Interracial and Interethnic Marriage

SIGNIFICANCE: Interracial and interethnic marriages involve marriages between people from dissimilar racial, ethnic, linguistic, or national groups. These marriages are significant for intergroup relations because they are a sign of assimilation or integration for the minority group. Intermarriage can be understood as an indication of the state of race and ethnic relations, as well as an agent of assimilation. Intermarriage blurs racial and ethnic boundaries by bringing together diverse groups and producing multiracial families and children who can assume new multiethnic and multiracial identities.

In the United States, racial and ethnic groups have tended to marry within their own group. Throughout US history, there have been laws against various types of interracial and interethnic marriage, usually directed at Black, Asian, or Indigenous Americans. For example, in the early twentieth century, Chinese and Japanese immigrants were denied “White” status, which meant, among other things, that they were subject to restrictions on their right to marry outside their own groups. Since the institution of slavery, interracial relations between Black and White Americans have been closely monitored and restricted. Until 1966, seventeen states still had formal prohibitions against one or more forms of interracial marriage, and forty states at one time had laws prohibiting Black individuals from marrying White individuals. On June 12, 1967, the US Supreme Court rendered a decision in Loving v. Virginia that overturned the sixteen existing state antimiscegenation statutes. The 2022 Respect for Marriage Act further protected interracial and interethnic marriage rights.

Intermarriage Rates

Rates of intermarriage differ depending on the racial or ethnic groups involved. Research in the twentieth century, like Richard Alba’s Ethnicity and Race in the USA (1988), indicated that interethnic marriages, especially between European Americans, were common. Alba concluded that, among White ethnic groups, there was a steady increase in interethnic marriage. For example, only 20 percent of Italian American men born after 1949 were married to Italian American women. Similarly, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Beyond the Melting Pot (1970) analyzed ethnic groups in New York City and found that distinctions between White ethnic groups were being reduced by intermarriage. Despite this increase in interethnic marriages, these studies both found that individuals were still somewhat more likely to choose mates from their own ethnic group than from another.

In the twenty-first century, interracial and interethnic marriage continued to become more common. The US Census Bureau reported that the number of interracial or interethnic opposite-sex married couples grew by 29 percent between 2000 and 2010. A Pew Research Center study found that, in 2010, about 15 percent of all new marriages in the United States were between people of differing races or ethnicities, and the total proportion of interracial or interethnic marriages was 8.4 percent compared to 3.2 percent in 1980. By 2015, 17 percent of marriages were between individuals of different races or ethnicities.

Interethnic marriage, though, is different from interracial marriage. People are often willing to cross ethnic boundaries to marry, but there is a much greater resistance to crossing racial boundaries. In addition, there are disparities between rates of intermarriage for the various racial groups. Hispanic Americans are an interesting example, since this group can be classed as both an ethnic minority group and a racial minority group. Marriages between Hispanic and White Americans accounted for only 2.6 percent of all US marriages in 1996, but this was a substantial increase from 1970, when the rate was around 1 percent. Some studies, such as Clara Rodriguez’s Puerto Ricans: Born in the USA (1989), found that rates of intermarriage increased for Hispanic Americans of more affluent social classes who lived in the cities and for the presumably more Americanized younger generations. Interracial marriage continued to be more common in urban areas in the twenty-first century. In 2015, 18 percent of marriages in metropolitan areas were interracial compared to 11 percent in non-metropolitan areas.

In the late twentieth century, Asian Americans had higher rates of intermarriage than Black and Hispanic Americans, according to scholars Sharon Lee and Keiko Yamanaka, who found the outmarriage rate for Chinese Americans to be 15 percent and for Japanese Americans 34 percent. However, not all Asian American groups had high rates of intermarriage. Robert Jiobu’s Ethnicity and Assimilation (1988) found that Vietnamese Americans had very low rates of intermarriage. In 2010, Asian Americans had the highest rates of intermarriage among minorities, at 28 percent of newlyweds, followed by 26 percent of Hispanic individuals. By 2015, the most common interracial pairings were between Hispanic and White individuals, at 42 percent of all interracial marriages. Around 15 percent were between White and Asian individuals, and 12 percent were between White and multiracial individuals.

African Americans have historically had the lowest rates of intermarriage among all racial groups. According to the US Census Bureau, in 1995, Black-White marriages accounted for less than 1 percent of all US marriages. Black males traditionally outmarried at higher rates than Black women. This is consistent with a 1990 study by Tucker and Mitchell-Kernan, which found that 3.6 percent of all married Black men were married to White women, while only 1.2 percent of married Black women were married to White men. However, this increased in the twenty-first century. The Pew Research Center reported that 17 percent of Black newlyweds married out in 2010, compared to 19 percent in 2015.

As a result of the increased acceptance and prevalence of interracial couples, America’s racial group demographics and ethnic profile have also shifted. In 1970, only 1 percent of American children were mixed-race, but in 2020, the US Census Bureau reported that over 33.8 million Americans were multiracial. In the 2020s, the number of same-sex couples who were interracial surpassed that of other couples. In 2022, 31 percent of same-sex couples were interracial, compared to 19 percent of opposite-sex couples. Of same-sex spouses, 37 percent of male couples were interracial compared to 25 percent of female couples.

Intermarriage and Prejudice

Despite the increasing occurrence of intermarriage, there is still prejudice against these unions, especially marriages between Black and White individuals. This disapproval is communicated through formal channels, such as institutional discrimination, as well as via informal channels, such as families, friends, or people outside the family. According to Rosenblatt et al., the refusal to accept or acknowledge interracial marriages occurs in a variety of ways, such as not selling a house or not renting a hotel room to an interracial couple. Other typical examples are restaurant hostesses asking one member of an interracial couple if it is “one for dinner” or supermarket cashiers trying to separate their food items in line at the grocery store, which are both refusals to acknowledge that the two are a couple.

Religious reasons have also been widely used to discriminate against interracial and interethnic marriage, with Christian groups like the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints distributing information over the Internet that “interracial marriages are not biblical” or preachers interpreting the scriptures as explicitly opposing interracial marriages. Interracial couples have also cited police harassment, getting pulled over a disproportionate number of times when together, and being told that the White woman fits the description of a kidnap victim. Often, White individuals who intermarry are marginalized and stereotyped in much the same way as minorities, with the assumption that they are maladapted in some way. Thus, although intermarriages are often seen as representative of the improving state of race and ethnic relations, opposition to and prejudice against these marriages still exists. A Pew Research Center study found that only 43 percent of Americans surveyed thought the increase in interracial marriages was good for society; 11 percent said it was a change for the worse, and 44 percent said it made no difference.

In 2021, a Gallup poll reported that 94 percent of the Americans surveyed approved of interracial marriage. Gallup conducted the same survey in 1958, when only 4 percent of Americans expressed approval, but in 2013, 87 percent supported interracial couples. To protect the rights of all married couples, the Respect for Marriage Act was passed in 2022. Under the Respect of Marriage Act, states must approve and recognize the marriage licenses of interracial couples from other states.

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