Mona Chalabi, The Guardian, February 21, 2018

It’s been half a century since the US supreme court decriminalized interracial marriage. Since then, the share of interracial and interethnic marriages in America has increased fivefold, from 3% of all weddings in 1967 to 17% in 2015.

The Loving v Virginia ruling was a clear civil rights victory, but as Anna Holmes reflects in a recent article for the New York Times, understanding who benefits from that win and how is a much more complicated story.

For a start, there’s huge geographic variation in where intermarriage happens; it’s more common in metropolitan areas than rural places (18% compared to 11%) according to a Pew analysis of the Census Bureau’s figures. But those are just averages — US metropolitan areas vary significantly from Honolulu, Hawaii, where 42% of weddings are interracial to Jackson, Mississippi where the figure is just 3%.

Overall, the most common type of intermarriage is between a partner who is white and one who is Hispanic of any race — those relationships accounted for 38% of all intermarriages in 2010. White-Asian couples accounted for another 14% of intermarriages, and white-black couples made up 8%. You can find detailed maps of intermarriage patterns at a county level in this Census Bureau poster.

There are gender patterns in this data too. In 2008, 22% of black male newlyweds chose partners of another race, compared to just 9% of black female newlyweds. The gender pattern is the opposite among Asians. While 40% of Asian females married outside their race in 2008, just 20% of Asian male newlyweds did the same. For whites and Hispanics though, Pew found no gender differences.

These numbers aren’t simply a matter of love. They’re the consequence of economic, political and cultural factors. To list just a few:

Attitudes (plain racism): While 72% of black respondents said it would be fine with them if a family member chose to marry someone of another racial or ethnic group, 61% of whites and 63% of Hispanics said the same. More specifically though, Americans aren’t comfortable with specific kinds of intermarriage. A Pew survey found that acceptance of out-marriage to whites (81%) was higher than is acceptance of out-marriage to Asians (75%), Hispanics (73%) or blacks (66%).

Migration patterns: The Census Bureau provided the following examples: “the removal of many American Indian tribes from their original lands to reservation lands; historically higher proportions of Hispanics living in the Southwest; historically higher proportions of Asians living in the West” all of which shape where intermarriages happen and between whom.