Gregory McEwen

1
Is this Love?

I am a son of a Mexican American mother and am African American

father. They grew up in the seventies when interracial relations let alone
marriage was very tense. I mean the sixties were just a decade before and it
was rattled with the civil rights era and drastic change when came to equal
rights and race relations. They went through the worst of it, the choice of
them choosing eachother was not just them choosing love but them
choosing a path filled with conflict and hardship that they would have to
endure by society and even within their own families. I also recently was
married this past summer to a hispanic woman but must say that I am sure
that it is a very different experience that my parents faced so many years
ago. That got me wanting to search the changes in societys views and
weather its views on equality and race relations had effected the total
number of people getting hitched to a different race. I predict that as we
move further away from the civil rights era interracial marriage and
acceptance of it will increase over time.
Starting off I must find a foundation a place to start and measure the
growth, so for that I went to our census website and pulled numbers from a
long time ago to see how it was and if there has been change. I can look at
the census and see that back in 1960 .4% of all marriages were interracial
marriages. That number includes every combination of interracial there is.
Which is understandable because of the climate that there was around race.
The African American was still considered a second class citizen. I would like
to get more detailed on this data and look specifically at the black/white

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Is this Love?

relations. Now between black/white relations the acceptance for this type of
marriage was 4% in 1958. That coming from a data set from GALLUP. Now
we can look at a data set from 10 years after to better dig into the
information and look at it further. Now if we look further into the sixties we
can see that there was already an increase on the way society viewed
marriage. In 1969 there was an increase on how society saw black/white
marriage, it increased from 4% to 20%. To further break down those
numbers we can pull see the difference in white perception vs black
perception. Now in this time frame blacks approval of white/black marriage
was already at a high 56% but when we look at the white view on
black/white marriage we see that there was only a 17% approval rating. Now
we can also see that in 1970 the census showed that there was an increase
in interracial marriage from .4% to .7% of all marriages. Now that is a low
number but when talking about all of America that is a decent amount. Now
this is a beginning of a trend we will see with marriage and acceptance of it.
Moving on into the seventies it is important to notate that in 1967 in the
Loving v Virginia court case the supreme court decided to overturn all state
bans on interracial marriage making it federally legal to marry interracially in
the united states. That is huge, now we all know that laws will not change
the hearts or beliefs of people but it certainly make living and loving a
person of different ethnicity or race in a certain part of the country a tad bit
easier. Now you still had fight society and social norms but at least you can

Gregory McEwen

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Is this Love?

do so with the law on your side. There was good growth in the seventies for
both acceptance and marriages with definitely helps my hypothesis.
Going into the eighties is particularly interesting to me because this is
where my parents became husband and wife and I was very intrigued to see
the type of backlash they saw and how unique their situation truly was. Now
looking at the acceptance rate in 1983 there was a 43% acceptance rate for
black/white marriages in the united states. Breaking that down 71% of all
black thought it was ok to marry between races where as only 38% of all
whites thought it was ok. Now this is good movement in acceptance and with
that we see the total percentage of interracial marriage jump up to 2% of all
marriages. Now you must remember that civil rights was literally less then
20 years before this so majority of people may have still had certain walls
built up from that time. There were many laws that separated us and it is
hard sometimes to break down those walls of separation especially if that all
youve known your whole life. Now going into the nineties you would expect
continued growth on both ends but thats where we see our first hiccup. The
marriage rate actually went down to 1.9%. Even though there was an
increase of black/white marriage acceptance. In 1997 61% of all Americans
were ok with interracial marriage so this is the first break in the trend we
were seeing of acceptance and actual marriages.
We are now getting to recent times the year 2000 or Y2K as we called
it then, we see an all time high on marriages. Based off the census we had a
percentage of 7% of all marriages be interracial marriages a massive

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Is this Love?

increase from what we saw just ten years prior. Now with that we get a high
in acceptance of about 65% of all Americans, and of that 78% black and 60%
white approve. We can see this trend continue with the latest census which
shows that 10% of all marriages are of interracial relationships. And with that
nearly 87% of all Americans approve of interracial marriage 96% black and
84% white.
So based off the information given we can see that there is some type
of connection overall, and as more time passed from the time of civil rights
and racial tension we can see and increase in not only the number of
marriages that are occurring but the overall acceptance of interracial
relationships.
Now with the information we can also look at a different set of
information also gathered by GALLUP which can separate by age. Now what
this shows is what would happen to a societies views if they never
experienced racial divide that existed during the civil rights times. And what
we get is that for the segment of adults 18-29 there is a 96% approval rating
for interracial marriage. We know how the census gets their information
however for GALLUP the information was gathered by phone interviews and
the information was weighted to represent racial and ethnic groups to their
share of the population. The information was released with a 95% confidence
and a margin of error of +- 2 percent.
To me this is a sensitive topic since it hits home in many different ways
and it is important to show that although there is much tension recently with

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Is this Love?

the election and everything between races, we have come a long way and
should look at the great leaps weve taken in love and continue that trend as
a nation.
WORK CITED:
GALLUP; http://www.gallup.com/poll/163697/approve-marriage-blackswhites.aspx
US Census;
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/2010_census/cb1268.html
US Cnsus; https://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/race/interractab1.txt