Interracial marriage has been legal throughout the United States since at least the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court (Warren Court) decision Loving v. Virginia (1967) that held that anti-miscegenation laws were unconstitutional via the 14th Amendment adopted in 1868. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in the court opinion that "the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the State." Interracial marriages have been formally protected by federal statute through the Respect for Marriage Act since 2022.

Historical opposition to interracial marriage was frequently based on religious principles. Many Southern evangelical Christians saw racial segregation, including in marriage, as something divinely instituted from God. They held that legal recognition of interracial couples would violate biblical teaching and hence their religious liberty. Roman Catholic theology, on the other hand, articulated strong opposition to any state-sanctioned segregation on the grounds that segregation violated human dignity. Although the Catholic Church did have a history of supporting segregation previously. Since Loving, states have repealed their defunct bans, the last of which was Alabama in a 2000 referendum.

Public approval of interracial marriage rose from 5% in the 1950s to 94% in 2021. The number of interracial marriages as a proportion of new marriages has increased from 3% in 1967 to 19% in 2019.

Historical background 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. 50 years later, the first recorded interracial marriage in a British North American colony was that of Matoaka, presently better known as "Pocahontas", the daughter of a Powhatan chief, who married tobacco planter John Rolfe in 1614. The first law prohibiting interracial marriage was passed by the Maryland General Assembly in 1691. The Quaker Zephaniah Kingsley published a treatise, reprinted 3 times, on the benefits of intermarriage, which according to Kingsley produced healthier and more beautiful children, and better citizens. Before the Civil War, interracial unions were not rare in the American South. They typically involved White men paired with Black women. Unions of Black men with White women were rarer, but also not very well documented, and therefore possibly forgotten by history.

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. I as much as any man am in favor of the superior position assigned to the white race". By 1924, the ban on interracial marriage was still in force in 29 states. 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. In 1958, Davis briefly married a black woman, actress and dancer Loray White, to protect himself from mob violence.Lanzendorfer, Joy (August 9, 2017) "Hollywood Loved Sammy Davis Jr. Until He Dated a White Movie Star", Smithsonian Retrieved February 23, 2021.

In Social Trends in America and Strategic Approaches to the Negro Problem (1948), Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal ranked the social areas where restrictions were imposed on the freedom of Black Americans by Southern White Americans through racial segregation, from the least to the most important: basic public facility access, social equality, jobs, courts and police, politics and marriage. 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. Virginia. The court's landmark decision, which was made on June 12, 1967, has been commemorated and celebrated every year on the Loving Day (June 12) in the United States.

Academic research

Cultural aspects 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. Interracial marriages have typically been highlighted through two points of view in the United States: Egalitarianism and cultural conservatism.Dunleavy, V.O. (1999) Examining interracial marriage attitudes as value expressive. The Howard Journal of Communications, 15 Egalitarianism's view of interracial marriage is acceptance of the phenomenon, while traditionalists view interracial marriage as taboo and as socially unacceptable.Knox, D., Zusman, M., Buffington, C., & Hemphill, G. (2000). Interracial dating attitudes among college students. College Student Journal, 34 Egalitarian viewpoints typically are held by younger generations, however older generations have an inherent influence on the views of the younger.Firmin, M., & Firebaugh, S. (2008). Historical analysis of college campus interracial dating. College Student Journal, 42. Gurung & Duong (1999) compiled a study relating to mixed-ethnic relationships ("MER"s) and same-ethnic relationships ("SER"s), concluding that individuals part of "MER"s generally do not view themselves differently from same-ethnic couples.Gurung, R., & Duong, T. (1999). Mixing and matching: Assessing the concomitants of mixed ethnic relationships. Journal of Social & Personal Relationships, 16. 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. Social enterprise research conducted on behalf of the Columbia Business School (2005–2007) showed that regional differences within the United States in how interracial relationships are perceived have persisted: Daters of both sexes from south of the Mason–Dixon line were found to have much stronger same-race preferences than northern daters did. The study also observed a clear gender divide in racial preference with regards to marriage: Women of all the races which were studied revealed a strong preference for men of their own race for marriage, with the caveat that East Asian women only discriminated against Black and Hispanic men, and not against White men. A woman's race was found to have no effect on the men's choices.

Socioeconomic aspects 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.

Research at the universities of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and Texas A&M addressing the topic of socioeconomic status, among other factors, showed that none of the socioeconomic status variables appeared to be positively related to outmarriage within the Asian American community, and found lower-socioeconomically stable Asians sometimes utilized outmarriage to Whites as a means to advance social status.Hwang, Sean-Shong; Saenz, Rogelio and Aguirre, Benigno E. Structural and Individual Determinants of Outmarriage among Chinese-, Filipino-, and Japanese-Americans in California, Sociological Inquiry, Vol.64, No.2, Nov. 1994, pp. 396-414, and Structural and Assimilationist Explanations of Asian American Intermarriage, Journal of Marriage and the Family, Vol. 59, No. 3, Aug. 1997, pp. 758-772.

Marital stability 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. Comparisons across marriage cohorts revealed that, overall, interracial couples have higher rates of divorce, particularly for those that married during the late 1980s. A 2009 study by Yuanting Zhang and Jennifer Van Hook also found that interracial couples were at increased risk of divorce. One consistent finding of this research is that gender is significantly related to divorce risk. Interracial marriages involving a White woman have a higher risk of divorce, as compared with interracial marriages involving Asian or Black women.

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". A 2018 study by Jennifer Bratter and Ellen Whitehead found that white women with mixed race children were less likely to receive family support than were non-white women with mixed race children.

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. Such prejudicial factors may place these marriages at an increased risk of divorce. A study published in 2008 reported a lower risk of divorce for inter-ethnic marriages between Hispanics and non-Hispanic Whites. However, another study, published in 2011, found that these intermarriages were still at higher risk of divorce relative to endogamous Hispanic/Latino marriage (but not relative to endogamous non-Hispanic White marriage).

Census Bureau statistics The number of interracial marriages has steadily continued to increase since the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Loving v. Virginia, but also continues to represent an absolute minority among the total number of wed couples. According to Pew Research, among all newlyweds, intermarried pairings were primarily White-Hispanic (43.3%) as compared to White-Asian (14.4%), White-Black (11.9%), and Other Combinations (30.4%). According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of interracially married couples has increased from 310,000 in 1970 to 651,000 in 1980, to 964,000 in 1990, to 1,464,000 in 2000 and to 2,340,000 in 2008; accounting for 0.7%, 1.3%, 1.8%, 2.6% and 3.9% of the total number of married couples in those years, respectively.U.S. Bureau of the Census "Table 60. Married Couples by Race and Hispanic Origin of Spouses" , December 15, 2010 (Excel table . Detailed data can be found in the Statistical Abstract of the United States, from 1979 to 2011.

These statistics do not take into account the mixing of ancestries within the same "race"; e.g. a marriage involving Indian and Japanese ancestries would not be classified as interracial due to the Census regarding both as the same category. Likewise, since Hispanic is not a race but an ethnicity, Hispanic marriages with non-Hispanics are not registered as interracial if both partners are of the same race (i.e. a Black Hispanic marrying a non-Hispanic Black partner).