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Abstract
Black/White romance has become increasingly commonplace in the United States in recent years. Primetime television shows and movies frequently present as unremarkable the love affairs between Black men and White women and between Black women and White men. Americans have become accustomed to vicariously experience Black/White interracial intimacy through celebrity liaisons. Polls tell us that Americans are becoming less opposed to interracial dating and marriage than in previous decades (National Opinion Research Center, 2002; Pew Research Center, 2003). Why has interracial love become more accepted in recent years, and, more importantly, why is Black/White interracial sexual intimacy often cast as ordinary at this moment in American life? Just 50 years ago, a Black man in the South risked his life if suspected by Whites of looking the wrong way at a White woman. A White woman faced rejection by her family and disgrace in the eyes of White society for having a child by a Black father. In 1967, when the Supreme Court struck down anti-miscegenation laws, Black/White marriage was still illegal in 17 states (Kennedy, 2000:144).
BlacklWhie Marriage
The broader social acceptance of interracial romance saw its beginnings in the early to mid- 1 96Os , before the 1967 Supreme Court decision in Loving vs. Virginia, and coincident with the major advances of the civil rights movement. Before the 1960s, Black/White marriage occurred only rarely and prompted White backlash of varying intensities when it did occur. The Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, writing in 1944, observed with keen insight that "the ban in intermarriage has the highest place in the White man's rank order of social segregation and discrimination" (Myrdal, 1944:606). The civil rights movement destabilized that social taboo, setting into motion a cultural shift that continues to the present. To be sure, White antipathy toward interracial marriage has not disappeared and virulent examples still occur (Childs, 2005:178-180; Ferber, 1995:165-166; Ferber, 1998). However, it is difficult to imagine that the inherited prejudices against Black/White marriage will ever again claim the loyalty of the majority of Americans. Although the civil rights struggle emerged in the 1950s, the effects it had on racial intermarriage lagged until the 1960s, when the re-alignments in race relations of the era began to bring together Black and White Americans...