Joelle Monrose's List: Mixed Race Couples

• In February 1961, Barack Obama's parents did something that was illegal in 22 states and that 96% of the population disapproved of: they got married.
• In fact, interracial marriage, sex and cohabitation would remain illegal in much of the U.S. for another six years. Then on June 12, 1967, in the case Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down the country's anti-miscegenation laws, allowing interracial couples across the country to marry.
• June 12 has since become a grass-roots holiday in the U.S., especially for multiracial couples and families. Known as Loving Day, the celebration commemorates the 1967 case and fights prejudice against mixed-race couples, and is a reason to throw an awesome, inclusive party.

  • that day the supreme court declared their marriage was right and proclaimed anti-miscegenation laws illegal.

  • June 12, "The Loving day", in remenbrance of the Loving family.
• In 1958, Richard and Mildred Loving got married in Washington, D.C., where interracial marriage was legal. But one night when Richard, who was white, and Mildred, who was black and Native American, were sleeping in their Virginia home, three police officers burst inside, shined flashlights in their faces and told them that their Washington marriage certificate was "no good."
• The newlyweds were arrested and threatened with jail time.
• A Virginia judge looked down at the couple from his bench and told them, "Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix."
• He sentenced Richard and Mildred to a year in jail each, citing an 1883 Supreme Court case that said if a mixed-race couple were punished equally, there would be no discrimination.
• Chief Justice Earl Warren delivered the opinion, writing that anti-miscegenation laws "deprive the Lovings of liberty" and that the "freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness."
• On June 12, 1967, the Supreme Court agreed.
• Virginia's anti-miscegenation laws had been on the books for 305 years.
• As late as 1987, a full 20 years after the case, only 48% of Americans said it was acceptable for blacks and whites to date. That number has since jumped to 83%, according to the Pew Research Center. In 2010, the center estimated that 1 in 7 new marriages in the U.S. is now an interracial coupling. In 1961, the year Obama's parents married, only 1 in a 1,000 marriages included a black person and a white person; today, it's 1 in 60.
• Now Loving Day is the biggest multiracial celebration in the U.S.

  • celebrating the day interracial marriage became legal

  • Loving Day Recalls a Time When the Union of a Man And a Woman Was Banned.
• 

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• Chip, who is white, says that when his dad learned he had fallen in love with a black co-worker named Yvette, the elder Edgeworth threw his son out of the house the family owned in Birmingham, Ala., and refused to speak to him.
• After dating for a year, they got married in 1994.
• Once a social taboo, love across the color line is becoming increasingly common. The number of interracial marriages in the U.S. has leaped almost 1,000% since 1967, when a landmark Supreme Court decision, Loving v. Virginia, voided state antimiscegenation laws that forbid unions between the races. Today there are more than 2 million interracial marriages, accounting for about 5% of all U.S. marriages, and almost half a million of them are between blacks and whites.
• It was only three years ago that Alabama became the last state to drop its (unenforceable) ban on mixed marriage,
• Of course, interracial intimacy has been a fact of life in the region since African slaves first arrived in the U.S.
• sanctioned love: black-white interracial marriages

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• Interracial marriage occurs when two people of differing racial groups marry. This is a form of exogamy (marrying outside of one's racial group) and can be seen in the broader context of miscegenation (mixing of different racial groups in marriage, cohabitation, or sexual relations).
• banning or restricting interracial marriage
• many states in the United States prior to a 1967 Supreme Court decision.

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• Multiracial Americans numbered 9.0 million in 2010, or 2.9% of the total population, but 5.6% of the population under age 18.^[1]
• A 2008 study by Jenifer L. Bratter and Rosalind B. King conducted on behalf of the Education Resources Information Center examined whether crossing racial boundaries increased the risk of divorce.
• the likelihood of divorce for interracial couples to that of same-race couples was compared.
• interracial couples have higher rates of divorce, particularly for those that married during the late 1980s.
• The number of interracial marriages has steadily continued to increase since the 1967 Supreme Court ruling in Loving v. Virginia, but also continues to represent an absolute minority among the total number of wed couples.
• Likewise, since Hispanic is not a race but an ethnicity, Hispanic marriages with non-Hispanics are not registered as interracial if both partners are of the same race (i.e. a Black Hispanic marrying a non-Hispanic Black partner).
• it may be seen that endogamy (marrying within race) was more prevalent for African American men at lower education levels.
• Racial endogamy is significantly stronger among recent immigrants.
• For instance, female immigrants of African descent are more likely to marry U.S.-born Caucasians than are their male counterparts.
• These numbers suggest that the prevalence of intimate interracial contact is greatly underestimated when one focuses only on marriage data.

