Interracial marriage

Interracial marriage is a marriage involving spouses who belong to different "races" or racialized ethnicities.

In the past, such marriages were outlawed in certain U.S. states, Nazi Germany and apartheid-era South Africa as miscegenation (Latin: 'mixing types'). 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 1864. Even in 1960, interracial marriage was forbidden by law in 31 U.S. states.

It became legal throughout the United States in 1967, following the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States under Chief Justice Earl Warren in the case Loving v. 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 1868) of the United States Constitution.

Interracial marriage has been internationally protected under the UN's "The Universal Declaration of Human Rights" which has granted the right to marriage "without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion", since it was approved in 1948. Since its enactment, it has been accepted by nearly every nation on the globe. Despite this, interracial marriage was not legalized in all U.S. states until Loving v. Virginia in 1967 which legalized interracial marriage in all fifty states. In addition, the UDHR is not legally binding and thus it is not necessarily reflective of global policies on interracial marriage.

A 2013 Gallup poll found that 11 percent of Americans said they disapprove of interracial marriage, compared with 94% who disapproved in 1958. In 1958, actor Sammy Davis Jr., who had faced a backlash for his involvement with a white woman, actress Kim Novak, briefly married a black woman to protect himself from mob violence. The opposition to interracial marriage in the United States prior to its legalization in 1967 was reflected by former president Harry S. Truman in 1963 who when asked by a reporter if interracial marriage would become widespread in the United States he responded, "I hope not; I don't believe in it. Would you want your daughter to marry a Negro? She won't love someone who isn't her color." African Americans' approval of interracial marriage has consistently been higher than whites' over the decades, and in 2013 Blacks' approval (96%) is now nearly universal, while whites' approval is at 84%. In 2021, 94% of U.S. adults approved of interracial marriages. In the past, many jurisdictions have had regulations banning or restricting not just interracial marriage but also interracial sexual relations, including Germany during the Nazi period, South Africa under apartheid, and many states in the United States prior to the 1967 landmark Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia.

A 2008 study by Jenifer Bratter and Rosalind King conducted on behalf of the Education Resources Information Center examined whether crossing racial boundaries in the United States increased the risk of divorce. Comparisons across marriage cohorts revealed that, overall, interracial couples have higher rates of divorce, particularly for those that married during the late 1980s. A 2009 study by Yuanting Zhang and Jennifer Van Hook also found that interracial couples were at increased risk of divorce. One consistent finding of this research was that gender is significantly related to divorce risk. Interracial marriages involving a White woman have a higher risk of divorce, as compared with interracial marriages involving Asian or Black women (interracial marriages involving Black women showed a decreased risk of divorce, lower than non-interracial marriages).

According to authors Stella Ting-Toomey and Tenzin Dorjee, the increased risk of divorce observed in couples with a White wife may be related to decreased support from family members and friends. They note that White women were viewed as "unqualified" by their non-White in-laws to raise and nurture mixed race children, due to their lack of experience in "navigating American culture as a minority". A 2018 study by Jennifer Bratter and Ellen Whitehead found that white women with mixed race children were less likely to receive family support than were non-white women with mixed race children.

In one study, White women married to Black men were more likely to report incidents of racial discrimination in public, such as inferior restaurant service or police profiling, compared to other interracial pairings. Such discriminatory factors may place these marriages at an increased risk of divorce. A study published in 2008 reported a lower risk of divorce for inter-ethnic marriages between Hispanics and non-Hispanic Whites. However, another study, published in 2011, found that these intermarriages were at an increased risk of divorce. Gender was found to be related to the probability of divorce, with marriages involving White women and Hispanic men having the highest risk of divorce.