CHICAGO, March 8 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- This year marks the
 fortieth anniversary of Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court case that
 declared states could not prohibit interracial marriage. A measure of how
 far we have come is that when Senator Barack Obama's parents married in
 1960, their marriage would have been illegal -- and he would have been
 considered illegitimate -- in half of all the states in America.
     This briefing report from the Council on Contemporary Families sums up
 the trends in interracial marriage since that time and provides a list of
 experts who can speak to various issues connected to the topic.
     Key dates: Loving v Virginia was argued April 10, 1967 and decided on
 June 12, 1967, by a unanimous decision, written by Earl Warren.
        The Steady Rise of Non-traditional Romantic Unions: The Case of
                    Interracial and Intercultural Marriage.
 
       A briefing paper prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families
 
                  by Michael J. Rosenfeld, Stanford University
     Prior to 1970, the overwhelming majority of all couples were same-race
 married couples. Couples who lived together outside of marriage, whether
 heterosexual or same-sex, were practically invisible. Inter-racial
 marriages were extremely rare. In fact, until 1967, many states in the US
 had laws against interracial marriage. In Virginia, for example, all
 nonwhite groups, including blacks, native Americans, and Asians, were
 prohibited from marrying whites. Even in states that never had laws against
 racial intermarriage, such as Illinois and New York, racial intermarriage
 was rare before the end of the 1960s.
     Since 1970 there has been a steady increase in all types of
 nontraditional romantic unions. The number of same-sex couples living
 together openly has climbed significantly, while the number of heterosexual
 unmarried cohabiting couples has soared, from 3.1 million in 1990 to 4.6
 million in 2000 to 5.2 million in 2005. This paper, however, focuses on the
 rise of inter-racial or intercultural marriages between whites and Asians,
 non-Hispanic whites and Hispanics, and between whites and
 African-Americans, the kinds of marriage that were illegal in many states
 prior to 1967.
     State laws prohibiting interracial marriages were finally struck down
 in the Supreme Court's 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision. Yet such marriages
 continued to be very uncommon well into the 1970s. In 1970, less than 2% of
 married couples in the US were interracial. By 2005, the number of such
 marriages had risen almost fourfold, with interracial couples representing
 7.5 percent of all married couples. Although this percentage may seem
 small, it is a dramatic increase over several decades, and many signs point
 to it accelerating in the future.
     Why are we Seeing More Interracial and Intercultural Marriages? The
 Role of Immigration
     Some of the rise in racial intermarriage since 1970 is due to
 immigration, which has increased the racial diversity of the US since 1965.
 Hispanics and Asians are the predominant groups among the new immigrants,
 and because neither Asians nor Hispanics are residentially segregated to
 the extent that blacks in the US historically have been, Asians and
 Hispanics have substantial opportunity to socialize with members of other
 racial groups. The increased numbers of these immigrants have contributed
 to the rise in intermarriage between Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites, and
 the rise in intermarriage between Asians and whites.
     Greater Acceptance of Diversity
     The rise in black-white marriages cannot be due to immigration. One
 cause is improvement in race relations. Despite continued residential
 segregation and enduring prejudices, the post Civil Rights era has led to
 more socialization between blacks and whites, and to more intermarriage.
 Polls show that the percentage of Americans who want interracial marriage
 to be illegal has declined precipitously since the early 1970s, and there
 is much higher acceptance of inter-racial unions than at any time in the
 past 200 years.
     Rising Age of Marriage as a Cause of Increased Interracial Marriage
     A second factor in the increase in interracial marriages is the rising
 age of marriage. Age at first marriage is substantially later than it ever
 has been in US history. In the 2005 American Community Survey (ACS), half
 of US- born women age 26.5 and half of US-born men age 28.2 had never been
 married. This is considerably higher than in any other historical period.
     As young adults postpone settling down to start their own families,
 they have greater exposure to different kinds of potential partners. Young
 adults in their 20s spend time going to college, traveling, working, and
 encountering a broader diversity of potential mates. Later age at marriage
 also makes it more difficult for parents to veto or even influence their
 children's choice of mates. Sure enough, among people married in the same
 calendar year, later age at marriage is associated with higher rates of
 interracial marriage. And second marriages are more likely to be
 interracial than first marriages.
