Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

More than one-fifth of all American adults (22%) say that they have a close relative who is married to someone of a different race, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. Until 1967, when a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Loving v. Virginia struck down the last of the anti-miscegenation laws in this country, interracial marriage had been illegal in 16 states and was widely considered a social taboo. Since then interracial marriage in this country has evolved from nearly non-existent to merely atypical. In 1970, fewer than one percent of all married couples were made up of spouses of a different race; by 2000 that figure had grown to just over 5%, according to an analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data by the Population Reference Bureau, a nonpartisan research organization.Read More