Love, L.A. style: A look behind the rise in interracial/interethnic ...

Photo by ?Lou?/Flickr (Creative Commons)

We?ve all seen the statistics and the stories by now: Interracial and interethnic relationships and families are on the rise, the product of an increasingly multicultural United States.

A Pew Research Center report last February charted?a growing number of ?interracial marriages, with the?share of new marriages between spouses of different races or ethnicities having gone up to 15.1 % in 2010. The overall share of existing interracial or inter-ethnic marriages stands at 8.4 percent, an all-time high. This is far cry from 1980, when only three percent of all marriages and less than seven percent of new ones involved partners of different racial or ethnic groups.

In Los Angeles, mixed ethnicity couples are pretty much the norm; in the West overall, one in five newlyweds (22 percent) married someone of a different race or ethnicity between 2008 and 2010, far above the norm in other regions.

But what is this like in practice, behind closed doors as couples from different ethnic and racial backgrounds navigate the daily challenges of life and family? Even in the most idyllic of pairings in this most polyglot of cities, as years go by, cultural differences are bound to crop up, whether these involve child rearing, in-laws, religion, or the different ways in which we communicate.

On Thursday, May 31, I?ll be moderating a community forum at KPCC in which four racially and ethnically blended couples will share their own experiences,?and which will most likely include a bit of sharing ( and venting, perhaps) from couples in the audience, too.

Admission to the event at KPCC?s Crawford Family Forum is free, but an RSVP is required. Sign up here.

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