Interracial marriage: Let’s talk about it

For most people my age, interracial marriage is an accepted fact of modern society. We grew up assuming it was normal and there were few opportunities to question it as a result.

This is, of course, was not a guarantee – especially after centuries of legislating against interracial marriage and procreation in this country. And in reality, different stigmas around it still remain.

A recent Netflix movie called You People – which was popular for many reasons – trades on that exact tension. In the movie, a white, Jewish man (played by Jonah Hill) falls in love with a Black, Muslim woman (played by Lauren London). Both are LA millennials who readily acknowledge the difference between their backgrounds and initially have few second thoughts about it.

It’s when their parents are introduced that the potential cracks begin to show. Tensions arise over the dinner table when Jewish and Black discrimination are compared. Eddie Murphy is surprised – and visibly annoyed – when Jonah Hill proves a capable basketball player. Julia-Louis Dreyfus (Hill’s mother in the film) embarrasses herself by defending his son’s fiancée from microaggressions that end up being simple misunderstandings.

Much of the humor derives from the hypersensitivity around race in today’s culture. And the controversy around the film was somewhat predictable. An early Twitter debate focused on director Kenya Barris’ supposedly excessive focus on interracial couples in his work, as if he feels the need to defend the practice. There was also criticism that the film represented the Jewish community in a reductive, stereotypical way.

Personally, outside of these controversies, I thought the movie was just OK. What it made me think of, and what is more important to realize in my view, is that interracial marriage remains a difficult lived experience. It may be free of overt social disapproval these days – in most parts of the country – but that doesn’t mean it’s a walk in the park.

The difficulty comes in part from the lack of discussion we have around interracial marriage. It’s become increasingly popular in America over the last several decades, yet it remains conspicuously unexamined as a new normal in our society.

Speaking from personal experience, I know my wife and I have learned a tremendous amount in the time we’ve been together. She’s Lebanese, and our daughters are a beautiful blend of Black, American, and Middle Eastern culture. But in practice, it’s not always straightforward.

Our daughter Mia

I’m often the only Black person when we visit Juliana’s family at her home in Kansas. Our cultural references are not always shared – there’s a continuous process of learning and sharing that requires sensitivity and attention. Even though we’re both technically “people of color,” there’s a big difference between what that means for Jules and what it means for me. Our daughters are Black, Middle Eastern, and American, but we’re aware that in this country they will be perceived as Black first. That has implications for how we raise them and what expectations we have to explain to them. I still have to have “the talk” with my daughters at some point.

These and many other elements of interracial marriage deserve more open conversation. But first, it’s worth digging into America’s history to understand how we’ve arrived at where we are today and what’s different about the modern approach to this continuously prevalent practice.

A short history of interracial marriage in America

The history of interracial marriage goes back to the Colonial era, when states first began legislating against it. As early as the 1660s, colonies like Maryland created explicit rules barring the union of whites with Black and Indigenous peoples.

The law in Maryland even went so far as to condemn freeborn (white) women who married Black enslaved people to servitude. The law ensured any mixed-race children produced from these unions would be destined for enslavement “til they be thirty years of age and no longer.”

Virginia banned all interracial marriages in the 1690s, prescribing exile from the colony for violators, as well as heavy fines for having multiracial children. The law here specifically banned the mixing of races, or miscegenation, whether the partners of color were enslaved or not.

In other words, the issue wasn’t whether people should be allowed to make individual choices about whom they love and marry. It was a reflection of the deep-seated societal anxiety around mixing and preserving bloodlines. Over the next two centuries, 41 out of 50 states would add anti-miscegenation laws to their books at one point or another.

Back then, marriage wasn’t primarily an expression of romantic love and personal commitment. It was a social tool and religious expectation, critical to the continuity of tradition, communities, and, therefore, identity. Marriage was less an individual choice and more a societal obligation. 

First and foremost, in a society where Christian religious hegemony forbade extramarital sex and procreation, marriage was the only acceptable means to either. But it was also an economic tool for upward mobility and property inheritance. This was critical for people at all social levels, but especially the middle and upper classes. Property had to be inherited by legitimate heirs – and marriage was the only way to guarantee legal legitimacy.

Marriage also allowed families to combine their wealth intergenerationally. For two families coming together, concerned about the preservation of their wealth, legitimacy was a crucial mutual guarantee. Enslaved people, or people of color who de facto experienced precarious legal standings, were often unable to provide that guarantee.

The anxiety around interracial marriage was therefore socially conditioned by racist views on biology and culture. But it was also determined by the legal and political systems that supported the American economy, including slavery, indentured servitude, and the dispossession of Indigenous communities.

After heavy industrialization and urbanization in the 19th and early 20th centuries, things changed. Individuals were not as tied to their communities for subsistence and economic opportunity. They flocked to urban centers chasing work and other social opportunities. Inevitably, people of many different backgrounds met and developed relationships outside of their original communities and identities.

