The Effects Of Interracial Dating

Although it has been decades since the initial signing of the Civil Right’s Act of 1964, prejudice still remains a large-scale issue appearing nationwide. One major aspect of this discrimination is the focus on interracial couples that can be seen throughout societies past, present, and anticipated future. Although the topic of interracial couples has always been of interest to the field of social psychology, early studies proved to have an undersupply of collectable data to base their information off of. Mok and Moore (1999) suggest that “although interracial marriage has been studied extensively, little research exists on interracial dating.” Due to the expeditious increase in multicultural grouping in the wake of the 1960’s, new data has
According to Mendelsohn, Shaw Taylor, Fiore, and Cheshire interracial dating has had an effect on society for as far back as the late 1950’s early 1960’s, “At two in the morning on July 11, 1958, the bedroom of Richard and Mildred Loving, a married couple of mixed race, was entered by a Virginia sheriff and two deputies who arrested them for violation of the state’s Racial Integrity Act. In the case of Loving vs Virginia (1967) Society witnessed the first big turn towards civil rights advancement. Loving’s marriage was accused of violating the terms of the antimiscegenation statute, which was initially enforced to ensure that racial segregation never reached levels higher than socially acceptable to the public. This in turn would criminalize the party involved due to their marriage or even sexual relations overall. The outcome of this was the Supreme Court’s decision that the prohibition was unconstitutional based off of analysis of the fourteenth amendment’s which lead to an out spring of interracial marriages bringing up the population's average far higher than before. Sixteen states legalized interracial marriage in 1967, when interracial marriage became officially legal. Only nine states, including Hawaii and Alaska, have never had an anti miscegenation law and it was not until 1957 that more than half the states were without one. (Gevrek, 2014). Gallup Poll data collected
Dispositional attributions provide us with the information that we can access in order to form a conclusion concerning how someone has or will behave in the future. This ties into how someone will externally view the situation in which they are placed taking into consideration various factors such as personality, intelligence, credibility, etc. One way this can be exhibited in reference to interracial couples is someone sees a white woman in a public environment with a black man the perceiver might conclude that since the woman is with him she must be “ghetto” or in another sense, nonconforming. On the other hand, situational attributions exhibits the tendency to analyze a person's actions when placed in accordance to the situation they are placed in. this is more of an internal viewpoint based on environment, culture, and how you are brought up in society. In reference to interracial couples this can be seen through the perceiver thinking that a interracial couple that they see may not have been raised right or that they might come from a broken home. According to past studies it has been stated that“whether the cause of an event is seen as internal or external systematically influences people’s subsequent behaviors, motivations, cognitions, and affect” (Holley, Mitchell & Johnson,