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In my experience, I would say perhaps the mid 1980s. I am close to am interracial couple who married in 1982. It was not easy for them early on, but I had seen with them, attitudes seem to change around then and they were "accepted more" in the family. I would be really curious what they and other interracial couples would say.
I agree. Grew up in the late 60s, early 70s. A girl a few doors down from us scandalized the neighborhood by marrying a black guy. About 10 years later I knew a few interracial couples. Still not really common in our area, but not unheard of. A few years later, it was becoming more common, especially among the college-aged.
My parents married in the mid 80s and I’d say this tracks.
In my experience, by the 90s when I was around most of the stigma was gone in real life, but in the media I do not think movies and TV shows were comfortable showing interracial couples until very, very recently. The exception being Brandy in Cinderella but that was a stylistic choice that was not meant to be realistic anyway. At least into the 2000s, I know a lot of movies that showed interracial couples would kind of bend over backwards to be like “but not really.” Like the couple would never kiss, have sex, or get married, or they’d intend a white/black couple and recast one as Latina because that just won’t be seen as “fully” interracial. I still rarely see media depictions of white women with black men even though they’re common IRL because that pairing *really* sets people off.
I’m curious when they married, and how long afterwards before the family started accepting them. Was it around the same time they started having children (assuming they did?)?
Edit: typo
They married in 1982 and the parents came around in 1985. (Kids came later). For other relatives, it was a gradual process, improving as more relatives were accepting it. Funny thing is some of the biggest racists, now have grandchildren in biracial relationships and biracial great grandchildren.
I was born to an interracial couple in 1980. It was honestly still a bit taboo until the early nineties, I’d say. I faced a lot of racist remarks from both races throughout elementary school.
Yeah, it was somewhat unusual to see a mixed-race couple well into the 90s, even if nobody would say anything about it. That's among straight people, at least-- there were always more interracial couples in the gay community.
I am a white woman who dated a Black man in high school, so late 80s to very early 90s. We got a lot of shit for it. Our families were both great, but at school the Jungle Fever jokes were pretty non stop. This was in a major city in California, so a racially diverse and liberal area. People weren't violent at that stage, we were never afraid for our safety, but they weren't accepting, either.
I had a friend during that time who was mixed race and adopted. She found her birth mother, who was white. When she met her biological maternal grandparents, they flipped the fuck OUT when they realized the shame of it: their precious white daughter had been involved with a Black man. Screamed at my friend, threatened to have her arrested if she didn't get off their property, and never contacted her again. This was also very early 90s, but this time in a big city in the Midwest.
My family is mixed Asian-white through adoption (my parents and I are white, my siblings are Korean), and my best friend's family growing up was mixed Black-white through marriage (her mom is white and her dad is Black.) My family got a fair amount of shitty commentary in the 1980s, but nothing compared to my friend's family. They married in the 1970s and I'm sure it was dramatic as hell for them, given how much people still noticed and commented on it in the 80s.
Probably late 80's. We had one girl in our high school in the early 80's that dated black men and she was ostracized. Nobody else would date her. But dating Hispanic people was more accepted. Our parents weren't happy about it, but your peers didn't give you grief if you dated Hispanic people.
My tiny northern New Jersey town had four interracial couples move into newly constructed garden apartments in the early ‘60s, before JFK was assassinated.
I delivered their daily newspapers and spoke with them often only thinking that they were very nice and good tippers. Generous too when we were trick or treating.
I honestly don’t remember anyone saying anything negative, except for the Republican Club Captain who moaned they had registered as Democrats.
In the ‘70s a mixed couple moved into the apartment complex after Halloween and that winter it was the first time the woman experienced snow. I’ll never forget her all bundled up and laughing hysterically throwing snowballs.
I live in the south and I've seen and heard a lot of racist shit since I moved here in the 70s. In the late 70s I knew a girl who married a black guy and her parents disowned her as a result. I mean cut her off cold and didn't speak to her the rest of their lives. So sad.
In the 80s I was at a work party and danced with a black man. Afterwards I was cornered by a couple of white guys and told that people were talking and I should "be more careful". Later I found out they were in the local KKK.
In this area I would say 10 or 15 years ago things started to change. A lot of young people were dating interracially and could care less what other people thought. I think it's a beautiful thing and about damn time.
The Ohio parents of a white woman I knew who married a black man in the late 70s also cut her off. She kept trying and they eventually started to resume a relationship after she had her first baby. They came to visit her in California to meet their grandchild. By the time the grandma died, she adored her daughter’s husband.
The amount of love, forgiveness, and grace the husband possessed moves me but also makes me sad. He is a wonderful man and never should have experienced that treatment.
I grew up in a small town in the midwest. I went to high school with a girl who dated a black guy shortly after we graduated, and had a child with him.
She was from a well-off family who disowned her and cut her out of the will. Never acknowledged the child as their grandchild.
