A Black & White Issue

Exogamy, miscegenation, interracial marriage… all saying about the same thing, all being dramatic issues in many nations around the earth and until recently, even illegal in some states in the U.S. as well. In the United States, it took a Supreme Court decision – Loving vs. Virginia – to declare that all such laws banning interracial marriage were unconstitutional; the case was a part of our recent past… it was decided in 1967. Mildred Delores Jeter (ethnically native American and African) and Richard Perry Loving (of European extraction) left their home state of Virginia, where the local “Racial Integrity Act” banned their expected marriage; they took off to neighboring Washington, D.C. to get married in 1958.

Wikipedia tells us what happened next: “Upon their return to Caroline County, Virginia, they were charged with violation of the ban. They were caught sleeping in their bed by a group of police officers who had invaded their home in the hopes of finding them in the act of sex (another crime). In their defense, Mrs. Loving had pointed to a marriage certificate on the wall in their bedroom; rather than defending them, it became the evidence the police needed for a criminal charge, because it proved they had been married in another state. Specifically, they were charged under Section 20-58 of the Virginia Code, which prohibited interracial couples from being married out of state and then returning to Virginia, and Sect ion 20-59, which classified ‘miscegenation’ as a felony, punishable by a prison sentence of between one and five years. On January 6, 1959, the Lovings pleaded guilty and were sentenced to one year in prison, with the sentence suspended for 25 years on condition that the couple leave the state of Virginia.”

Forty-four years later, at least according to U.S. Census data, the South seems to be a far cry from the cross-burning days of the Ku Klux Klan – an organization that lingers still in the shadows of our contemporary world. You might not expect it, but, for example, Mississippi is one of those states with the highest number of black and white marriages, where census data shows an increase of 70% of such Mississippi unions between 2000 and 2010. The first wave of census data reveals the depth of this growing trend: “In the first comprehensive accounting of multiracial Americans since statistics were first collected about them in 2000, reporting from the 2010 census, made public in recent days, shows that the nation’s mixed-race population is growing far more quickly than many demographers had estimated, particularly in the South and parts of the Midwest. That conclusion is based on the bureau’s analysis of 42 states; the data from the remaining eight states [is about to be issued].

“In North Carolina, the mixed-race population doubled. In Georgia, it expanded by more than 80 percent, and by nearly as much in Kentucky and Tennessee. In Indiana, Iowa and South Dakota, the multiracial population increased by about 70 percent.” New York Times, March 19^th. In some states – like California, Oklahoma and Hawaii where interracial marriages have been accepted for a much longer time – the increases weren’t particularly startling, but the sheer numbers of such marriages remained significant. The mix in Hawaii – 23% of marriages are “mixed” (the highest in the country) – primarily involves Pacific Islanders or Asians as opposed to African-Americans, and the combination in Oklahoma emphasizes Native Americans; Mississippi, however, is the kind of black and white union that would have invited a Klan attack not so long ago.

The civil rights struggles of the 50s and 60s, focused heavily in the traditionally southern states, seems to have yielded the most radical and positive results. It’s no longer an impossible dream for racially mixed couples to live and thrive in the South: “‘Racial attitudes are changing,’ said Marvin King, a professor of political science at the University of Mississippi who is black, married to a white woman, and the father of a 2-year-old biracial daughter. ‘Day in, day out, there is certainly not the hostility there was years ago, and I think you see that in that there are more interracial relationships, and people don’t fear those relationships. They don’t have to hide those relationships anymore.’” It does seem that as younger generations move through their lives, a message of racial tolerance is growing and becoming a more natural part of being an American. It makes a body smile.

I’m Peter Dekom, and at a moment when religious tolerance seems to be hitting a new modern low, it’s refreshing to see tolerance building in another important arena.