2 weeks Ago
Interracial marriage was made legal throughout the United States in the 1967 Supreme Court decision Loving v. Virginia . Mildred Loving, a woman of color, and her white husband, Richard Loving, were sentenced to a year in prison in Virginia for having an interracial relationship.
However, the Supreme Court decided that the laws banning intermarriage were unconstitutional. (The film that depicted the case, “Loving” (2016), might fail to delve deeply on a psychological level but is without false notes and stirs one emotionally.) Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in the court opinion: “The freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the State.
” Historical opposition to intermarriage was based on religious principles; racial segregation was viewed by white Southern evangelical Christians as divinely ordained by God. Even by 1986, opinion polls saw only a third of Americans approving of intermarriage. And back in 1967 when miscegenation laws were overturned, only 3 percent of all newlyweds were married to someone of a different race or ethnicity.
Since then, intermarriage rates have steadily climbed. By 1980, the share of intermarried newlyweds had about doubled to 7 percent, and by 2015 the number had risen to 17 percent. By 2011, many Americans approved of intermarriage, according to polling.
Of course, how honest the answer that the people polled provided remains open to question. I am sure many of them hid their prejudices. Still, clear changes in interracial relationships have occurred within my lifetime.
In recent years looking at ads, streaming TV programs and new films, one can see that interracial couples and relationships have become commonplace. More than 50 years after the Supreme Court struck down laws banning interracial marriage, a growing number of ads self-consciously feature interracial couples with biracial children. There were a number of TV shows in the last decade — “Scandal,” “How to Get Away with Murder” and “Bridgerton,” among others — that often centered on black women and included a number of interracial romances.
For years, Black Americans and other minorities have been underrepresented on television, so even when it seems the new programs contrive to awkwardly promote black representation, one is glad for the gesture, and one knows it’s about time. Hopefully, more realistic and natural representation will ultimately dominate the media without the strenuous attempt to overcompensate and for the creators and executives to show how liberal they are. There are now many more Black directors and actors in the film industry, but interracial relationships have just begun to be depicted in larger numbers.
In 1967, Stanley Kramer made an Oscar-winning box-office smash, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” about an interracial marriage. The film was crammed with stars: Spencer Tracy, Katherine Hepburn and the Black superstar of the era Sidney Poitier. Poitier played a handsome, chaste and charming doctor well on his way to someday winning the Nobel prize.
In fact, he is too good a catch for the innocent, simpering daughter (Katherine Houghton) of liberal millionaire press lord Matt Drayton (Spencer Tracy) and his feisty, gallery-owning wife, Christina (Katherine Hepburn). There are difficulties that the marriage will face that are raised by both sets of parents, but they are easily overcome here by Matt’s homage to Christina and their love marriage. Obviously, it’s not a film that attempts to seriously engage with the social and psychological complexities of intermarriage — but it was a beginning.
So 50 years later, after Poitier challenged a nation’s attitudes as a Black man dining at his white fiancee’s home, movies are increasingly showing interracial couples with less emphasis on race and more on the concept of “this is whom I love.” A number of films in recent years have dealt in varied ways with interracial relationships. Some of the best of these films include Jordon Peele’s anti-racist horror work “Get Out”; romantic-horror film “Bones and All” (2022) directed by Luca Guadagnino; and Ava Duvernay’s “Origin,” a dramatization of Isabel Wilkerson’s book about a writer with a white husband who, after suffering a personal tragedy, sets herself on a global investigation of the nature of racism.
I see these films as steps in the exploration of marriages where race hopefully becomes just one dimension in the pain and pleasure of marriage and romantic relationships, never color-blind but avoiding making race the prime definition of identity. The changes in how the media handle interracial relations is an expression of what is happening in the presidential race. Kamala Harris is the first Black woman and the first South Asian American to be nominated for president by a major party.
She also has a diverse personal religious and spiritual history and is married to a reform Jew. Harris has decided to center her run on her being a traditional liberal, anti-MAGA candidate and deemphasize her identity. Let’s hope that for this presidential contest it’s the last word on the subject.
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