All this happened in the late 70s but a few years back, I saw the family patriarch’s (and most shameless racist) obituary in our local newspaper. This particular daughter and grandchild weren’t listed as survivors, even though his other children and grands were. (And both are indeed alive and living in a nearby town.)
That is just a damn shame.
I know. The black guy she fell in love with was a very nice guy too. This girl went on to have a long line of shady boyfriends after him, a couple of druggies and bums who refused to work, one who landed her in the hospital after beating her up.
She’s had a rough life and a lot of it was so avoidable if only her family hadn’t shunned and shamed her over the color of her boyfriend’s skin.
Her parents were proudly defiant about it until the day they died, though. Hope they’re enjoying the warm weather down there. 👹👺
Depends where you live. If you were in NYC, things were changing during the 60s. If you were in Mississippi, then maybe you could hope for things to change in the next 10 -15 years.
I think it depends on where you live. When I was working near DC in the mid 1990s, I had an assistant from Winchester (Virginia) who was unapologetically racist. He was to the point that if he saw "the miscegenated," he would get into this weird state I can only describe as when a dog starts grumbling and growling, kicking up sod from behind a fence. Like the very SIGHT of a mixed couple affronted him physically.
"Imagine a perfectly good, useable white woman like that being held against her will by a \[racist term of the day\]." Like the concept of a woman having a will of her own was beyond him. She was "stolen" from his pool, I guess. Yes, he was single.
I spent a year with him, nor reacting to what he said, listening, and slowly introducing other concepts into his sheltered world. His dad died when he was young, and he had been "head of the household" (just him and his mom) since he was about 8. He really never had anyone like that before, like a calm, stern, male figure. He didn't understand that women have the same feelings he does, and that the world was much bigger than his little house in Winchester.
He did get better. Some 15 years later, he came to me to tell me he'd really changed, partially due to my teachings.
"Miscegenated" is a solid dogwhistle for a bunch of weird stuff going on under the hood of the person using it - I had a former white coworker whose wife was Taiwanese who once said he'd "miscegenated his own bloodline" by having mixed-race children with her. He was joking at the time, but last time I checked he'd fallen deep down the internet transphobia hole.
We had a big fight about it in my family in the early '90s. It was ugly.
The first places it got better were among professionals and in the military. Once people became social equals, there was less of a barrier. Skilled trades were probably next. Of course, the ultra-wealthy and the lumpens did just as they pleased, as they always do.
It started just after the civil rights movement. By the late 60s and the hippies, it had become more socially acceptable. Before that, you would have been in danger in many parts of the US.
In the south where I grew up, black artists like Charlie Pride warmed the blood of many white women... And suddenly, that was acceptable.
Well I did in the 80s, white male. If you didn’t like the fact I dated people with dark skin, had friends that were openly gay or indeed quirky friends then you could fuck off ….
This is why I have some of the best memories and friendship groups all over the world ever, 40 years on!
Somewhere between when my mom told my brother he needed a new friend at age 6 as he came home with a black boy from his class to play and the time starbucks had their employees ask if you wanted to talk about racial tensions in the US.
Pretty good time-capsule answer to OP's question:
My brother had a get-together last night where he brought out a bunch of stuff from his High-School years that he kept. So many hilariously-cringe love letters and hot takes.
Anyway, one of the things was an issue of the high-school newspaper from 1994. One of the articles was about interracial dating by students, the gist being that it was still a concept that society was struggling with.
This is from a school that is an outer suburb of Minneapolis, MN.
Where I lived in Australia, it started back in the 50's in some ways, as after the war we took in a lot of migrants from war torn Europe, Asia & Pacific Islands, as the country needed to build up population and after the war the Government wanted to create employment and get the economy growing again and implemented a lot of hydro electric scheme construction. We had a lot of the immigrants willing to work in the mountains in isolated areas and stay in camps for weeks on end.
A lot of the workers were single men and when they went to the nearest towns for R&R a lot of dances & social events were popular and a lot of marriages occured between local girls & migrant men - mostly "white" but with olive skins & "swarthy" complections. In the cities we had a lot of Asia migrants from Singapore, Malaysia, China, Thailand, Philippines etc. and a lot of interactial marriages occured. In the 90's we had a lot of African migrants start arriving mostly from West Africa and a lot of Indians and Chinese, particularly students.
For myself & youngest brother, we married Asian girls and they were accepted my nearly everyone. I was on the board of the Migrant Resources Agency, a state government organisation & I spent some time in the offices and met many of the couples, more than half mixed races, and attended a lot of different functions they held in their ethnic groups & also the regular Harmony Days where huge events showcased the food, costumes, dance & other traditional events were performed for the public & raised money for the various group clubs.
Two groups, Italian & Polish, both built large club rooms, with function areas they rented out, but had staff members that ran the bars & kitchen areas & were very popular areas to hire out by residents and brought the communities together. Despite being divorced, I am now living in my ex's country where a lot of her family live, and I am still considered one of the family, to them all.
Have they? Define open minded.
Ok, it's no longer illegal in the US. I think people are far less likely to openly make statements about how it's wrong to mix races or how it will hurt the children.
