9797: Interracial Marriage Milestone.

From USA TODAY…

U.S. rate of interracial marriage hits record high

By Sharon Jayson, USA TODAY

Interracial marriage in the USA reached an all-time high in 2010: 8.4% of all marriages, compared with 3.2% in 1980, finds a Pew Research Center study, released today, that analyzes unions between spouses of different races or ethnic groups.

Among marriages in 2010, 15% of couples married outside their race or ethnicity.

“Interracial marriage has gone from taboo to a rarity, and with each passing year, it’s less of a rarity,” says Pew’s Paul Taylor. Pew reviewed Census data from more than 850,000 people in the American Community Survey between 2008 and 2010.

In addition, Pew surveyed 2,003 adults in September and found more tolerance: 43% agree that “more people of different races marrying each other has been a change for the better in our society.” Another 44% say it made no difference; 11% say it’s been a change for the worse.

But questions about race make people cautious, says sociologist Daniel Lichter of Cornell University. “People don’t want to reveal negative attitudes that might reflect badly on them, and they tend to tell interviewers what they want to hear,” says Lichter, whose data analysis last year found similar trends in interracial marriage.

Pew found that minorities, younger adults, the college-educated, those who say they’re “liberal” and those who live in the Northeast and the West are more likely to view intermarriage positively.

Other regional differences were clear in the 2008-2010 data Pew analyzed: 35% of all newlyweds who married outside their race live in the West. In Hawaii, 42% of newlyweds fell into that category; other states with 20% or more are all west of the Mississippi.

Pew also found that among those who married in 2008-2010, 42% had been married before (one partner or both). And some patterns vary by gender among blacks and Asians but not among whites and Hispanics. Among blacks, 24% of newlywed men married outside their race, compared with 9% of women. Among Asians, the opposite is true: 36% of women married outside their race, compared with 17% of men.