Interracial dating percentages

Mixed unions in Canada

Children, Youth, and Families U. Less than 3 percent of all marriages were interracial in , and the public generally disapproved of such unions. Interracial marriage was even illegal in at least 15 U. Although the U. Supreme Court ruled that laws prohibiting interracial marriages were unconstitutional in , a reported 72 percent of southern white Americans and 42 percent of northern whites said they supported an outright ban on interracial relationships. In , with Barack Obama Jr. Not surprisingly, this transformation is most evident among young people. As the education and income gaps between racial and ethnic groups shrank, so did the social distance between them. While racial discrimination is still evident, the boundaries separating the major ethnic and racial groups have become more porous. A recent survey found that young Americans ages 18 to 29 have nearly universal acceptance of interracial dating and marriage within their own families.

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Since then, intermarriage rates have steadily climbed. All told, more than , newlyweds in had recently entered into a marriage with someone of a different race or ethnicity. By comparison, in , the first year for which detailed data are available, about , newlyweds had done so. The long-term annual growth in newlyweds marrying someone of a different race or ethnicity has led to dramatic increases in the overall number of people who are presently intermarried — including both those who recently married and those who did so years, or even decades, earlier. Overall increases in intermarriage have been fueled in part by rising intermarriage rates among black newlyweds and among white newlyweds.

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Interracial marriage is a marriage involving spouses who belong to different races or racialized ethnicities. In the past, such marriages were outlawed in the United States , Nazi Germany and apartheid -era South Africa as miscegenation. The word, now usually considered pejorative, first appeared in Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro , a hoax anti-abolitionist pamphlet published in Virginia , which ruled that race-based restrictions on marriages, such as the anti-miscegenation law in the state of Virginia , violated the Equal Protection Clause adopted in of the United States Constitution.

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U.S. Approval of Interracial Marriage at New High of 94%

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