The Family - Interracial Marriages Are Becoming More Common

Over the 40 years covered by the chart above, the United States has seen its population of interracial married couples grow sharply, from 157,000 couples in 1960 to 1,464,000 in 2000. This is not surprising when one considers that until 1967 interracial marriage was illegal in more than 20 states. In 1967 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia, a case brought by an interracial married couple attempting to live freely and openly in Virginia. The court found that a ban on interracial marriage was unconstitutional. In the years that followed, there was a predictable increase in the number of mixed marriages.

The total number of married couples in the U.S. increased by 40% between the years 1960 and 2000. The increase in interracial marriages was an astounding 832%. Although still a small percentage of all couples (2.59% in 2000), interracial couples are becoming somewhat more common, and they certainly no longer have to skirt the law or cross a state border in order to wed.

The chart uses bars to show the percent of all married couples that is composed of inter-racial couples and lines to present data on the number of interracial couples by race combinations⁷.

Race breakdown of Interracial Couples (Presented as a percentage of all interracial couples)

Racial Categories	1970	1980	1990	2000	% Change
Black and White	21.0%	25.7%	21.9%	24.8%	18.3%
White and Asian/Pacific Islander or Native American	75.2%	69.1%	74.7%	71.8%	-4.5%
Black and Asian/Pacific Islander or Native American	3.9%	5.2%	3.4%	3.4%	-11.8%

The number of black/white couples has risen most over the period. However, the group that represents the largest number of mixed marriages is the white partnered with a non-black, i.e. white/Asian or Pacific Islander or white/Native American. Although this category has seen a slight decline, it still represents almost three-fourths of interracial couples.

One interesting aspect of interracial marriages is the husband/wife/race disparity. One quarter of mixed marriages are black/white couples. Of these, however, nearly three-fourths are black men and white women. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Virginia Lamp Thomas are a prominent example of such a couple, not to mention Sidney Poitier and his wife Joanna Shimkus. The exact opposite is true when we look at white/Asian mixed couples. In 1990⁸ 72% of white/Asian marriages were like that of Maury Povich and Connie Chung, or John Lennon and Yoko Ono, white males and Asian females.

This situation has led to a growing disapproval of interracial marriage among Asian men and black women⁹. According to Steven Sailer, in an article titled Is Love Colorblind? "the heart of the problem is that intermarriage does not treat every sex/race combination equally. On average it offers black men and Asian women new opportunities to find mates among whites, while exposing Asian men and black women to greater competition from whites."

The fact that new groups (Asian men and black women) are joining those opposed to interracial marriage just as interracial marriages become more common suggests that this is a social phenomenon for which predictions are difficult to make. Complicating an already complex subject is the fact that recent studies suggest that our rates of interracial cohabitation are higher than our rates of interracial marriage. Could this portend a continuation or even increased growth rate for interracial marriages? We will have to watch and see.

Sources: U.S. Bureau of the Census. Race of Wife by Race of Husband: 1960, 1970, 1980, 1991 and 1992. Online. Available: http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/race/interracttab1.txt. (For data for the chart and table ); America's Families and Living Arrangements 2000. Current Population Reports. June 2001. (for figures for 2000); Sailer, Steven. "Is Love Colorblind?" National Review, 14 July 1997. Online. Available: http://www.isteve.com/IsLoveColorblind.htm.; University of Michigan. "Intimate relationships between the races more common than thought." 23 March 2000. Online. Available: http://www.umich.edu/~newsinfo/Re-leases/2000/Mar00/r032300a.html. (for cohabitation study data).