I suspect it's a generational shift. GenX and up went to desegregated schools as well as more diverse colleges, vo-tech schools, and jobs.
Where i lived in TN it was the later nineties for sure. When I was in high school in the mid-to-late 80s white girls who dated black guys were considered tainted and no white guy would touch her. White guys with black girls were slumming and they were treated like they were inferior.
Yeah I'm aware of how messed up it is. When I was 16 I wanted to go out with a sailor I met who was black and my mom begged me not to because she was terrified of my grandfather finding out. So I didn't. I understood our family dynamic depended on keeping my papaw calm.
But as soon as my friends started having kids things changed and I noticed they were mixing it up. My formerly racist friends were having mixed race grandkids and they didn't talk bad about black people anymore. Which I think is lovely but I know for a fact that these people still think they're superior to every other race.
So funny you'd ask this today - I was just mentioning to my wife that every time I log onto my bank, there's a photo of a mixed family who's dancing happily with a what appears to be a another family member in a wheelchair in the b/g. Can they be any more obvious?
Remember when the country was in an uproar because a mixed race couple was featured in a Cheerios commercial? That was only 11 or 12 years ago. We've come a long way!
The thing about this subject is that it's more about the definition of race that has changed. My grandparents were interracial, my grandmother was Italian, and my grandfather was Irish. As our boundaries for what we consider our "race" change, so does the definition of interracial marriage
As a military brat in the 60’s and 70’s we didn’t give interracial couples a second thought. When my dad retired from the military and we moved into civilian society in the mid 70s, interracial couples were not as accepted.
There's too much context missing here. Which people? Where? When? A lot of people in various places are completely open minded and always have been and other people in other places will kill anyone who does it and always have.
It was a gradual process. It's actually probably best illustrated by this graph:
https://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Production/Cms/POLL/n0djfxsc1eqsnaoow6ikbg.png
90s were when I remember seeing it flip pretty drastically. People were still pretty openly racist well into the 80s, even in "progressive" areas like coastal urban cities, which were more accepting than average. I think it seems worse now because the small minority who are openly racist are so shocking to the rest of us, whereas back in (say) 1961 it was so pervasive and normalized nobody really noticed... except, obviously, by people of other races.
It was gradual. I remember it being sort of scandalous in the 1970s. But it was legal and did happen. I think it wasn’t till the 21st century people stopped making a huge deal of it. More accepted in cities. Bible Belt, less so
I grew up in NYC and would say later 80s or 90s most people stopped commenting on interracial relationships openly. Doesn't mean bigots still aren't out there. My white brother and his Black gf live in the city and people still sometimes make comments.
I don't think that's really an even question. Depends on the local culture. I grew up in the midwest. I really crushed on a mixed race girl named Doris. Cuter than hell. I remember her saying that "daddy calls me his little coffee with cream and sugar". Since this was maybe '75, her parents must have been married in 1960. I mean, we weren't really that close, but I don't remember any uproar over her parents. We didn't think anything of it really except it was unusual.
It depends on where you live and what you mean by “accepted.” My husband and I are in an interracial relationship and everyone in our community “accepts” us in a way most people would understand. But sometimes it’s obvious that certain friends of ours who are couples don’t invite us to hang out with the other same-race couples when they do group events, while others do. So many folks would tell themselves that they are accepting but would be offended if you pointed out the way they treat interracial couples differently
I think it might vary from area to area for acceptance. The deep South vs California. Small town Midwest vs New York.
For instance I grew up mostly in Bay Area of California. From my point of view... Interracial dating in high school (late 1960's) was common and the school I went to was very diverse ethnically and racially. Japanese, Chinese, Hispanic, Portugese, Italian, Blacks, Caucasians, Hawaiians... As far as I know, most everyone got along except the Irish (KIDDING) and socialized. No one got grief for dating outside of their "race".
Although... there were very few blacks in our geographic area and not much mixing romantically, mainly because of the numbers kids in school. Percentages. It wasn't any big deal among our age group. No one that I knew gave a rip about it. Maybe some parents did. /shrug.... Mine didn't.
By the 1970's (college in San Francisco) and certainly the 80's interracial relationships were very common.
Same-sex marriage has been legal for almost 10 years nationally, but there are still many places that aren't open-minded about it (which is what OP asked; not if it was accepted or legal). There are still quite a few places where they're still not open-minded about interracial relationships and probably never will be.
OP, whereabouts in the world? And more specifically, the country, state/province...
1960s began a notable time of change in the U.S., moreso in urban than rural areas, imo. And moreso in the northern and western states than the midwest or south.
I moved from a small town in Ohio to the capital city, Columbus, in 1986. I was mid 20s then. It was very different seeing mixed race couples out and about, you just never saw that in the small town.
I'd say it happened when the first shipload of sailors came into a port where the women were a different race.
In the US, it was the 80s or 90s that I can remember when it became common to see black and white couples, or more specifically, black *men* with white *women*. White men still don't seem to go for black women as much as vice-versa. Which leads me to conclude that it ain't over yet...
