ELMHURST, Ill. -- While volunteering at her daughter's school, Rachel Gregersen noticed something that bothered her. Her 8-year-old daughter was the only biracial child she saw in her class.
"I was seeing the world through her eyes for the first time," Gregersen says. "It's important for children to see a reflection of themselves, to see the beauty in themselves and know they're not odd."
Gregersen, who is black, and her husband, Erik, who is white, don't make a big deal out of living as a biracial couple in Elmhurst. But they decided to transfer their daughter to a private school with a greater mix of black and white students. It's a small example of issues interracial couples still face, even 50 years after mixed marriages became legal nationwide.
It was June 1967 in the landmark Loving v. Virginia case -- the subject of the 2016 film Loving, directed by Little Rock native Jeff Nichols -- that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state bans on interracial marriage were unconstitutional.
Now a new analysis of census data by the Pew Research Center has found that the percentage of interracial or interethnic newlyweds in the United States rose from 3 percent since the Loving case to 17 percent in 2015.
And Americans have become more accepting of marriages of different races or ethnicities. One measure reflecting the shift is that, according to a Pew poll, the percentage of people who aren't black who say they'd oppose a relative marrying a black person dropped from 63 percent in 1990 to 14 percent in 2016.
The Chicago metropolitan area's rate of interracial marriages was 19 percent, slightly higher than the national rate of 16 percent, according to Pew, which looked at the share of newlyweds with a spouse of a different race or ethnicity from 2011 to 2015.
The Little Rock-North Little Rock-Conway metropolitan area's rate of interracial marriages was 14 percent during that time frame, Pew states. In the Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers metropolitan area, which covers a small area of southwestern Missouri, too, the rate of interracial marriages from 2011 to 2015 was 17 percent.
The rate of interracial marriage in the Memphis metropolitan area, which includes a portion of eastern Arkansas, was 10 percent from 2011 to 2015, according to Pew.
Asians and Hispanics in the United States are by far the most likely to marry someone of a different race or ethnicity. Almost one-third of married Asian-Americans and about a quarter of married Hispanics are married to a person of a different race or gender, according to the study.
In interviews, interracial couples in the Chicago area say they rarely encounter overt racism but occasionally run into subtle signs that they're treated differently.
When Rachel Gregersen gets asked for identification at the same store where her husband does not, or when they eat out together and the waiter asks if they want separate checks, she says, they notice it.
The couple have been married for 11 years, and previously blended into more diverse communities like Chicago's Pullman neighborhood and Oak Park, Ill. When they moved to Elmhurst to be closer to work, unlike some other newcomers, they say no neighbors introduced themselves. And after a woman next door asked them to recommend a painter, they didn't find out their neighbors were leaving until they saw the moving truck.
More broadly, the couple are concerned about how their children might be treated by law enforcement. Along with a talk about the birds and bees, they will have to talk about what to do when stopped by police.
"Being in an interracial marriage did open my eyes to things like that that I never would have thought about," Erik Gregersen says.
Between the couple themselves, though, "race really is not an issue," Rachel Gregersen says. "We forget
about it until the outside world reminds us from time to time."
OTHER STORIES
As the child of an interracial couple, Michelle Hughes identifies herself differently depending on the setting. With black friends or professionally, she might describe herself as black, while with mixed-race friends, like a social group called the Biracial Family Network, she's proudly biracial.
The network, which will celebrate the anniversary of the Loving decision next month, also holds an annual family barbecue on the lakefront.
As a child, Hughes remembered being called the N-word exactly twice. She reported one child to school officials, who ended the name-calling, and her father impressed on the other child that such language was not acceptable.
Hughes' parents married in 1967, the year of the Loving decision, but she says they didn't face as much backlash as some other couples because they lived in diverse areas in Chicago and south suburban Homewood.
Some of her biracial friends had much worse experiences, she says, having their hair cut off or being beaten up. Some had grandparents or other family members who disowned them.
Others, whose parents divorced, got negative images of one race or the other, Hughes says, because if the ex-spouse was considered a jerk, "then everyone of that race was a jerk."
Since Donald Trump's election as president, Hughes says she feels heightened tensions over race, as dramatized recently by a group of white nationalists with torches demonstrating over the removal of a Confederate statue in Virginia.
But Hughes considered her parents' mix of friends and family getting along despite their differences to be a good model for race relations.
"My perceptions were (that) the rest of the world was out of whack, not our family," she says.
On his second date with the woman he would later marry, Marc Dumas, of the Rogers Park neighborhood in Chicago, says a cabdriver threatened to kick the couple out of the car after they kissed in the back seat.
Even on their wedding day, Dumas says, a woman at the bar where the couple was celebrating mistook him for an employee and later asked his wife, who is white, if she was the one "who married a colored boy today."
Dumas says he and his wife, Kylie, were able to laugh it off.
"I'm blessed with having really good friends who are receptive of our relationship," he says. "I don't think they think about the racial aspect of it unless something like this happens."
He says he still puts up with strangers' questions about the couple's relationship and believes there are still those who don't like the idea of interracial coupling.
But he also says he thinks that "a large portion of the country has gotten over that and as long as you love each other and are not doing it because you're fetishizing interracial relationships or not doing it because you think it's going to help you politically or socially, no one cares," he says.
OTHER FINDINGS
• Black men are twice as likely to intermarry as black women, while Asian women are much more likely to do so than Asian men.
• The most common racial or ethnic pairing among newlywed intermarried couples is a Hispanic person married to a white person (42 percent). The next most common are couples in which one spouse is white and the other Asian (15 percent), and then where one spouse is white and one is multiracial (12 percent).
• Intermarriage is slightly more common among the college educated, especially for Hispanics. Nearly half of married, college-educated Hispanic Americans are intermarried, compared with 16 percent for those with a high school diploma or less education.
• Thirty-nine percent of Americans polled think intermarriage is a good thing, 9 percent think it's a bad thing and the rest say it doesn't make a difference.
Family on 06/14/2017