Interracial/intercultural marriages have been on the rise for years in the United States. According to PEW, about 17% of new marriages are interracial couples. Many of these unions produce children that are multiracial and multicultural.

With open racism on the rise and challenges to personal and privacy rights, what are the life realities for interracial couples and their mixed-race offspring? What does the research say about public opinion and hidden biases? And can these families themselves help defeat prejudice in the long term.

(Above, l-r): Justin Gest, Associate Professor of Policy and Government at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government; Allison Skinner Dorkenoo, Assistant Professor of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Social Psychology at the University of Georgia; Sonia and Richard Kang, a multicultural-multiracial couple that, together, encapsulate African American, Latino and Korean origins and who have 4 multicultural children. Sonia is Vice President of Multicultural Families of Southern California and owner of Mixed-Up Clothing, a children’s clothing business. (EMS)

Experts and researchers – Justin Gest, Associate Professor of Policy and Government at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government; Allison Skinner Dorkenoo, Assistant Professor of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Social Psychology at the University of Georgia ­– discuss data and ideas on the subject, and Sonia and Richard Kang, a multicultural-multiracial couple share about what it takes to make it and thrive in our increasingly polarized society.

Dr Justin Gest wrote a very intriguing article, his preposition was that building relationships with people who are different from you, racially, culturally, in other ways, can help counter the separation and polarization, and some of the violence that we are seeing in our country.

“I anticipate the upcoming demographic milestone in the United States, where the original or at least earlier ethnic racial majority of white, non-hispanic people, will no longer be a majority in the United States, and will be one of many pluralities, many one of many minorities in the country in around 2045.

“Many people think of this milestone as unique to the United States but what I found in my research is that it’s rare but it’s not unique.

“There are number of countries that have undergone similar transitions and we have a lot to learn from them, even though they are smaller than us, they’re microcosms of our country.

“We can better anticipate our own milestone in our own politics watching how they pivot towards inclusion or exclusion, a way or to backlash, and this milestone and demographic change more broadly is a shadow that is overshadowing so much of our politics today.

“In many ways, immigration and demographic change are the sort of fulcrum around which our partisan politics revolves these days, and it is paralyzing us as a country legislatively, and it is dividing people because our partisan identities are now stacked with our social identity.

“There was a time in no recent American history, in the late 20th century, when you did not have parties whose constituencies were not predictably of one race or another, but basically since 2004 until around 2020, every major racial or ethnic minority in the United States, in many religious minorities in the United States, broke relatively heavily for the Democrats and the Republican party was increasingly homogenously people of non-Hispanic White backgrounds. That’s not healthy for a democracy because it creates identity politics that make the ideological opponents not just feel like you disagree on individual issues, but it makes it seem like it’s an existential opposition, and that’s why we see so many of our debates over identity today, and the legitimacy of people’s presence or status in the United States. These politics are not uncommon across countries elsewhere, that have experienced similar demographic shifts and the question is, ‘What can we do to get around it?’

“One of the things that my book emphasizes is the role of governments and states to make decisions that structure our societies in ways that avoid these politics. Unfortunately states and governments don’t always behave in a way that is conscious of both fostering equality, cultivating pluralism, and making sure that people can live harmoniously together.

“Instead, many states behave in exclusionary ways and sometimes they exploit people’s divisions to win elections.

“It wasn’t so long ago that intermarriages were prohibited, but California led the way in the 1950s with a Supreme Court case, that fought for the right for people to have marriages across racial boundaries and there were religious justifications for it back then.

“Americans are less likely to want to date people who have ideological preferences different from them, to be neighbors, to engage in conversations, to go to social events with people who are different from them.

“Unfortunately, that’s no way to build bridges across a single nation, and one of the primary interventions that researchers have studied to fix this situation is intergroup contact.

“Looking at the countries that I’ve studied and across their various histories, when people are intermarrying, it basically disarms the politics of polarization and division.

“The reason is those politics rely on very clean lines between groups, but these relationships whether you’re married or not, even if it’s just a good friend, a neighbor, a co-worker, a member of your church, these relationships transcend those boundaries.

