Loving Day at 58 (Kinda…)

June 12 is a special day. I’d guess most of my Facebook Friends are aware of Loving Day. Doesn’t take much to understand why. J.D. Vance might understand better than many of you. Same with Clarence Thomas. Also Barack Obama and yours truly (along with my enormous extended family). Actually, the list is virtually endless the world over even though most people don’t realize it.

But, a question: Have you found information on what this date is about in your local paper or any of your regular news sources? And how much detail did you get?

Mildred and Richard Loving were married in 1958 (the same year I was born). They had to leave their state of Virginia where mixed race marriages were illegal (anti-miscegenation as defined by Virginia’s “Racial Integrity Act”). They married in Washington, D.C. but were arrested in their bedroom a few weeks after returning home to Virginia. The court eventually allowed them to leave Virginia as long as they did not return for 25 years. The Lovings moved to D.C., but appealed the court’s decision. The same judge in 1965 refused to alter the original decision. He wrote (I’m pulling this from a 2006 Washington Post article):

“Almighty God created the races, white, black, yellow, Malay, and red and placed them on separate continents, and but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend the races to mix.”

Washington Post,June13, 2006

As a bi-racial person, and someone adopted by Irish and Anglo American parents, I’ve considered the whole anti-miscegenation phenomenon pretty hilarious my entire conscious life. It shouldn’t matter at all how biologies mix. I suppose it could have pissed me off and made me feel indignant. It never really has, though. I’ve just always found it funny–funny in both a ridiculous way, but also funny in that Monty Python absurd, proof that human beings can be so simple-minded and slothful at the same time way. This goes back as far as my little brain remembers: you can either scream hysterically and cower in a corner, get mad and break things, or chuckle knowingly, then get on with creating a better world. I have always chose that last option.

In fact (and of course) mixed race marriage doesn’t matter one whit, nor does (as in my initial case) mixed race “coupling.” What matters is how much people want to live together and how they plan to create love and a family, what kind of people their children become, and how they will all contribute to the future of this still amazing golden country.

There’s much more to this issue, of course. There’s so much more that always goes into the question of how we are conceived and what happens to the conceivers once they have concepted, and the wonder that is the conceived themselves.

I’ve pointed this out before, but it’s pretty astoundingly illustrated in the map that is the key image for this post. While we always say that mixed race marriages became legal on June 12, 1967 because that’s when the Supreme Court stepped up with their decision, it took a number of states many more decades to wipe so-called anti-miscegination laws from their books. I won’t name those states today. However, I encourage readers to look at the map posted with this essay and note what they will. I hope as well that readers draw some inferences about where we are as a country these days. Racism, let me conclude, is really still quite prominent in this land of plenty. In fact, it’s metastasized dramatically into what I think of as Racism 2.0. It’s all still funny, though. Right? I mean, who knew that people unworthy of passing 7th grade biology could be so desperately anti-American, hypocritically “Christian,” and unnecessarily venal, petty and/or cruel?