A Brief Overview of Integration

Racial integration encompasses various processes including desegregation, but also eliminating barriers for minorities and thus creating equal opportunities for all races. Racial integration is a social issue that, while there have been strides made in American society, still has much progress to be made.

Interracial relationships are one aspect of racial integration. A Gallup poll found that 96 percent of blacks and 84 percent of whites approved of interracial marriages between blacks and whites. (Fitzgerald, 2017, p. 423) However, a 2010 study by the Pew Research Center found that only about 8.4 percent of all marriages are interracial. (Fitzgerald, 2017, p. 424) While the Gallup poll shows how far American society has come since the antebellum era, interracial relationships are still met with resistance and hostility and shows that we have not yet achieved a totally racially integrated state.

Of course the increase in interracial relationships, and changing attitudes about them, has also resulted in an increase in multiracial families. According to Fitzgerald, “Multiracial families occupy a unique place in our racialized society, as they are forced to think about contradictions and complexities surrounding race in ways monoracial families are not.” (Fitzgerald, 2017, pp. 427 - 428) Multiracial families deal with issues such as the assumption they are not related while in public, rebound racism, and the same discrimination in the housing market as families of color face.

This leads to the conversation relating to biracial/multiracial identities – how individuals of two or more races identify themselves and those implications in modern American society. The 2000 United States Census gave individuals the ability to check more than one racial category for the first time. The 2010 U.S. Census reported 3 percent of the population, or about nine million people, as identifying with more than one race. Many recognize, however, that identifying with more than one race does nothing to upset the social order, as adding new nonwhite categories does not challenge the racial hierarchy or the processes of white privilege. It does, however, challenge the ideas of race as fixed and biological.

Another intimate relationship that has long been scrutinized and deemed immoral is gay and lesbian marriages. They are also routinely discriminated against for their same-sex relationship, and that certainly doesn’t change when they look to start a family within that relationship, including seeking marriage licenses and wedding services, and when they seek to expand their family through adoption. People often use religion as a reason for their opposition to gay marriage, just as they did for interracial marriages. They also oppose same-sex couples who are looking to adopt children, by stating that their relationship is not a good home environment on children and that it will have negative impacts on their development. Gay marriage was fairly recently legalized and still faces uncertainty to this day. Politicians continue to reference gay marriage as a downfall of our society and are consistently asserting that businesses should not have to accommodate gay couples who are wishing to get married if they find it goes against their morals.

Despite the progress that has been made, challenges facing individuals that identify as multiracial, interracial relationships and families, same-sex couples and more still persist today. Despite what some may argue, we are yet to exist in a postracial society.

Bibliography

(2017). Chapter 11: Arenas of Racial Integration: Interracial Relationships, Multiracial Families, Biracial/Multiracial Identities, Sports and the Military. In K. Fitzgerald, Recognizing Race and Ethnicity: Power, Privilege, and Inequality. Boulder: Westview Press.

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