DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

 

To begin, American society has only recently begun to legally and socially accept interracial couples. The influx of Chinese (mostly male) immigrants to the US in the early 1800s had been met with fear and apprehension over relationships between the Chinese men and white American women. In response, several laws were passed to prevent non-Whites from marrying whites (many laws against black-white marriages were already in place). As recently as 1967, 38 states still had laws against interracial marriage and sex. But in that year the Supreme Court ruled that such anti-miscegenation laws were unconstitutional. This ended the legal barriers against interracial relationships.

 

The increase in intermarriages also resulted in an increase in multiracial American children. Lee and Bean (2004) note that 2000 was the first year that the US Census allowed Americans to identify with “one or more races” (53). This, they suggest, indicates a shift in the racial lines. There is no longer a line between blacks, whites, and non-whites, but now there is recognition of American citizens as potentially of many different ancestries.

 

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Le, C.N., “By the Numbers: Dating, Marriage, and Race in Asian America.              

http://www.imdiversity.com/villages/Asian/family_lifestyle_traditions/le_interracial_dating.asp.  Date retrieved: 1 May 2008

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.