More than 10-fold increase since 1970
By Jim Lobe
Special to the NNPA
WASHINGTON (NNPA) – The number of interracial marriages in the United States increased more than ten-fold between 1970 and 2000, according to a new report which concludes that U.S. attitudes towards inter-racial dating and marriage have undergone a “sea change” over the past generation.
Owing in part to increased immigration and higher education levels, the percentage of interracial couples grew from under 1 percent in 2000 to more than 5 percent of the estimated 57 million couples recorded in the 2000 Census, according to the report by the Washington-based Population Reference Bureau (PRB).
That translated into an increase from roughly 300,000 interracial couples in 1970 to 1.5 million in 1990 to more than 3 million in 2000, according to the 36-page report, ”New Marriages, New Families: U.S. Racial and Hispanic Inter-marriage.”
That trend, which shows no sign of slackening, suggests that the United States is shifting increasingly from a “salad bowl” – where racial groups maintain their separate identities and resist marrying outside their groups – to an updated “melting pot,” where they are far more open to relations, including marriage, with people of a difference race.
And interracial marriage means more bi- and multi-racial children. Of the 281 million people enumerated in the 2000 Census, more than 2.4 percent, or 7 million people, reported “multiple race,” a figure that PRB suggested probably understates the actual number.
The 2000 Census was the first in which the “multiple race” category was listed as an option for respondents to check, along with 15 other categories, including 11 Asian and Pacific subgroups.
For purposes of the new PRB study, inter-marriage is defined as interracial – that is, between people from different racial groups, including white (75 percent of the total population), black (12 percent), Asian and Pacific Islander (4 percent), American Indian (1 percent), “some other race” (almost all Hispanics) (6 percent), or multiple race (2 percent) – or inter-Hispanic – which applied to individuals of Hispanic origin who married a non-Hispanic partner.
Aside from the more than five-fold increase in the percentage of interracial married couples, key findings of the report included:
* The typical inter-racial couple is a white person with a non-white spouse, while inter-marriage between two people from minority racial groups is relatively infrequent.
* Whites and blacks have the lowest inter-marriage rates, while American Indians, Hawaiians, and multiple-race people have the highest.
? Black men are more likely to intermarry than black women, while Asian women are more likely to intermarry than Asian men. Men and women from other racial groups, on the other hand, are equally likely to intermarry.
* About one-fourth of Hispanic couples are inter-Hispanic, a rate that has been fairly stable since 1980.
* Younger and better-educated people in the U.S. are more likely to intermarry than older and less-educated citizens.
* U.S.-born Asians and Hispanics and foreign-born whites and blacks are more likely to intermarry than foreign-born Asians and Hispanics and U.S.-born whites and blacks.
* Between 1970 and 2000, the number of children living in inter-racial families increased nearly fourfold – from 900,000 to 3 million – while the number in inter-Hispanic families increased nearly three-fold, from 800,000 to 2 million.
The study noted that changes in racial attitudes over the last 30 years clearly played a major role in the mushrooming of interracial marriages, which were illegal in most states at the end of the 19th century. As recently as 1945, the legislature of California which, next to Hawaii, has become the country’s most multi-racial state, passed a law that banned marriage between whites and Negroes, mulattos, Mongolians (which included Chinese and Japanese) and Malays.
After World War II, however, the law began to change as U.S. servicemen married Japanese women, and as the Civil Rights Movement began challenging anti-miscegenation laws in the courts. In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that all such laws were unconstitutional, although it took Alabama until 2000 to repeal its ban.
According to a recent Gallup study, the percentage of whites who favored laws against marriages between blacks and whites has declined from 35 percent in the 1970s to 10 percent in the early 2000s.
A late-2003 Gallup survey found that 86 percent of blacks, 79 percent of Hispanics, and 66 percent of whites said they would accept their child or grandchild marrying someone of a different race. As recently as 1990, two out of every three whites said they would oppose any relative marrying a black person.
Yet another 2003 poll found that 77 percent of respondents had no objection to blacks and whites dating each other.
Inter-marriage rates, according to the report, tend to increase with education for most groups. Nine percent of blacks who have graduated from college, for example, intermarry, compared to 5 percent who have less than a high-school education.
Similarly, interracial couples are more likely to live in populous areas where the population is racially diverse.
The U.S. West, with its population centers and high racial diversity, had twice the proportion of interracial couples (10 percent) as other major regions (5 percent), according to the report. Hawaii, Alaska, California, Nevada and Oklahoma led the rest of the states.