Families: When Love Is Mixing It Up

Tijuana Ricks and Michael Gillespie have been dating for three years and hope to marry. The African-American Ricks, 23, a Yale-drama grad student, and the Caucasian Gillespie, 29, a chiropractor, always loved the idea of blended-race children. But since Sept. 11, the idea of mixing up America's races has seemed even more urgent. "If we have more diverse children," Ricks urges, "they can educate others about different races and cultures and be more prepared for issues that might arise."

Brave words. But when it came time to tell her parents about Gillespie, Ricks hesitated, knowing his race would be an issue. "I told my mom I met this great guy who was smart and handsome and," she says with a giggle, "a little bit white." Her mother, she says, was "struck dumb." But soon her parents came to know and like her boyfriend.

If the couple marry, they will join a youth vanguard marrying interracially in increasing numbers and meeting greater--though far from total--tolerance from their families. The number of mixed-race marriages--between whites, blacks, Asians and Hispanics--has more than doubled since 1980, from 2.5% to 5% or, by some estimates, 6% today.

In a new survey of biracial couples by the Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University, 72% of respondents said their families had accepted their union immediately. Acceptance, however, was lower among black-white couples, two-thirds of whom reported at least one set of parents objecting at first. There are still only 450,000 black-white marriages in the U.S., compared with 700,000 white-Asian and 2 million white-Hispanic.

Interracial coupling is actually rocketing up faster than the stats indicate, suggests University of Michigan sociologist David R. Harris. According to his research, 1 in 6 interracial unions is a cohabitation, so the prevalence of intimate partnerships among the races is greater than it appears. And casual dating between groups is even more common. The Post found that 4 of every 10 Americans said they had dated someone of another race and almost 3 in 10 said it had been a "serious" relationship.

Brita Roy, an Indian American, met her boyfriend George Jones, an African American, at Vanderbilt University, where the 21-year-olds are students. Although her parents in Michigan are immigrants from India and Jones attended all-black elementary and middle schools in Selma, Ala., the two say they have far more similarities than differences. They both attended small, upscale boarding schools; both are career minded. They share tastes for hip-hop music, Thai and Italian food, and shopping at Banana Republic. And they're well educated and affluent, like many interracial couples.

That Jones and Roy are a couple reflects partly the fact that their peer group and pop culture have long sent the message, whether through movies like Save the Last Dance or ad campaigns like Benetton's, that interracial dating is cool. "In adolescent life and culture, kids hang out together in all different kinds of groups. It's what's accepted, what one sees on TV, in the movies, in tons of advertising," says Ron Taffel, author of The Second Family: How Adolescent Power Is Challenging the American Family. "Now when kids date interracially, they're not doing it to rebel or upset their parents but because it's a part of life. It's a profound difference."