Interracial marriage in the United States

[6] The first recorded interracial marriage in what is today the United States took place in 1565 in New Spain, when Luisa de Ábrego, a free black Hispanic woman from Andalucía, and Miguel Rodriguez, from Segovia, married in St. Augustine, Florida.

[7][8][9] 50 years later, the first interracial marriage in New England was that of Matoaka, presently better known as “Pocahontas", the daughter of a Powhatan chief, who married tobacco planter John Rolfe in 1614.

[13] While opposed to slavery, in a speech in Charleston, Illinois in 1858, Abraham Lincoln stated, "I am not, nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people.

[11] While interracial marriage had been legal in California since 1948, in 1957 actor Sammy Davis Jr. faced a backlash for his relationship with a white woman, actress Kim Novak.

[15] In 1958, Davis briefly married a black woman, actress and dancer Loray White, to protect himself from mob violence.

This ranking scheme illustrates the manner in which the barriers against desegregation fell: Of less importance was the segregation in basic public facilities, which was abolished with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

However, the most tenacious form of legal segregation, the banning of interracial marriage, was not fully lifted until the last anti-miscegenation laws were struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren in a unanimous ruling Loving v.

[16] The differing ages of individuals, culminating in the generation divides, have traditionally played a large role in how mixed-ethnic couples are perceived in American society.

[20] Research led by Barnett, Burma, and Monahan in 1963 and 1971 showed people who marry outside of their race are usually older and are more likely to live in an urban setting.

[22] Several studies have found that a factor which significantly affects an individual's choices with regards to marriage is socioeconomic status ("SES")—the measure of a person's income, education, social class, profession, etc.

For example, a study by the Centre for Behaviour and Evolution, Newcastle University confirmed that women show a tendency to marry up in socioeconomic status; this reduces the probability of marriage of low SES men.

[24] A 2008 study by Jenifer Bratter and Rosalind King conducted on behalf of the Education Resources Information Center examined whether crossing racial boundaries increased the risk of divorce.

[25] A 2009 study by Yuanting Zhang and Jennifer Van Hook also found that interracial couples were at increased risk of divorce.

[27][28] 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".

[29] 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.

The table (U.S. Census Bureau's 2008 American Community Survey) shows that among whites who out-married in 2008, there were different patterns by gender in the race of their spouses.

[39] Anti-miscegenation laws discouraging marriages between Whites and non-Whites were affecting Asian immigrants and their spouses from the late 17th to early 20th century.

[40] For example, a Eurasian daughter born to an Indian father and Irish mother in Maryland in 1680 was classified as a "mulato" and sold into slavery,[41] and the Bengali revolutionary Tarak Nath Das's White American wife, Mary K. Das, was stripped of her American citizenship for her marriage to an "alien ineligible for citizenship.

[42] California law did not explicitly bar Filipinos and Whites from marrying, a fact brought to wide public attention by the 1933 California Supreme Court case Roldan v. Los Angeles County; however, the legislature quickly moved to amend the laws to prohibit such marriages as well in the aftermath of the case.

In 1997, 15,000 North American wives and children of non-Japanese origin migrated to Japan as dependent of Japanese male nationals.

[47] Since at least post-war immigration if not Jewish-American patronage of Chinese restaurants on Christmas, a rise in Jewish-Asian ("Jasian" or "Jew-Asian") marriages has occurred, as covered by numerous press articles from New York Times and NPR to Jewish publications.

A 2014 scientific study by geneticists, Shai Carmi, PhD (Hebrew University) et al. published by Nature Communications found that all Ashkenazi Jews[63] descend from 330-350 individuals who were genetically about half-Middle Eastern and half-European, making all Ashkenazi Jews related to the point of being at least 30th cousins or closer.

"[68][69][70] Notably, test score patterns correlating to race and intelligence, and a shared value in education and achievement, have resulted in the Jewish quota and Asian quota in Ivy League admissions when affirmative action was legal from 1961-2023 (until Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard won suit for educational discrimination against Asians),[71][72][73][74][75][76][77][78][79][80] with Pershing Square Capital and hedge fund manager, Bill Ackman, writing his Harvard senior thesis titled, Scaling the Ivy Wall: The Jewish and Asian American Experience in Harvard Admissions.

[21] Historically, mixed-race offspring of black and white people such as mulattos and quadroons were often denominated to whichever race had the lower status, an example of the "one-drop rule", as a way to maintain the racial hierarchy.

Relations between an African American man and white woman were deeply frowned upon, often due to the frequent portrayal of the men as sexual dangers.

[94] Historically in Latin America, and to a lesser degree in the United States, Native Americans have married out at a high rate.

[96] Some African men chose Native American women as their partners because their children would be free, as the child's status followed that of the mother.

[107] According to several studies on the topic by sociologist Samuel L. Perry, religious tradition and church attendance are consistent predictors for attitudes towards interracial marriages.

[111] It is speculated that the reason for this is twofold: the increasing diversity of the Catholic population (which has seen a huge influx of immigrants, Catholicism has sizable to significant number of adherents from many nationalities worldwide) and the fact that Catholics typically base their choice of parish on geography rather than on its ethnic or racial makeup which creates more opportunities for interracial mixing.