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• Incredibly, laws against interracial couples stayed on the books for decades after the Loving decision. In 1998, a clause that prohibited "marriage of a white person with a Negro or mulatto or a person who shall have one-eighth or more Negro blood" was removed South Carolina's state constitution.

• In Alabama, it took until 2000 to remove these laws. A referendum was passed that removed this article from the Alabama State Constitution:

   

  "The Legislature shall never pass any law to authorize or legalize any marriage between any white person and a Negro, or a descendant of a Negro."
   Alabama State Constitution, Article IV, Section 102

   

  This section was introduced in 1901.
• However, 64% said that they would vote to remove it. While this is a majority, it is still far from a unanimous vote
• Because of the Loving decision, these laws were not legally enforceable after June 12th, 1967 - even though they were on the books.

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• Monday was, by city proclamation, Loving Day in the nation's capital, recognizing the 39th anniversary of L oving v. Virginia, the 1967 Supreme Court decision that overturned miscegenation laws in Virginia and 15 other states, all in the South. It was the end of the last piece of state-sanctioned segregation.
• the percentage of interracial marriages has increased fivefold from 1970 to 2000, according the U.S. Census, from 1 percent of all marriages to more than 5 percent.
• "I don't know that people know about and understand the impact of that court case," Bullock says. "I mean, how many of us mixed-race kids would have been born without it? That's a pretty fundamental change in society."

• The Loving case started in rural Caroline County, Va., about 100 miles south of the District. Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter were young people in love. She was just 18. She was black and he was white. They traveled in 1958 to the District, where interracial marriages were legal, took their vows, came home and, at 2 a.m., were arrested in bed by deputies. They were prosecuted and sentenced to a year in jail. Caroline County Circuit Court Judge Leon Bazile suspended the sentence -- so long as the couple left the state and did not return together for a quarter-century. 

   

   "Almighty God created the races, white, black, yellow, Malay, and red and placed them on separate continents, and but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend the races to mix," Bazile ruled.
• It was not until 1967, 13 years after Brown v. Board of Education ended segregated schools, that the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the law.

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• Young people,
• are even more color-blind than their elders when it comes to matters of the heart.
• According to a recent nationwide poll in USA Today, 60% of U.S. teens have dated outside their race.
• Ali Zeidan, 22, a white Indiana native and computer major at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, and Melody Twilley, 19, a black prelaw student, are among them. The couple became engaged this past Valentine's Day after meeting on the Internet last year. When they started living together, Melody's dad, a businessman in mostly black Wilcox County, "got mad and made me pay my share of the rent," says Melody. But then he got to know Ali. Now Melody says that instead of looking at her fiance as "a white boy out to steal our women," her father welcomes him as a son-in-law-to-be with whom he can talk Democratic politics. He has also resumed subsidizing their rent.
• a University of Houston study this year found that these mixed unions are 30% more likely to have elevated levels of stress.
• "The bigger challenge for us is that I'm Catholic and he's Muslim," says Melody. "So we've thought this through."

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• Priya Merrill, 27, and husband Andrew Merrill, 30, married in August. They are part of a growing trend of interracial marriages
• The first time Priya Merrill, who is Indian, brought her white boyfriend home for Thanksgiving in 2007, the dinner was uncomfortable and confusing.
• The couple married last August, and her Indian family has warmed up to her husband despite their racial differences.
• Apparently, race is mattering less these days, say researchers at the Pew Research Center, who report that nearly one out of seven new marriages in the U.S. is interracial or interethnic. The report released Friday, which interviewed couples married for less than a year, found racial lines are blurring as more people choose to marry outside their race.
• He said interracial marriages have soared since the 1980s. About 6.8 percent of newly married couples reported marrying outside their race or ethnicity in 1980. That figure jumped to about 14.6 percent in the Pew report released this week, which surveyed newlyweds in 2008.
• From what we can tell, this is the highest [level of interracial marriage] it has ever been.
  --Jeffrey Passel, Pew senior demographer
• Couples pushing racial boundaries have become commonplace in the U.S., a trend that is also noticeable in Hollywood and politics. President Obama is the product of a black father from Africa and a white mother from Kansas. Supermodel Heidi Klum, who is white, married Seal, a British singer who is black.
• But not everyone is willing to accept mixed-race marriages. A Louisiana justice of the peace resigned late last year after refusing to marry an interracial couple.
• However, studies show that support for interracial marriages is stronger than in the past, especially among the Millennial generation. Among 18- to 29-year-olds, about 85 percent accept interracial marriages, according to a Pew study published in February. Scholars say interracial marriages are important to examine because they can be a barometer for race relations and cultural assimilation.
• growing acceptance of interracial marriages
• 50 years ago that such marriage was wrong -- and even illegal.
• Mildred Jeter had married a white man, Richard Loving.
• In the decades after the court's ruling, the U.S. population has been changed by an unprecedented influx of immigrants. The growing numbers of immigrants, said Pew researchers, is partially responsible for the increase in interracial marriages.
• The Pew Center study released Friday found that marrying outside of one's race or ethnicity is most common among Asians and Hispanics, two immigrant groups that have grown tremendously. About 30 percent of Asian newlyweds in the study married outside of their race, and about a quarter of Hispanic newlyweds reported marrying someone of another race.
• David Chen, 26, of Dallas, Texas, is Taiwanese. He is planning a wedding with his fiancee, Sylvia Duran, 26, who is Mexican.

