Interracial Marriages: A Cultural Analysis

American attitudes toward interracial marriage illustrate an “awkward historical moment” because after the interracial marriage law changed, one would think black/white marriages are common but they are the least. Over the years, interracial marriages has increased by a few percent, mainly from other races that are not black/white. In America, racism still exist even when laws are changing.

Interracial marriage has traditionally been viewed as a means of expressing a hatred of oneself, of escaping something in one’s culture or self that one no longer wants to identify with. Jacki Thompson Rand describes the outcome of this phenomenon in an essay on her experience as the child of an interracial marriage. She explains how her mother married a white man in an effort to make herself more white, and therefore more legitimate: “My mother 's marriage to my father was a racial love

The community has a great impact on mate selection and family formation (McGoldrick, 1998). Molina et al., (2004) argue that communities serve as proxies for extended families in many societies and are extremely important in bringing intercultural couples together. People who are in intercultural relationship must understand that there will be challenges and obstacles from others that are against interracial or intercultural relationships. If the relationship is valuable to them then they will be able to over come adversity such as prejudice and discrimination and a host of other negative challenges they may occur.

Interracial families are more prevalent today than they have even been and the number of interracial families are growing each year as people are becoming more accepting of people of other races and rejecting the past. However, interracial families still report dealing with issues such as discrimination. Not everyone has yet to accept and welcome the idea of an interracial family in their own family and neighborhoods. Parents and children who are a part of interracial families must deal with multiple biases, how people act towards them, and developing a healthy identity in a world that is not always ready to accept them as they are.

One’s colour, religion and families origin should not interfere with the happiness between the couple. A publication by the University of Toronto Scarborough furthers this notion of love and relationships; yet explains there are many barriers and challenges which many interracial couples strive to overcome.

The family issue I will be analyzing is interfaith marriage. Interfaith marriage is simply marriage between two people who belong to or identify with different religious groups. However simple the definition may seem, the reality of interfaith marriage can be far more complex. For most of human history it has been a social taboo to marry outside of one 's faith. However, in recent years it has become much more acceptable, even to the point of seeming to essentially be a non-factor as far as society is concerned. Nevertheless, with the inevitable differences in customs and beliefs, and despite social acceptance, interfaith marriages can still cause major conflict in the household. This paper will explore seven different sociological theories, and attempt to explain how they can decipher the effects of interfaith marriage upon the family.

Love has a lot to do with race it has a way of bringing out both good and bad in some people and unfortunately in some cases the issues of love and race are taken too far. In today’s society it is not as much of an issue to see interracial couples together as it used to be in the past, but that does not mean that it is not still an issue for some people. Throughout the semester we have studied different ways that not only in the cases of love but also family, friendship, and community are affected by racial issues both past and present, which only goes to show that racism still exists in our world today despite all of the progressions that we have made towards fixing the issue.

I found my situation very thought-provoking that my family fell within the “51%” of African American kids that were raised by a single mother. Additionally, it was even more interesting that I fell within the “390,000” of black American male that is in an interracial relationship. Furthermore, Black Demographics (n.d.) states that “while black men marry white women at twice the rate of Black women, only 7% of married Black men had White (non-Hispanic) spouses in 2014. About 14% percent of African American men married non-Black or Hispanic women in 2014. It is Asian women who have the highest rates of intermarriage which is twice that of Black men”. As a result, the interracial relationship between black and white Americans has held strong.

In May 2005 ‘Navigating Interracial Borders’ was published by Erica Chito Childs. The article offers a refined and understanding analysis of the social and political context of interracial relationships in America. Childs explores the world of interracial couples and examines the ways that group attitudes shape relationships. Using her own personal experiences, interviews, group responses, as well as media sources, she provides compelling evidence which verifies that disapproval still exists toward black/white unions. However it is merely being shown in a more subtle manor.

The different histories of Blacks and Asian Americans is that despite the many similarities in the treatment and status of these groups, their members speak with different specific experiences and different cultures, which may manifest in distinct customs. Therefore, it seems very hard to build a bridge for the relationship between Asian American and African American, especially for their marriage. In the 2005 census, we can see that the total numbers of Asian-black interracial marriages are low, numbering only 2.2 percent for Asian male marriage and 10.2 percent of Asian female marriages. From these small numbers of interracial marriages, we can see that many traditional Asian

Interracial dating and marriage is a very touchy subject. Society today and in the past has always discriminated against interracial intimate interaction; and this is not limited to the United States. Today, interracial dating and marriage is beginning to be accepted simply because love triumphs all. However, there are still a vast amount of people, communities, and ethnic groups that oppose intimate interracial interaction. They believe that such intimate relationships between two different races should never be developed or maintained. So the real question is, will love be enough to break the barrier and change the minds of those who oppose interracial marriage?

The two articles used were “Understanding the Occurrence of Interracial Marriage in the United States through Differential Assimilation” (Lewis, Ford- Robinson, 2010) and “Marital Dissolution among Interracial Couples” (Zhang, Van Hook, 2009). The first article “Understanding the Occurrence of Interracial Marriage in the United States through Differential Assimilation”, spoke about the unprecedented changes that our society is going though in the 21st century.

This literature examines human communication with theory addressing differences between interracial couples among young adolescent’s interpersonal styles. To address these differences, the authors introduce four stages of relationship that explores various stages of a couple’s life together through the communication requirements ranging from developments of coping, maintenance, racial awareness, and identity emergence. These findings attempts to explore how intimate communication across interracial couple can and does work effectively through different measures of interpersonal style. To identify the communication stages, researchers held interviews among interracial couples and individual partners by examining their voices by applying interpersonal styles. It is found that interracial couples are challenged to communicate creatively and thus prompts the couple to not only assist them but others to others reconstitute the images of interracial couples and images of race and in the current social construction when they begin to develop their own perspective and vocabulary.

The success of an interracial marriage, to withstand all the prejudices in society, needs one major ingredient, and that is love. One of the hardest things an interracial couple has to deal with is acceptance from both their families and society. Interestingly, though, Interracial marriages tend to last longer than same race ones because people going into interracial marriages are prepared for a rocky road and are prepared to stick with it, while same race couples may have not experienced that same adversity, and at the first sign of struggle, back out of the marriage. This obviously tells us that whether the marriage is a success or not does not depend upon the races of the partners, or at least not in the way everyone thinks it does. It is obvious that people in general are becoming more open minded and accepting of interracial marriages, however, there still are many social taboos that prevent people from being in such a marriage. Society tends to concentrate on skin color when

Marriage is one of the important institution in human society as it is a universal phenomenon that has been developed over time and currently, still continues to grow. In the Oxford dictionary, marriage is defined as, “The legally or formally recognized union of two people as partners in a personal relationship.” In other words, it is a union between two people, particularly regulated by law in which they become partners. Therefore, selecting a husband or a wife is considered one of the most important decisions of a person’s life. As a result, in today’s world, people think of many questions before getting married. Who should I marry? What should I look for when choosing a partner? Would it be more likely to be successful if it the same culture as mines or would cross-cultural marriage be as beneficial? Nevertheless, today, cross-cultural marriage is not as frowned upon as it once was. Romano (2003) claims, “Interracial love were once quite rare and were almost uniformly negative” (p. 2). That is because the world is now an interesting and a diverse place to live in. Thus, there is more and more marriages of people from different cultures. In a marriage with a person from the same culture, there is already some distinct differences. Each individual was taught by different families, went to different schools, and grew up in different surroundings, therefore, their idea of the world is different and in general, their way of life is different. Walsh (2012) mentions, “Although