Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Trends in interracial relationships

People have had issues with interracial relationships for centuries. Many have made arguments about interracial relationships leading to impurity among the distinct races. In the United States, main opposition has come from groups such as the Kl Klux Klan. Even though times have certainly changed, and trends in interracial relationships have evolved over the years, the US remains one of the few countries in the world that has banned interracial dating in the past. Certain laws that prohibited people from dating inter racially, gave hate groups such as the Klu Klux Clan a foundation from which to commit hate crimes.
Because all laws banning the interracial dating have been lifted, it has become a much more accepted and practiced notion in the United States. The last anti-miscegenation was struck down in 1967, and there has been a steady increase of interracial couples since that time. Although, the US got rid of its last law in 1967, certain universities have prohibited interracial dating based on biblical references up until recently. For example, Bob Jones University in South Caroline just removed their regulations on interracial dating in 2000. In 1970, interracial marriages represented only about .7% of all US marriages. By 1992, there represented about 2.2% of all marriages with a documented 1,161,000 interracial marriages in the US. This number continues to rise, as it is becomeing more and more acceptable for couples to date and eventually marry interracially. In fact, in 2003, a poll of Americans of varrying races showed that only 30% of Americans are opposed to interracial marriages at that point, which is a huge decrease from earlier years. Still with there being more acceptance, statistics show that people are more comfortable with white-hispanic or white-Asian marriages, than they are with white-black marriages. Furthermore, amond those who do approve of white-black marriages, most are black. This shows that although there has been drastic change, this is a continuing issue that has room for much improvement. With the way the trends are going, we should continue to see more and more interracial couples leading to a larger percentage of interracial marriages.

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