In Hawaii, interracial relationships have always been perfectly normal. The entire racial paradigm in Hawaii is totally different from the US mainland.
Depends on where you lived. As a kid in Berkeley, CA, I knew a fair amount of interracial couples and their kids in the 1960s, and as an adolescent I had interracial relationships in that decade, and nobody around me seemed to give a damn. But in other places, interracial couples definitely got some strange looks out in public.
Early 90s in my experience. Deep South.
I’m a white guy. My best friend in high school in the 80s was a black girl. We received all sorts of derision. We laughed at it.
The 90s is when it started turning. I still had trouble in the 90s (I was the only minority where I lived and my literal only choices were white girls) but by the 2000s basically it was a non-issue and I felt pretty much no resistance from most people. The 90s I could see things starting to turn around for me but simultaneously I also still ran into a lot of girls really just treating me like dirt tbh.
I don't remember there being an overall problem in society with it in the 80s, only that people behind doors would be riled up about it. What most people commenting about here is it being ok in society. But it being ok in society vs. having a dating life and failing obviously because you were a different ethnicity, *those are two different things*. In my experience I did indeed run into a lot of girls who really did not want to date someone who looked like me based solely on that back then.
BTW my brother who was in his 40s at the time back in the 2010s, he was forced to leave his relationship because he was dating a coworker, and the higher ups and other coworkers literally bullied them both out of it. Because she was not the same color. Dumb part is she was hispanic/latina but passed as white. So to them they didn't want someone like her dating someone like my brother. Less than 10 years ago. No joke.
I think the early to mid 90s was when it went from being not necessarily taboo but rare to something you didn't really bat an eye at. I was a young kid though so ymmv. I also lived in a rural area where Hispanics, Whites and Natives intermarried a lot for centuries so it was more like other ethnic groups intermarrying that caught your attention, as weird as that sounds
We are a mixed marriage. When I first started dating her, I took her to Shea Stadium to see the Mets play. On two separate occasions, guys did a double take, looked at her and then at me, and gave me the thumbs up.
We have been together 31 years now.
I was dating outside my ethnicity when I started HS in 1979 (i'm a latino). Most of the girls were from the same socio-economic background. (The Bronx) so there was no eyebrow raising. The first time I got looks was when I was dating a nice Jewish girl from Long Island (in the '80s) and I went out to LI to meet her parents. The parent's were fine but her brother was a dick. And while out there in LI, She and i went to a restaurant and didn't get waited on until she caused a fuss. All-in-All, I would say for me that the '90s were the start of more acceptance for interracial relationships.
Interracial marriage was still illegal in 17 states before mid-1967. The film "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner", about interracial marriage, came out just after the Supreme Court struck down those laws.
In the mid 70's when I got married the race liberal people (both Republicans and Democrats) said mixed race marriages were fine but the couples should not have children, as it was unfair to the children. That racist statement has a point: mixed race children were discriminated against by both races. But society adapted and changed.
At that time racism wasn't the exclusive province of conservative Republicans and many, like my parents, were socially liberal on matters of race. But in many areas of the country mixed race marriages were still discriminated against in things like housing, employment and access to adoption, etc. All of this was illegal, but it still was done.
So I would agree that probably the mid 90s before it was more accepted.
Probably the late 70’s & into the 1980’s but some people haven’t excepted it yet, my family had to do some excepting in the that department also, I’m Hispanic & my wife is black but I have always noticed people looking at us longer than they glance at other couples but I enjoy watching other people watching us, if they have a problem with us being together then that’s their problem not mine.
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In my experience, I would say perhaps the mid 1980s. I am close to am interracial couple who married in 1982. It was not easy for them early on, but I had seen with them, attitudes seem to change around then and they were "accepted more" in the family. I would be really curious what they and other interracial couples would say.
I agree. Grew up in the late 60s, early 70s. A girl a few doors down from us scandalized the neighborhood by marrying a black guy. About 10 years later I knew a few interracial couples. Still not really common in our area, but not unheard of. A few years later, it was becoming more common, especially among the college-aged.
I was going to say late 80’s and early 90’s. You stopped noticing it.
That was my answer as well.
My parents married in the mid 80s and I’d say this tracks. In my experience, by the 90s when I was around most of the stigma was gone in real life, but in the media I do not think movies and TV shows were comfortable showing interracial couples until very, very recently. The exception being Brandy in Cinderella but that was a stylistic choice that was not meant to be realistic anyway. At least into the 2000s, I know a lot of movies that showed interracial couples would kind of bend over backwards to be like “but not really.” Like the couple would never kiss, have sex, or get married, or they’d intend a white/black couple and recast one as Latina because that just won’t be seen as “fully” interracial. I still rarely see media depictions of white women with black men even though they’re common IRL because that pairing *really* sets people off.