• The African-American population also saw increases in interracial marriage, with the number of blacks participating in such marriages roughly tripling since 1980, the study said. About 16 percent of African-Americans overall are in an interracial marriage, but researchers point out a
• It's more common for black men to marry outside of their race than for black women.
• gender difference:
• The gender difference was the reverse in the Asian population surveyed. Twice as many newlywed Asian women, about 40 percent, were married outside their race, compared with Asian men, at about 20 percent.
• The Pew Center also found education and residency affected whether people married interracially
• More people who live in the West marry outside their race than do people in the Midwest and South, the survey found.
• "If I'm a college graduate, I am going to marry another graduate," Cherlin said. "It's of secondary importance if that person is my race."
• Technology
• free Internet dating site
• more privately

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• The growth of interracial marriages is slowing among U.S.-born Hispanics and Asians. Still, blacks are substantially more likely than before to marry whites.
  
  The number of interracial marriages in the U.S. has risen 20 percent since 2000 to about 4.5 million, according to the latest census figures. While still growing, that number is a marked drop-off from the 65 percent increase between 1990 and 2000.
  
  About 8 percent of U.S. marriages are mixed-race, up from 7 percent in 2000.
• steady flow of recent immigration
• White wariness toward a rapidly growing U.S. minority population also may be contributing to racial divisions, experts said.
• He noted the increase in anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.S. after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks as well as current tensions in Arizona over its new immigration law.
• "With a white backlash toward immigrant groups, some immigrants are more likely to turn inward to each other for support,"
• Broken down by race, about 40 percent of U.S.-born Asians now marry whites - a figure unchanged since 1980. Their likelihood of marrying foreign-born Asians, meanwhile, multiplied 3 times for men and 5 times for women, to roughly 20 percent.
  
  Among U.S.-born Hispanics, marriages with whites increased modestly from roughly 30 percent to 38 percent over the past three decades. But when it came to marriages with foreign-born Hispanics, the share doubled - to 12.5 percent for men, and 17.1 percent for women.
  
• In contrast, blacks are now three times as likely to marry whites than in 1980. About 14.4 percent of black men and 6.5 percent of black women are currently in such mixed marriages, due to higher educational attainment, a more racially integrated military and a rising black middle class that provides more interaction with other races.
• Hai Nguyen, 37, of Houston recalls the instant connection she felt after meeting her first Vietnamese boyfriend, Greg, in college. Nguyen says while she had to explain herself to white boyfriends, with Greg it was a feeling that "he so gets me, because we eat the same food, we like the same things, our families know each other and there is so little that needs to be said."
• The two divorced and Nguyen is now remarried to Jon, who is white.
• Due to increasing interracial marriages, multiracial Americans are a small but fast-growing demographic group, making up about 5 percent of the minority population. Together with blacks, Hispanics and Asians, the Census Bureau estimates they collectively will represent a majority of the U.S. population by mid-century.
• Still, many multiracial people - particularly those who are part black - shun a "multi" label in favor of identifying as a single race.
  
  By some estimates, two-thirds of those who checked the single box of "black" on the census form are actually mixed, including President Barack Obama, who identified himself as black in the 2010 census even though his mother was white.
• - Mississippi had the fastest growth in mixed marriages from 2000-08, a sign of closer ties between blacks and whites, though it still ranked second to last in overall share of mixed marriages.
• - Mixed marriages jumped from 2.25 million to 3.7 million, or 65 percent, from 1990-2000, as such unions became more broadly accepted in Southern states.
• - Among U.S.-born whites, about 0.3 percent married blacks in 1980; that figure rose to about 1 percent in 2008. About 0.3 percent of whites married Asians in 1980 and about 1 percent in 2008. About 2 percent of whites married Hispanics in 1980, rising to about 3.6 percent in 2008.

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