And yet, by the 1950s, roughly half of the United States still had laws restricting interracial marriage. The watershed moment came in 1967 when a widely publicized Supreme Court case, Loving v. Virginia, finally ruled that bans on interracial marriage were unconstitutional. It overturned a previous ruling, Pace v. Alabama, which saw no conflict between the 14th Amendment and bans on mixed-race unions.

The plaintiffs in the 1967 case, Mildred and Richard Loving, had married in 1958 in Washington D.C., where interracial unions were legal. Mildred was of mixed Black and Indigenous heritage, while Richard was white. After exchanging vows, they returned home to Virginia and were soon arrested for violating the state’s anti-miscegenation law, instituted in the 1924 Racial Integrity Act.

After their sentencing, Mildred and Richard moved to Washington DC, where they lived in exile from their home state for nearly a decade. Eventually, with help from the ACLU, their case went to the Supreme Court, where Chief Justice Earl Warren ruled that “the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the state.”

In theory, the ruling overturned anti-miscegenation laws in the 16 states that still had them. But many were slow to change their law codes officially. In 2000, Alabama became the last state to officially accept the ruling by removing relevant statutes from their books.

The Loving v. Virginia case also paved the way to the Supreme Court’s ruling that bans on gay marriage were also unconstitutional. Since then, “marriage equality” has become an umbrella term referring to these very different, but related issues.

Modern perceptions of interracial marriage

When Mildred and Richard Loving married in 1958, approval ratings for interracial unions were at around 4% nationwide. Even in states where anti-miscegenation laws had long become things of the past, contemporary opinion remained highly stigmatized and prejudicial. The 1967 film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner is one of the most iconic cultural reflections of this stigma from the period.

That film, written and released in the same year as Loving v. Virginia, spoke to the overt disapproval and plain surprise that interracial couples could elicit. In the film, the protagonists debate the issue with their parents, who are both extremely surprised to discover the identity of their child’s partner. They conclude that they have no right to challenge the union, but they also acknowledge that the road ahead will be extremely difficult.

source: Gallup

That was even more true back then, but I don’t think we consider how complicated interracial relationships can still be. That’s because in many parts of the country, large gaps exist along cultural and identity lines. We celebrate multiculturalism and the “melting pot” narrative, but many of us still grow up in culturally homogeneous contexts.

The result, for the 19% of Americans now in interracial marriages, is that coming face to face with a new culture can be jarring. When I go visit my wife’s Lebanese family for the holidays, there are traditions I’m unfamiliar with and I’m often the only one without the full context. When my wife is with my family, she’s suddenly in the minority and surrounded by cultural references she may not inherently understand. It’s not that these are difficult or unhappy experiences – but they do represent small hurdles that we continually have to address with each other.

The two people totally exempt from this are our two daughters. They’re still very young, but they’re already cultural chameleons. Their identities flex easily depending on the context they’re in – Black, Middle Eastern, American, or any combination thereof. I’m so excited that they will grow up in a country where people of color represent the new majority. Their multiracial identity is fast becoming the new normal.

Our youngest daughter, Lila

That said, children represent another complicating factor in interracial relationships. In my family, it was important for me to agree with my wife on raising our children as proudly and primarily Black. Given that’s how the rest of society will perceive them – from universities to law enforcement to friends at school – that was particularly important for me as a Black father.

According to Pew polls, approval ratings for interracial marriage are now at 94%. Only 1 in 10 say they would disapprove of someone in their family dating someone outside their race. There are few significant differences regionally, generationally, or racially in those approval ratings. But it’s only relatively recently that we’ve reached parity on the question throughout the population.

source: Pew

Interracial marriage is only going to become more prevalent as the nation moves toward a future where people of color form the majority of the population. While the approval ratings represent a critical development away from anti-miscegenation and segregation laws, they’re only one piece of the puzzle.

We need to keep examining and talking about interracial marriage as a social phenomenon, because it reflects many aspects of racial, ethnic, and cultural experience that aren’t talked about as openly. Especially because marriage equality as a constitutional precedent is not necessarily a guaranteed right across the United States. For example, the Tennessee House of Representatives just passed a bill that would allow county clerks to deny marriage licenses to same-sex, interfaith, or interracial couples.

It’s only by encouraging open conversations about the realities – the challenges and the joys – of interracial marriage that we can combat attacks like these at the most fundamental level. It’s one thing to say you approve of something in theory – it’s quite another to have empathy for it in practice.

As we move toward a majority diverse population, race, color, and ethnicity will only become more visible and significant aspects of our identities. And I’d rather live in an America where movies like You People can’t trade on the fundamental discomfort people still have when talking about the nuances of racial experience.

We all deserve better than that.

The Braswells!

Porter Braswell