American attitudes to interracial marriage flipped within a single lifetime
In 1958, 94 percent of Americans told Gallup they disapproved of marriage between people of different races. By 2021, 94 percent approved. Between those two polls came a landmark Supreme Court ruling, Loving v. Virginia in 1967, which struck down the last state bans on such unions.
The first recorded interracial wedding on land that later became the United States took place in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1565, when Miguel Rodriguez, a Spaniard from Segovia, wed Luisa de Abrego, a free Black woman. Barely a century later, Maryland passed the first law criminalising such marriages, in 1691. By the late 1800s, 38 states had bans, and even in 1960 they remained on the books in 31. The very word miscegenation was coined in an 1864 hoax pamphlet intended to smear abolitionists.
Bans were not uniquely American; Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa had them too. Internationally, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, affirmed a right to marry without limits of race, nationality or religion, although it is not legally binding. In the United States, the Warren court ruled that race-based marriage restrictions violated the Constitution's equal protection clause, which dated from 1868.
Change since then shows up clearly in census numbers. Interracial couples made up 2 percent of married couples in 1970, 7 percent in 2000 and 8.4 percent in 2010, and their share of new marriages rose from 11 percent in 2010 to 19 percent by 2019. A Pew analysis found that about six in ten Americans would be fine with a relative marrying someone from any other major racial or ethnic group.
Research points to both strains and benefits. Some studies find higher divorce risk for certain pairings, possibly linked to weaker support from family and friends. On the other hand, the contact hypothesis holds that positive encounters across group lines reduce prejudice, and one experiment found that merely watching a member of one's own group act warmly toward an outsider improved attitudes. Many people of mixed heritage report pressure to pick one identity, yet also describe the ability to move between groups as a source of confidence.
Source: Interracial marriage
