More interracial marriages: Is it a healthy breaking down of negative racial attitudes?

Despite the institutionalized racism that pervades every aspect of American life, I see that the number of interracial marriages has increased significantly.  According to a recent Pew report, 14.6% of all new marriages in the US in 2008 were between people of different ethnicity, six times the rate in 1960.  In 1961, the report says, less than one in 1000 new marriages were between a black and white person; by 1980 that figure had risen to one in 150  and by 2008, one in 60.
According to the report, of the 3.8 million adults married in 2008, 9% of whites, 16% of blacks, 26% of Latinos and 31% of Asians married outside their ethnic group with intermarriage doubling among whites and tripling among blacks.

I like to think that this is a positive thing, a product of the weakening of racial barriers.  I think I am right in general but two good friends of mine once offered me their opinions on this some time ago and they were sort of similar.  One was a Japanese American who told me at that time that there was a very high marry out rate in his community with women marrying white men in particular.  He had no problem with it in general but was concerned about the reasons and the loss of his culture or the thinning out of it I guess. His argument for this was that it was partially driven by them seeking security as well as it is the face of the white man that appears as the symbol of power and success in this society as a small group of predominantly white men rule it.

My other friend, an African American woman had a similar argument.  She told me that when she was a teenager, a lot of her girlfriends talked of having a child with a white man or lighter skinned black man, that this would produce a child with more opportunity and, I assume, security; it would give her child a fighting chance.   That child would have to face less racism in general was the idea.  She never ended up marrying a light skinned black man or a white man and had two beautiful black children; "straight up black" she always told me.

Obviously, there is nothing scientific about an example like this, two friends sharing their views with me, but it does make some sense. I welcome any comments and thoughts that readers might have about this. I would dare to say that the black man has been the most denigrated individual in US society. Those older folks reading this might remember Big Bill Broonzy's song, Black White and Brown, "If you white, its all right, if you brown, well stick around, but if you black, get back get back get back." Broonzy then goes on to give examples of what it meant to be wearing black skin in this country, telling stories about the unemployment line and wage differentials etc. Broonzy was a great guitarist and storyteller like so many of them.
When I think about it, I grew up in England listening to the blues as did a whole section of British working class youth in the sixties. It was these old blues guys with their songs about life in America who influenced me politically although I didn't really know it at the time. They  helped me understand some things about life in the land of the free; that it wasn't quite the way Disney  and the Dick Van Dyke show portrayed it.  Most of them were uneducated working class folks, some of them illiterate country boys. Their lives came through the music and the words they sang.  Then there was the great Nina Simone of course, she held nothing back and added another level to this. I owe them a lot for helping me understand the world and should write a lot more about these emissaries of black America who came to Europe in the 40's 50's and 60's expressing  politics through their song.

But that's for another time I hope.

"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education."  Einstein