“They don’t allow politicians and others to fear mongers to divide us on those boundaries because people themselves transcend it in some cases, they themselves are on two sides of those boundaries, when they are the children of diverse parents and while the jury is out on intergroup contact, my research which looks at things historically rather than psychologically, suggests that actually it’s a really powerful way of disarming these politics of division and polarization.

“Mixed race individuals jumped threefold, over the period of 2010 to 2020, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Across those different people it isn’t just that people are having more mixed-race children, it’s also that people who are of mixed backgrounds are more willing to identify themselves in that way, so the statistics sometimes are revealing not just the objective reality, but the subjective reality that people are more comfortable identifying in this way and those numbers are only going to grow over time because the cohort of children these days are all already majority-minority.

“Dating across these social boundaries is taking place extensively, as are many multi-racial friendships, because children are being socialized in multiracial environments, and it’s only going to grow and so good luck to anyone who wants to go back to the days of anti-miscegenation laws.

“The other statistic that might be of interest is that among the group of people that the Census identified as ‘mixed race’ or that self-identifies as multi-racial, 80 percent of them have one White parent, it’s estimated,” said Dr Gest.

Next, Dr Allison Skinner Dorkenoo talked about some of the research that she conducted about public and not so public opinions about uh interracial marriage.

“It has been 55 years since the Loving versus Virginia decision and we have seen some pretty big changes in increases in interracial marriage, also in attitudes toward interracial marriage.

“There’s also been a great increase in representation within media and advertising, and when we look at the most recent gallup data, looking at public opinion, there is approval of interracial marriage specifically between black people and white people.

“We’ve got a dramatic increase in approval over this time-period, looks promising, and in some ways, looks like we went from a situation where it was illegal in many states to have interracial marriage, within the course of 50-55 years, it’s become quite common and virtually universally accepted.

“People who had personal interracial romance experience, had more positive attitudes toward interracial couples.

“We’re also seeing a bias against interracial couples, black-white interracial couples, relative to same race couples.

“Black U.S. residents with more contact with black-white interracial couples had more positive attitudes toward interracial couples.

“Multi-racial U.S. residents had a bias in favor of same race couples.

“We also did see some evidence that more exposure to interracial couples, in one sort of social environment, was associated with less positive attitudes toward interracial couples.

“According to some tweets from various people on Twitter, there’s lots of people sort of referencing, tying interracial couples to their own family. Multiracial people tying them to their own family and perhaps they might think of most of their own potential romantic prospects also being an interracial relationship.

“There are lot of reasons why we might be seeing these distinctly different attitudes among multiracial people.

“When we go back to the colonial period in the U.S., power was concentrated among small sub-sample of the population which was wealthy white men. It would benefit wealthy white men to create divisions to prevent other groups from allying with one another and so a clear example of that is trying to prevent alliances between white women and people of color. Early anti-miscegenation laws prevented those alliances, unions between black men and white women, and based on that notion our study of white men shows those who more strongly preferred hierarchical social structures also had the most negative attitudes toward interracial couples.

“Those who express the most negative attitudes toward those who violate traditional gender roles, those men also had particularly negative attitudes toward interracial couples.

“As we’ve been talking about increase in interracial marriages, we’re talking about it getting news coverage, and thinking about what impact is that having?

“Among white U.S. residents reading about the increase in interracial marriage in the U.S., increased participants biases against black people, so it did increase racial biases to hear about increasing interracial marriage. However, it didn’t seem to influence attitudes toward interracial couples themselves.

“Summing it all, 94 percent of U.S. residents approve of interracial marriage. It’s the most recent estimates and that personal willingness to engage in interracial relationships is lower than this though,” said Dr Skinner.

Sonia and Richard Kang, a couple who spoke next. Sonia grew up in a family that was biracial African American and Mexican American, and was married to Richard, who is Korean American. They spoke about the challenges they faced as interracial couple and how they overcame the hurdles from family, to getting married, and raising a family.

The couple has four children that they are raising intentionally in a multicultural, multiracial, multilingual home, in Los Angeles.