done. Despite its long reputation as a racial and cultural monolith, British society is in fact the product of thousands of years of intermarriage between locals and newcomers. In successive waves from the European continent came Celts, Romans, Saxons, Danes, Normans. I tried unsuccessfully to expel them, on grounds they were not Christians and were taking jobs from her subjects. The final years of empire brought a new influx, from the colonies.