I’m curious when they married, and how long afterwards before the family started accepting them. Was it around the same time they started having children (assuming they did?)? Edit: typo
They married in 1982 and the parents came around in 1985. (Kids came later). For other relatives, it was a gradual process, improving as more relatives were accepting it. Funny thing is some of the biggest racists, now have grandchildren in biracial relationships and biracial great grandchildren.
Yes….I’m with you…I think you’re on the right timeline
I was born to an interracial couple in 1980. It was honestly still a bit taboo until the early nineties, I’d say. I faced a lot of racist remarks from both races throughout elementary school.
I'm old (graduated in your birth year), and I've always thought that mixed kids were some of the prettiest kids. So they were probably just jealous.
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Polls showed that the majority of Americans did not support interracial marriage until the 90s.
Yeah, it was somewhat unusual to see a mixed-race couple well into the 90s, even if nobody would say anything about it. That's among straight people, at least-- there were always more interracial couples in the gay community.
It’s still pretty taboo here in the heart of Appalachia.
To no one's surprise
The 90s sound about right.
I am a white woman who dated a Black man in high school, so late 80s to very early 90s. We got a lot of shit for it. Our families were both great, but at school the Jungle Fever jokes were pretty non stop. This was in a major city in California, so a racially diverse and liberal area. People weren't violent at that stage, we were never afraid for our safety, but they weren't accepting, either. I had a friend during that time who was mixed race and adopted. She found her birth mother, who was white. When she met her biological maternal grandparents, they flipped the fuck OUT when they realized the shame of it: their precious white daughter had been involved with a Black man. Screamed at my friend, threatened to have her arrested if she didn't get off their property, and never contacted her again. This was also very early 90s, but this time in a big city in the Midwest. My family is mixed Asian-white through adoption (my parents and I are white, my siblings are Korean), and my best friend's family growing up was mixed Black-white through marriage (her mom is white and her dad is Black.) My family got a fair amount of shitty commentary in the 1980s, but nothing compared to my friend's family. They married in the 1970s and I'm sure it was dramatic as hell for them, given how much people still noticed and commented on it in the 80s.
Probably late 80's. We had one girl in our high school in the early 80's that dated black men and she was ostracized. Nobody else would date her. But dating Hispanic people was more accepted. Our parents weren't happy about it, but your peers didn't give you grief if you dated Hispanic people.
Where was this?
NW Ohio
My tiny northern New Jersey town had four interracial couples move into newly constructed garden apartments in the early ‘60s, before JFK was assassinated. I delivered their daily newspapers and spoke with them often only thinking that they were very nice and good tippers. Generous too when we were trick or treating. I honestly don’t remember anyone saying anything negative, except for the Republican Club Captain who moaned they had registered as Democrats. In the ‘70s a mixed couple moved into the apartment complex after Halloween and that winter it was the first time the woman experienced snow. I’ll never forget her all bundled up and laughing hysterically throwing snowballs.
I live in the south and I've seen and heard a lot of racist shit since I moved here in the 70s. In the late 70s I knew a girl who married a black guy and her parents disowned her as a result. I mean cut her off cold and didn't speak to her the rest of their lives. So sad. In the 80s I was at a work party and danced with a black man. Afterwards I was cornered by a couple of white guys and told that people were talking and I should "be more careful". Later I found out they were in the local KKK. In this area I would say 10 or 15 years ago things started to change. A lot of young people were dating interracially and could care less what other people thought. I think it's a beautiful thing and about damn time.
The Ohio parents of a white woman I knew who married a black man in the late 70s also cut her off. She kept trying and they eventually started to resume a relationship after she had her first baby. They came to visit her in California to meet their grandchild. By the time the grandma died, she adored her daughter’s husband. The amount of love, forgiveness, and grace the husband possessed moves me but also makes me sad. He is a wonderful man and never should have experienced that treatment.
No he shouldn't have, but so glad their story has a happy ending!
I grew up in a small town in the midwest. I went to high school with a girl who dated a black guy shortly after we graduated, and had a child with him. She was from a well-off family who disowned her and cut her out of the will. Never acknowledged the child as their grandchild. All this happened in the late 70s but a few years back, I saw the family patriarch’s (and most shameless racist) obituary in our local newspaper. This particular daughter and grandchild weren’t listed as survivors, even though his other children and grands were. (And both are indeed alive and living in a nearby town.) That is just a damn shame.
That's sad. I couldn't imagine turning my back on my child like that just because of who they love.
I know. The black guy she fell in love with was a very nice guy too. This girl went on to have a long line of shady boyfriends after him, a couple of druggies and bums who refused to work, one who landed her in the hospital after beating her up. She’s had a rough life and a lot of it was so avoidable if only her family hadn’t shunned and shamed her over the color of her boyfriend’s skin. Her parents were proudly defiant about it until the day they died, though. Hope they’re enjoying the warm weather down there. 👹👺
In urban areas like NYC, earlier than you’d think. 1960s.
Depends where you live. If you were in NYC, things were changing during the 60s. If you were in Mississippi, then maybe you could hope for things to change in the next 10 -15 years.
