'Deracialization' means that American Blacks are becoming another ethnic group, with a shared culture and heritage born out of the slave/Jim Crow/civil rights movement experience. (Which makes today's black immigrants a different ethnic group than Blacks whose ancestors were brought here as slaves).
Your concerns about losing that culture and heritage are no different than the concerns of parents in every other ethnic group in the US - Jews, South Asians, East Asians, etc. (Consider the dilemma faced by Tevya the Milkman in Fiddler on the Roof).
Beyond ethnic groups, it's the concern of rural parents when their children leave home for higher education - the kids are unlikely to return home to share their parents' way of life, perhaps their customs and values.
And it's a universal concern - parents everywhere are concerned that their children will not share their culture. A sub-story in Jorge Amado's beautiful 'Tent of Miracles' involves a son who leaves poor community where he was raised to go to law school. All of the adults who helped raise him and thrilled for him, but their joy is bittersweet - they know he is never coming back.
However, unless you live in a totalitarian religious state, the parents only have a loose influence as to the culture the children create for themselves.
Last time I checked, the intermarriage rates among most American ethnic communities is close to 40% - they are sharing parts of their culture and losing other parts.
My understanding is that intermarriage among the American Black community is not quite as high as other ethnic groups, but it's growing. I recall an article in Ebony decades ago that objected to black-white dating in the same terms my parents used to object to Jewish-Christian dating. But today, anyone wandering around Old Town Alexandria is accustomed to seeing mixed race couples (just as today, American synagogues are adjusting to mixed marriage families.)
Part of the experience of 'modernity' is that culture evolves. And there is little parents can do about it. You can take your daughters to Jack and Jill, but they will be creating their own variation of the culture they learned from you.
"I recall an article in Ebony decades ago that objected to black-white dating in the same terms my parents used to object to Jewish-Christian dating."
The great difference is that many blacks denounce dating and marriage with OFFICIAL "whites" but love the prospect of marrying the children of the couples they claim to despise. Since the 19th century, the prize spouse for ambitious blacks has been the mixed race (the whiter the better) person who can provide them with off the record "miscegenation" while they plead "not guilty" on a technicality.
'Deracialization' means that American Blacks are becoming another ethnic group, with a shared culture and heritage born out of the slave/Jim Crow/civil rights movement experience. (Which makes today's black immigrants a different ethnic group than Blacks whose ancestors were brought here as slaves).
Your concerns about losing that culture and heritage are no different than the concerns of parents in every other ethnic group in the US - Jews, South Asians, East Asians, etc. (Consider the dilemma faced by Tevya the Milkman in Fiddler on the Roof).
Beyond ethnic groups, it's the concern of rural parents when their children leave home for higher education - the kids are unlikely to return home to share their parents' way of life, perhaps their customs and values.
And it's a universal concern - parents everywhere are concerned that their children will not share their culture. A sub-story in Jorge Amado's beautiful 'Tent of Miracles' involves a son who leaves poor community where he was raised to go to law school. All of the adults who helped raise him and thrilled for him, but their joy is bittersweet - they know he is never coming back.
However, unless you live in a totalitarian religious state, the parents only have a loose influence as to the culture the children create for themselves.
Last time I checked, the intermarriage rates among most American ethnic communities is close to 40% - they are sharing parts of their culture and losing other parts.
My understanding is that intermarriage among the American Black community is not quite as high as other ethnic groups, but it's growing. I recall an article in Ebony decades ago that objected to black-white dating in the same terms my parents used to object to Jewish-Christian dating. But today, anyone wandering around Old Town Alexandria is accustomed to seeing mixed race couples (just as today, American synagogues are adjusting to mixed marriage families.)
Part of the experience of 'modernity' is that culture evolves. And there is little parents can do about it. You can take your daughters to Jack and Jill, but they will be creating their own variation of the culture they learned from you.
"I recall an article in Ebony decades ago that objected to black-white dating in the same terms my parents used to object to Jewish-Christian dating."
The great difference is that many blacks denounce dating and marriage with OFFICIAL "whites" but love the prospect of marrying the children of the couples they claim to despise. Since the 19th century, the prize spouse for ambitious blacks has been the mixed race (the whiter the better) person who can provide them with off the record "miscegenation" while they plead "not guilty" on a technicality.