The interracial marriage of Bill de Blasio, newly elected mayor of New York, is generating a lot of headlines. De Blasio may be the first white politician in U.S. history elected to a major office with a black spouse. Not only did this not ruffle the feathers of very many New Yorkers - probably the most diverse city on the planet, after all - but it looks like it probably helped get him elected.
I've got a chart in the
Secret Peace book reflecting the trend of acceptance of interracial relationships:
A clear trend, but I only had data at the time up to the year 2000. However, the trend is so obvious that we can pretty safely extrapolate what it would look like if it continued to today (in blue):
Pretty impressive, as the two groups' opinions are converging around the 80-85% mark. But what's really interesting is that one of the articles about de Blasio, in the
Huffington Post, mentions current trends - allowing us to update the chart for real:
The result (in red) is even higher than projected. The percentage of whites approving went from 4% in 1958 to 86% now. Today, across America, only 14% of whites disapprove of mixed marriage, and an amazingly low 2% of blacks disapprove.
Can you imagine this trend ever reversing? I can't. Nearly everyone approves of interracial marriage, something that would have been inconceivable to folks a few generations ago. Though they're going at different speeds, all other trends of tolerance are moving in the same inevitable direction as well.
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