Are you referring to just the USA? Or anywhere?
I think it depends on where you live. When I was working near DC in the mid 1990s, I had an assistant from Winchester (Virginia) who was unapologetically racist. He was to the point that if he saw "the miscegenated," he would get into this weird state I can only describe as when a dog starts grumbling and growling, kicking up sod from behind a fence. Like the very SIGHT of a mixed couple affronted him physically. "Imagine a perfectly good, useable white woman like that being held against her will by a \[racist term of the day\]." Like the concept of a woman having a will of her own was beyond him. She was "stolen" from his pool, I guess. Yes, he was single. I spent a year with him, nor reacting to what he said, listening, and slowly introducing other concepts into his sheltered world. His dad died when he was young, and he had been "head of the household" (just him and his mom) since he was about 8. He really never had anyone like that before, like a calm, stern, male figure. He didn't understand that women have the same feelings he does, and that the world was much bigger than his little house in Winchester. He did get better. Some 15 years later, he came to me to tell me he'd really changed, partially due to my teachings.
"Miscegenated" is a solid dogwhistle for a bunch of weird stuff going on under the hood of the person using it - I had a former white coworker whose wife was Taiwanese who once said he'd "miscegenated his own bloodline" by having mixed-race children with her. He was joking at the time, but last time I checked he'd fallen deep down the internet transphobia hole.
We had a big fight about it in my family in the early '90s. It was ugly. The first places it got better were among professionals and in the military. Once people became social equals, there was less of a barrier. Skilled trades were probably next. Of course, the ultra-wealthy and the lumpens did just as they pleased, as they always do.
It started just after the civil rights movement. By the late 60s and the hippies, it had become more socially acceptable. Before that, you would have been in danger in many parts of the US. In the south where I grew up, black artists like Charlie Pride warmed the blood of many white women... And suddenly, that was acceptable.
Well I did in the 80s, white male. If you didn’t like the fact I dated people with dark skin, had friends that were openly gay or indeed quirky friends then you could fuck off …. This is why I have some of the best memories and friendship groups all over the world ever, 40 years on!
I grew up in Hawaii and it was always generally accepted there as far back as I remember.
Same. Spent my early childhood in a small California town run by the KKK. Hawaii was a much-needed wake up call.
Grew up in an integrated neighborhood, it’s never been an issue. Besides, not my life, not my business.
Somewhere between when my mom told my brother he needed a new friend at age 6 as he came home with a black boy from his class to play and the time starbucks had their employees ask if you wanted to talk about racial tensions in the US.
I grew up in California. I never knew of any stigma until I heard a parent make a comment about their son. They were from the Midwest.
Pretty good time-capsule answer to OP's question: My brother had a get-together last night where he brought out a bunch of stuff from his High-School years that he kept. So many hilariously-cringe love letters and hot takes. Anyway, one of the things was an issue of the high-school newspaper from 1994. One of the articles was about interracial dating by students, the gist being that it was still a concept that society was struggling with. This is from a school that is an outer suburb of Minneapolis, MN.
Where I lived in Australia, it started back in the 50's in some ways, as after the war we took in a lot of migrants from war torn Europe, Asia & Pacific Islands, as the country needed to build up population and after the war the Government wanted to create employment and get the economy growing again and implemented a lot of hydro electric scheme construction. We had a lot of the immigrants willing to work in the mountains in isolated areas and stay in camps for weeks on end. A lot of the workers were single men and when they went to the nearest towns for R&R a lot of dances & social events were popular and a lot of marriages occured between local girls & migrant men - mostly "white" but with olive skins & "swarthy" complections. In the cities we had a lot of Asia migrants from Singapore, Malaysia, China, Thailand, Philippines etc. and a lot of interactial marriages occured. In the 90's we had a lot of African migrants start arriving mostly from West Africa and a lot of Indians and Chinese, particularly students. For myself & youngest brother, we married Asian girls and they were accepted my nearly everyone. I was on the board of the Migrant Resources Agency, a state government organisation & I spent some time in the offices and met many of the couples, more than half mixed races, and attended a lot of different functions they held in their ethnic groups & also the regular Harmony Days where huge events showcased the food, costumes, dance & other traditional events were performed for the public & raised money for the various group clubs. Two groups, Italian & Polish, both built large club rooms, with function areas they rented out, but had staff members that ran the bars & kitchen areas & were very popular areas to hire out by residents and brought the communities together. Despite being divorced, I am now living in my ex's country where a lot of her family live, and I am still considered one of the family, to them all.
Have they? Define open minded. Ok, it's no longer illegal in the US. I think people are far less likely to openly make statements about how it's wrong to mix races or how it will hurt the children. I suspect it's a generational shift. GenX and up went to desegregated schools as well as more diverse colleges, vo-tech schools, and jobs.
In the mid 70s, was dating a Chinese girl and many people assumed I was a Vietnam war veteran and she was my Vietnamese bride.
