Interracial marriage is a form of marriage involving spouses who belong to different races or racialized ethnicities. In the past, such marriages were outlawed in the United States , Nazi Germany and apartheid-era South Africa as miscegenation. In interracial marriage was forbidden by law in 31 USA states. Virginia , which ruled that race-based restrictions on marriages, such as the anti-miscegenation law in the state of Virginia , violated the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution. Many jurisdictions have had regulations banning or restricting not just interracial marriage but also interracial sexual relations, including Germany during the Nazi period, South Africa under apartheid , and many states in the United States prior to a Supreme Court decision. According to studies by Jenifer L.

The present study investigated whether the conditions that make interracial contact anxiety-provoking for Whites differ from those that make it anxiety-provoking for Blacks. Specifically, the present work examined interracial anxiety as a function of discussant race i. To that end, we examined the non-verbal behavior of White and Black participants during brief interpersonal interactions. Consistent with previous research, White participants behaved more anxiously during interracial than same-race interactions. Additionally, White participants of interracial interaction behaved more anxiously than their Black interaction partners. Furthermore, whereas White participants of interracial interactions found race-related discussions no more stressful than race-neutral discussions, Black participants of interracial interactions found race-related discussions less stressful than race-neutral discussions.

Interracial marriage in the United States has been legal throughout the United States since at least the U. Supreme Court Warren Court decision Loving v. Virginia that held that "anti-miscegenation" laws were unconstitutional. The number of interracial marriages as a proportion of all marriages has been increasing since , so that by

In the racial and ethnic classification system used for this report, individuals are classified first by ethnicity defined as whether someone is Hispanic or not and then by race. As such, all references to whites, blacks, Asians, American Indians, multiracial persons or persons of some other race include those who are not Hispanic; Hispanics may be of any race. By the same token, if a Hispanic black person marries a non-Hispanic white person, their marriage would be classified as one between a Hispanic and a white person rather than a black and a white person. Beginning with the census, individuals could choose to identify with more than one group in response to the race question.