Forty years ago, I would have been illegal in several states

[jlh]

(Just a reminder that this icon is a chibi of me, drawn by bhanesidhe.)

Last week there was an excellent series on National Public Radio about the fortieth anniversary of the Loving decision. For those of you that haven't heard of it, in 1967 the Supreme Court ruled that a state (in this case, Virginia) could not nullify a marriage on the basis of race.

The Lovings had got married in DC in 1958, where they could be legally married, and then went back to their Virginia home town. In the middle of the night, the cops woke them up, arrested them, and charged them with violating Virginia law. Their sentence was suspended on the condition that they leave the state and not return for 25 years, so they moved back to DC. Missing their family, they decided to sue in 1963. In 1967 the Supreme Court overturns the conviction in a unanimous decision based on the Fourteenth Amendment.

The other thing that happened in 1967 was "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner." As a kid I used to watch this movie, in which a white girl presents her black fiancee to her liberal parents, and pretend that the couple were my own birth parents. (The timing is right; I was born in 1969, and I'm biracial.) The Hays Code, which delineated morality in film from the mid-thirties until the implementation of the MPAA ratings system in the 1960s, specifically prevented interracial romance that did not have an unhappy ending so as to discourage miscegenation. So "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" was the first film with an interracial couple who got their happy ending.

In their story on the decision NPR talked to an interracial couple living in the Loving's Virginia hometown now, and they talked about the verbal and physical violence that they have to deal with on a daily basis. In 1998 the law against interracial marriage in South Carolina, unenforceable since 1967 but still on the books, was struck down even though a poll found that 22% were against the removal of the law. It took Alabama until 2000 to get rid of their law. Heck, I'm in New York City and my own racial ambiguity makes people nervous all the time. So let's hear it for the Lovings and their bravery, and the bravery of all the interracial couples around us, because it still is a brave act, and remember that even certain kinds of heterosexual love are under attack from many in this country.

In fandom we have so much difficulty talking about race, perhaps because fandom is generally white, whiter even than the American and British cultures at large, and white guilt gets in the way. I don't know; I'm not white. I only know that when I talk about race, I don't get many comments, or the sense that many of you are listening. Given our ability to rally around issues of sexual orientation, I find that to be both sad and frustrating. If I felt that my lone voice in the wilderness was really making a difference—if I thought that even one person would link to this, or stop and think about how far we as a culture have and have not come around issues of miscegenation, which is so much at the very heart of what racism means—I'd be happy to make more race posts. I'd like to say that this isn't begging for comments, but to be honest, it is. On the one hand, it's upsetting to feel only five people care about these matters, and on the other hand, it's upsetting to post about them and confirm that only five people care.

Comments

[a-hollow-year.livejournal.com]

I listen, but I don't comment because I'm a dumb white girl and am so clueless about race and racial issues that anything I say is going to be from such a position of privilege as to be useless and embarrassing. Sorry.

[conob.livejournal.com]

I find it useful to consider sometimes that not all white people in the U.S. are in the same position. Certainly, not all of them are equally privileged re: race! And it's possible for a white person in the U.S. to experience racial discrimination; it just happens less on average, and for some reason it's even harder to talk about sensibly. (People start edging into comments that sound more like a how to suppress (http://coffeeandink.livejournal.com/607897.html) index than an actual discussion.)

[jlh.livejournal.com]

I think that if you pay enough attention to know that Hitchens is a racist, and why, then you are very much not clueless, and certainly much less clueless than a lot of people, and have a lot of worthwhile things to say already. And also, commenting about the position of privilege is also useful in order to breakdown the categories—as conob says, there isn't just white privilege and all white privilege is not alike. In order to break down race as a category it helps to say that all white folks aren't alike, either.

But thanks for commenting! I really appreciate it!