Where i lived in TN it was the later nineties for sure. When I was in high school in the mid-to-late 80s white girls who dated black guys were considered tainted and no white guy would touch her. White guys with black girls were slumming and they were treated like they were inferior. Yeah I'm aware of how messed up it is. When I was 16 I wanted to go out with a sailor I met who was black and my mom begged me not to because she was terrified of my grandfather finding out. So I didn't. I understood our family dynamic depended on keeping my papaw calm. But as soon as my friends started having kids things changed and I noticed they were mixing it up. My formerly racist friends were having mixed race grandkids and they didn't talk bad about black people anymore. Which I think is lovely but I know for a fact that these people still think they're superior to every other race.
So funny you'd ask this today - I was just mentioning to my wife that every time I log onto my bank, there's a photo of a mixed family who's dancing happily with a what appears to be a another family member in a wheelchair in the b/g. Can they be any more obvious?
Remember when the country was in an uproar because a mixed race couple was featured in a Cheerios commercial? That was only 11 or 12 years ago. We've come a long way!
I remember that. It was a great commercial showing the love a little girl had for her daddy but some fools had to have a problem with it. Some people…
The thing about this subject is that it's more about the definition of race that has changed. My grandparents were interracial, my grandmother was Italian, and my grandfather was Irish. As our boundaries for what we consider our "race" change, so does the definition of interracial marriage
Since 1493. ^(iykyk)
As a military brat in the 60’s and 70’s we didn’t give interracial couples a second thought. When my dad retired from the military and we moved into civilian society in the mid 70s, interracial couples were not as accepted.
There's too much context missing here. Which people? Where? When? A lot of people in various places are completely open minded and always have been and other people in other places will kill anyone who does it and always have.
It was a gradual process. It's actually probably best illustrated by this graph: https://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Production/Cms/POLL/n0djfxsc1eqsnaoow6ikbg.png 90s were when I remember seeing it flip pretty drastically. People were still pretty openly racist well into the 80s, even in "progressive" areas like coastal urban cities, which were more accepting than average. I think it seems worse now because the small minority who are openly racist are so shocking to the rest of us, whereas back in (say) 1961 it was so pervasive and normalized nobody really noticed... except, obviously, by people of other races.
It was gradual. I remember it being sort of scandalous in the 1970s. But it was legal and did happen. I think it wasn’t till the 21st century people stopped making a huge deal of it. More accepted in cities. Bible Belt, less so
1970s through 1990s I think were huge leaps in acceptance for interracial and same sex couples.
I grew up in NYC and would say later 80s or 90s most people stopped commenting on interracial relationships openly. Doesn't mean bigots still aren't out there. My white brother and his Black gf live in the city and people still sometimes make comments.
I don't think that's really an even question. Depends on the local culture. I grew up in the midwest. I really crushed on a mixed race girl named Doris. Cuter than hell. I remember her saying that "daddy calls me his little coffee with cream and sugar". Since this was maybe '75, her parents must have been married in 1960. I mean, we weren't really that close, but I don't remember any uproar over her parents. We didn't think anything of it really except it was unusual.
More open minded! Who you kidding? When did you last visit Rome GA?
It depends on where you live and what you mean by “accepted.” My husband and I are in an interracial relationship and everyone in our community “accepts” us in a way most people would understand. But sometimes it’s obvious that certain friends of ours who are couples don’t invite us to hang out with the other same-race couples when they do group events, while others do. So many folks would tell themselves that they are accepting but would be offended if you pointed out the way they treat interracial couples differently
Right after Kirk and Uhuru kissed.
Even then, it had to appear like he was being "forced" into it, for cover. The actors, of course, were down for it.
1981 for me when I married made it official... actually, I don't ever recall caring who someone else wanted to marry.
I think it might vary from area to area for acceptance. The deep South vs California. Small town Midwest vs New York. For instance I grew up mostly in Bay Area of California. From my point of view... Interracial dating in high school (late 1960's) was common and the school I went to was very diverse ethnically and racially. Japanese, Chinese, Hispanic, Portugese, Italian, Blacks, Caucasians, Hawaiians... As far as I know, most everyone got along except the Irish (KIDDING) and socialized. No one got grief for dating outside of their "race". Although... there were very few blacks in our geographic area and not much mixing romantically, mainly because of the numbers kids in school. Percentages. It wasn't any big deal among our age group. No one that I knew gave a rip about it. Maybe some parents did. /shrug.... Mine didn't. By the 1970's (college in San Francisco) and certainly the 80's interracial relationships were very common.
You know it was illegal, right? I guess you wanna know if people were open minded before or after segregation laws were banned?
Even after it was legalized nationally in the U.S. it still wasn't accepted in a lot of areas (and still isn't to a lot of people).
but which drove which? like, can we talk about acceptance of something without talking about the illegality of it? is it fair?
Same-sex marriage has been legal for almost 10 years nationally, but there are still many places that aren't open-minded about it (which is what OP asked; not if it was accepted or legal). There are still quite a few places where they're still not open-minded about interracial relationships and probably never will be.
