Marriage across racial and ethnic lines has reached a new high in the U.S. amid fading social taboos in an ever more diverse society.
About 15% of new marriages in the U.S. in 2010 were between individuals of a different race or ethnicity, more than double the share in 1980, according to a report released Thursday by the Pew Research Center. Among those married in 2010, 9% of whites, 17% of blacks, 26% of Hispanics and 28% of Asians married outside their ethnic or racial group.
“Intermarriage in this country has evolved from being illegal to being a taboo to being merely unusual,” said Paul Taylor, the Pew official who edited “The Rise of Intermarriage” report. “With each passing year, it becomes less unusual.”
Shifts in behavior, attitudes and demographics—including immigration—have contributed to the intermarriage trend, which the report analyzes based on historical data and Census Bureau figures from the annual American Community Survey from 2008 to 2010.
Michal Czerwonka for The Wall Street Journal
Alex and Kristine Smith with their 8-month-old daughter Holly at their California home this week.
In particular, attitudes have changed markedly since the Supreme Court declared antimiscegenation laws unconstitutional in 1967. Until then, whites were still banned from marrying nonwhites in 16 states.
When Kathy Christie Hernandez, who is Caucasian, married her Mexican-American husband, Don, in 1987, “we didn’t feel like groundbreakers,” recalled Ms. Hernandez, 48 years old. “We were two Stanford students who met and fell in love.”
But when she stops to think, Ms. Hernandez can’t immediately name another mixed couple among their peers. Indeed, intermarriages represented only 4% of all existing marriages 25 years ago.
By the time Kristine Smith, a Filipino-American, married Alex, a Caucasian, in 2008, mixed marriages had doubled to 8% of the total. By 2010, they accounted for 8.4% of all existing marriages, says the report.
Mrs. Smith’s parents, Benjamin and Conchita Feleo, met and married in California after emigrating from the Philippines in the 1970s. The Feleos have maintained strong ties to the Philippines and their social life revolves around Filipino associations.
But their 32-year-old daughter says, “I never thought of limiting myself to marrying another Filipino or Filipino-American. I have friends who are everything.”
The University of California graduate met her husband, an engineer from Texas, in 2004, through personal ads on the Internet. They are now settled in La Habra, Calif., with two young children. Ms. Smith said her only sibling, a sister named Kayreen, is dating a white man.
“Rising interracial-marriage rates suggest men and women of different races are more likely than in the past to come into contact with each other as coequals in the same neighborhoods, schools and work settings,” said Daniel Lichter, a Cornell University sociologist who studies intermarriage.
The ascendancy of interracial marriage is partly fueled by the wave of immigration in recent decades, with U.S.-born offspring of Hispanics and Asians entering adulthood, said Mr. Lichter.
Younger adults, especially those under the age of 30, tend to have a more positive view of intermarriage than older adults, according to a Pew survey that is part of the report. College graduates are much more likely to regard intermarriage positively than those with only a high-school diploma.
Of the 275,500 intermarriages in 2010, 43% were white-Hispanic, 14.4% were white-Asian, 11.9% were white-black and the rest were other combinations. Mixed couples are most likely to reside in the Western states, where 22% of all newlyweds between 2008 and 2010 found a partner outside their group.
More than four out of 10 marriages in Hawaii were mixed, the highest intermarriage rate of any state. Vermont had the lowest rate of intermarriage, 4%.
New Mexico boasted the biggest prevalence of white-Hispanic marriages, or 20%. Rates of white-Asian marriages are highest in Hawaii, Washington, D.C. and Nevada. The top three states for white-black unions are Virginia, North Carolina and Kansas, which have rates of about 3%.
Mixed couples are as likely as those in non-mixed marriages to be college educated and their ages at marriage are also similar. Both Hispanic and black men and women who marry whites are more likely to be in a union where both partners are college-educated than those who marry in their group.
As intermarriage has climbed, the rate of outmarriage among Asians has declined, most likely because the pool of people who are members of the same group and of marrying age has swelled. The share of Asian newlyweds who married outside of their group dropped to 28% in 2010 from 31% in 2008.
Jen Kim and Jason Ma, U.S.-born children of Korean immigrants who married last year, weren’t looking for a fellow Korean-American to wed when they met in New York five years ago.
In fact, “Jason was the first Korean I ever dated,” recalled Ms. Kim, 33, who is an art conservator. Mr. Ma, who is a reporter, says he had dated both Asian and white women.
Being from the same group means “it’s convenient when our parents meet and when it comes to eating [Korean] food,” said Mr. Ma.
Write to Miriam Jordan at miriam.jordan@wsj.com
February 23rd, 2012 | 
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