I am not old enough to remember the Loving v. Virginia ruling, but I am old enough to remember (and remember having) the attitude of "Well, yeah, people should be allowed to love as they will, but, jeez, that's going to be a tough row to hoe, for them and for the children. Maybe it's not a good idea."
Fortunately, the nation [1] has (mostly) gotten the hell over that.
'Today, one in six newlyweds in the United States has a spouse of a different race or ethnicity, according to a recent analysis of 2015 census data by the Pew Research Center. That is a fivefold increase from 1967, when just 3 percent of marriages crossed ethnic and racial lines.
The decline in opposition to intermarriage is even more striking: In 1990, according to a Pew analysis of data from the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey, 63 percent of nonblack adults said they would be very or somewhat opposed to a close relative marrying a black person. Today the figure is 14 percent.'
That's good. And, it's something that, over time, further trends toward irrelevancy. In that, the folk who screeched in fear of "amalgamation" had it right: the more the "races" [2] intermingle, the less of a deal it is, just as today someone doesn't bat an eye over an individual being of mixed Italian, Irish, English, and Spanish heritage, even if some of those mixtures might have been fraught at the time.
——
[1] And I, long ago.
[2] "Race" being, to be blunt, a social concept, not a biological one.
50 Years After Loving v. Virginia
Interracial Love and Marriage