     What Nontraditional Unions Tell us about American Society
     The rise of intermarriage in the US means that racial barriers no
 longer have quite the strength and power they used to have. Race continues
 to be a powerful division in American life, however. Racial intermarriage
 remains far less common than intermarriage between high school dropouts and
 people with college degrees, or intermarriage between Catholics and
 Protestants, or intermarriage between Northerners and Southerners.
     And although the number of black-white marriages has grown from 55,000
 in 1960 to 440,000 in 2005, black-white marriage remains the most unlikely
 racial combination in the US, given the sizes of the black and white
 populations. Hispanics only slightly outnumber blacks among American
 adults, but the number of Hispanic marriages to non-Hispanic whites (1.75
 million) was four times larger than the number of black-white marriages in
 2005. There were fewer than half as many Asians as blacks in the US in
 2005, but the number of Asian- white marriages (755,000) was substantially
 larger than the number of black- white marriages. In the marriage market,
 as in the residential housing market, blacks continue to be the most
 socially isolated group in the US.
     Nevertheless, it is clear that acceptance of interracial unions is on
 the rise. In 1972, five years after all laws in the US against interracial
 marriage had been declared unconstitutional, 39% of Americans still favored
 laws against racial intermarriage. This percentage has steadily dropped
 over time, so that by 2002 only 10% of Americans surveyed in the General
 Social Survey said they favored laws against interracial marriage. Young
 adults are more favorably disposed to interracial marriage than their
 elders: only 4% of young adults surveyed in 2002 favored laws against
 interracial marriage. Another sign of changing times: Barack Obama's
 parents were married in Hawaii in 1960, and at that time their marriage
 would have been illegal in more than half of US states, because they were
 an interracial couple.
     For more information on these and other non-traditional unions,
 contact:
     Michael J. Rosenfeld, Assistant Professor, Stanford University
 Department of Sociology. Author of The Age of Independence: Interracial
 Unions, Same-Sex Unions, and the Changing American Family. Cambridge,
 Mass.: Harvard University Press, March, 2007. Email: mrosenfe@stanford.edu.
 Cell: 415-205-1892.
     Note: Although the long-term impact of immigration has been to greatly
 increase the number of interracial marriages in the US, and to increase the
 percentage of whites married to nonwhite minorities, recent research
 suggests that the massive immigration of Asians and Hispanics during the
 1990s has led to at least a temporary increase in the percentage of Asians
 married to Asians and the percentage of Hispanics married to Hispanics, as
 the pool of potential Asian and Hispanic mates has grown. For more
 information on this countervailing trend, contact Dan Lichter, Professor of
 Policy Analysis and Management, Cornell University, email:
 dtl28@cornell.edu.
     Other CCF Experts can address the implications for family life raised
 by the trends Dr. Rosenfeld describes:
     On the issues faced by couples and families in interracial and
 intercultural marriages, contact Kerry Ann Rockquemore, Associate Professor
 of African-American Studies and Sociology at the University of Illinois at
 Chicago: rockquem@uic.edu; 312.996.4694
     On the issues faced by couples and children from interracial marriages
 and the similarities/differences in the experiences of same-sex couples and
 interracial couples, contact Brian Powell, Professor of Sociology, Indiana
 University: powell@indiana.edu; 812-855-7624.
     On interracial and intercultural marriages and partnerships involving
 Hispanics or Latinos, contact Gonzalo Bacigalupe, Associate Professor &
 Director, Family Therapy Program, University of Massachusetts:
 gonzalo.bacigalupe@umb.edu; 617.287.7631
     On transracial adoption and persons who are both transracially adopted
 and multiracial, contact Gina. M. Samuels, School of social Service,
 University of Chicago, (773) 834-2163; gmsamuels@uchicago.edu
     On the issues faced by interracial same-sex couples, contact Mignon R.
 Moore, Department of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles at
 moore@soc.ucla.edu or 310-206-9678.
     The Chicago-based Council on Contemporary Families is a non-profit,
 non- partisan association of prominent family researchers and clinicians
 whose aim is to make recent research on family formation, marriage,
 divorce, childhood and other family issues accessible to the press and
 public. For more information, go to http://www.contemporaryfamilies.org.
     On May 4-5, The Council will hold its 10th Anniversary Conference at
 the University of Chicago: "What Works for Today's Families? And What
 Doesn't? A Decade of Research, Practice, and Dialogue."
     Accredited journalists seeking complimentary registration should
 contact Stephanie Coontz, Director of Research and Public Education,
 Council on Contemporary Families: coontzs@msn.com. Phone: 360 556-9223.
 
 

SOURCE Council for Contemporary Families

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