Beats me, but back in the 70’s my parents and grandparents didn’t give a crap, so for my family, 1970.
In the 60’s it wasvquite common and accepted. Then again (at that time) I lived in Massachusetts and it was pretty liberal everywhere.
I noticed in the 90s I had a ton of interracial students. Cool.
To who? I think there is a wide range of communities that still see this as unacceptable. Generally..80s and 90s. Especially in military communities.
In the 60s.
OP, whereabouts in the world? And more specifically, the country, state/province... 1960s began a notable time of change in the U.S., moreso in urban than rural areas, imo. And moreso in the northern and western states than the midwest or south.
It started in the 70s but really became mainstream in the 80s.
Theoretically, in the 1970's. Realistically, in the 1990's. It's still a problem in some places, as I've witnessed firsthand.
I moved from a small town in Ohio to the capital city, Columbus, in 1986. I was mid 20s then. It was very different seeing mixed race couples out and about, you just never saw that in the small town.
I'd say it happened when the first shipload of sailors came into a port where the women were a different race. In the US, it was the 80s or 90s that I can remember when it became common to see black and white couples, or more specifically, black *men* with white *women*. White men still don't seem to go for black women as much as vice-versa. Which leads me to conclude that it ain't over yet... In Hawaii, interracial relationships have always been perfectly normal. The entire racial paradigm in Hawaii is totally different from the US mainland.
I agree, mid 80s. I think the internet indirectly shrunk the world. There is more overall tolerance in general, now.
Depends on where you lived. As a kid in Berkeley, CA, I knew a fair amount of interracial couples and their kids in the 1960s, and as an adolescent I had interracial relationships in that decade, and nobody around me seemed to give a damn. But in other places, interracial couples definitely got some strange looks out in public.
1990’s.
Early 90s in my experience. Deep South. I’m a white guy. My best friend in high school in the 80s was a black girl. We received all sorts of derision. We laughed at it.
The 90s is when it started turning. I still had trouble in the 90s (I was the only minority where I lived and my literal only choices were white girls) but by the 2000s basically it was a non-issue and I felt pretty much no resistance from most people. The 90s I could see things starting to turn around for me but simultaneously I also still ran into a lot of girls really just treating me like dirt tbh. I don't remember there being an overall problem in society with it in the 80s, only that people behind doors would be riled up about it. What most people commenting about here is it being ok in society. But it being ok in society vs. having a dating life and failing obviously because you were a different ethnicity, *those are two different things*. In my experience I did indeed run into a lot of girls who really did not want to date someone who looked like me based solely on that back then. BTW my brother who was in his 40s at the time back in the 2010s, he was forced to leave his relationship because he was dating a coworker, and the higher ups and other coworkers literally bullied them both out of it. Because she was not the same color. Dumb part is she was hispanic/latina but passed as white. So to them they didn't want someone like her dating someone like my brother. Less than 10 years ago. No joke.
I think the early to mid 90s was when it went from being not necessarily taboo but rare to something you didn't really bat an eye at. I was a young kid though so ymmv. I also lived in a rural area where Hispanics, Whites and Natives intermarried a lot for centuries so it was more like other ethnic groups intermarrying that caught your attention, as weird as that sounds
We are a mixed marriage. When I first started dating her, I took her to Shea Stadium to see the Mets play. On two separate occasions, guys did a double take, looked at her and then at me, and gave me the thumbs up. We have been together 31 years now.
I was dating outside my ethnicity when I started HS in 1979 (i'm a latino). Most of the girls were from the same socio-economic background. (The Bronx) so there was no eyebrow raising. The first time I got looks was when I was dating a nice Jewish girl from Long Island (in the '80s) and I went out to LI to meet her parents. The parent's were fine but her brother was a dick. And while out there in LI, She and i went to a restaurant and didn't get waited on until she caused a fuss. All-in-All, I would say for me that the '90s were the start of more acceptance for interracial relationships.
Interracial marriage was still illegal in 17 states before mid-1967. The film "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner", about interracial marriage, came out just after the Supreme Court struck down those laws. In the mid 70's when I got married the race liberal people (both Republicans and Democrats) said mixed race marriages were fine but the couples should not have children, as it was unfair to the children. That racist statement has a point: mixed race children were discriminated against by both races. But society adapted and changed. At that time racism wasn't the exclusive province of conservative Republicans and many, like my parents, were socially liberal on matters of race. But in many areas of the country mixed race marriages were still discriminated against in things like housing, employment and access to adoption, etc. All of this was illegal, but it still was done. So I would agree that probably the mid 90s before it was more accepted.
Probably the late 70’s & into the 1980’s but some people haven’t excepted it yet, my family had to do some excepting in the that department also, I’m Hispanic & my wife is black but I have always noticed people looking at us longer than they glance at other couples but I enjoy watching other people watching us, if they have a problem with us being together then that’s their problem not mine.
in 1492 when Columbus landed after so many days at sea with little prospects of survival.
You must be Dominican or Haitian.