海角大神

I got that question a lot after adopting my daughter. As an infant, she hadn鈥檛 fully grown into her 鈥渃olor,鈥� but she didn鈥檛 exactly look white, either. So people wondered what she was. Too often, I indulged the question, when all it deserved was the obvious answer.

鈥淲hat is she?鈥�

鈥淎 baby.鈥�

On good days, I didn鈥檛 let it bother me. On not-so-great days, I got annoyed. Here was this cute-as-can-be baby girl, and people were focused on the fact that we didn鈥檛 match.

As she grew older and her skin naturally darkened, we looked more like the African American mother-daughter pair people expected, so the questions ceased.

I flashed back on those early days when I saw the results of a recent . What was once perceived as an egregious mismatch is now widely accepted. Specifically, of the 1,007 adults across the United States polled by phone in July, 94% approve of marriages between Black people and white people. That鈥檚 up from a mere 4% in 1958, when Gallup first asked the question. In 1968, a year after the Supreme Court , 20% of Americans approved of the practice. By 1992, when my daughter was born, 48% approved.

In short, the country is catching up to what has always been true: Love bridges racial differences. That鈥檚 true among friends, parents and children, husbands and wives.