Americans marrying someone from a different race or ethnicity at its highest in history

More and more Americans are marrying people of different races and ethnicities, reaching at least 1 in 6 newlyweds in 2015, the highest proportion in American history, a new study released Thursday showed.

Currently, there are 11 million people — or 1 out of 10 married people — in the United States with a spouse of a different race or ethnicity, according to a Pew Research Centre analysis of US Census Bureau data.

This is a big jump from 50 years ago, when the Supreme Court ruled interracial marriage was legal throughout the United States. That year, only 3 per cent of newlyweds were intermarried — which means they had a spouse of a different race or ethnicity. In 2015, 17 per cent of newlyweds were intermarried, a number which had held steady from the year before.

“There’s much greater racial tolerance in the United States, with attitudes having changed in a way where it’s much more positive toward interracial marriage,” said Daniel T. Lichter, director of the Institute for the Social Sciences at Cornell University, who studies interracial and interethnic marriages. “But I think that a greater reason is the growing diversity of the population. There are just more demographic opportunities for people to marry someone of another race or ethnicity.”

Asians were most likely to intermarry in 2015, with 29 per cent of newlywed Asians married to someone of a different race or ethnicity, followed by Hispanics at 27 per cent, blacks at 18 per cent and whites at 11 per cent.

There also were differences between men and women.