Interracial Intimacies
Categories: In the News , Staff Picks
Mildred Loving doesn’t give a lot of interviews anymore. She doesn’t see herself as that spectacular. She sees herself as just a girl who fell in love with boy and they got married. But at the time their marriage was against the law in many states, especially her home state of Virginia.
On June 12, 1967 the Supreme Court struck down anti-miscegenation laws and made it legal for interracial couples to marry. To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Loving case a few cities across the country are having Loving Day parties.
Randall Kennedy’s book Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity and Adoption examines the long history of race relations in the United States. The book’s introduction opens with the story of Jacqueline Henley, a young New Orleans orphan whose aunt relinquishes custody because neighbors suspected Jacqueline was black.
But then Henley couldn’t be adopted by her African American foster parents because her birth certificate designated her as white.
The 500+ pages then proceed to look at the interrelations of blacks and whites during slavery, the enforcement of anti-miscegenation laws, the racial identity of biracial/multiracial people and transracial adoptions. The book is filled with footnotes (sometimes taking up half the page) that are interesting and help to give historical context to many stories.
With high profile figures like Halle Berry, Keanu Reeves and Senator Barack Obama one might think that interracial marriages are more prevalent but they only comprise 7% of married couples. In a mono-racial relationship himself, Kennedy urges Americans to “eschew state-supported racial separatism in its various manifestations, I also urge that we all embrace a positive ideal: a cosmopolitan ethos that welcomes the prospect of genuine, loving interracial intimacy.” (pg 35)
Similar titles on interracial couples/history:
Tell the Court I Love My Wife: Race, Marriage, and Law by Peter Wallenstein
Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Postwar America by Renee Christine Romano
Mixing Race, Mixing Culture: Inter-American Literary Dialogues
Love in Black and White: A Memoir of Race, Religion and Romance by William S. Cohen with Janet Langhart Cohen
