Happy Loving Day

Photo credit: by Fazy on Flickr with thanks to BizyLizy for finding it first

Today is Loving Day. Forty one years ago today, in the case of Loving v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court passed down a unanimous decision legalizing interracial marriage. A little over thirty years after that decision, a black man and a white woman who had been born around that time, married. Who were those two people? I won't leave you stewing in suspense: Mark and I were that couple, just one of many.

When Mark and I started dating, my mother said, "But you won't marry him, will you?" And when he did ask me to marry him, and I called my parents, my face aching from smiling, to tell them I was going to be marrying my best friend, the love of my life, my father said, "You know, I'm not happy about this." My mother cried without saying a word, and I wasn't sure what part was happiness and what sorrow.

Mark was intelligent, well-educated and personable, not to mention crazy about me. He treated me like the princess my parents saw me as. But he was black. And they were afraid for me.

I was born in the 60's, born into the craziness and turmoil of the civil rights movement. It was frightening upheaval that my parents had witnessed but that I had never known. I know they were thinking, "Will people be throwing bricks through our baby girl's window or burning crosses on her lawn, if she can even buy a house? Will people shun her children, who won't fit into the black community or the white?"

I credit two things with my parents' acceptance of my marriage: a lengthy engagement that gave them time to see how well Mark and I worked as a couple and the arrival in major league baseball of New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter. The product of an interracial marriage, Jeter joined what had been a struggling team. Good natured and wildly talented, he became an instant star, and his arrival marked a new era of Yankee dominance. He was living proof that biracial children could more than fit in, they could be heroes on your favorite team.

Of course, I worried too: about feeling safe, about being accepted, and about raising children. The funny thing is that I worried about entirely the wrong things: sex addiction and autism have played a much larger role in our marriage, our child rearing and our relationship with society than skin color. That's why (in spite of what I thought would be the case when I started this blog) I haven't written about race much at all. Mark and I and our children have encountered much more love and acceptance as an interracial couple than we ever have discrimination or hostility. And just forty one years after our ability to marry was legalized, that says something beautiful about our society's capacity for acceptance and understanding.

So, on Loving Day, I celebrate my marriage to the man who is still my best friend and the love of my life. I celebrate our human capacity for change. And I salute the Supreme Court justices who gave me the chance to be here today, in a loving, growing marriage to a man of another race with two beautiful biracial children: Here's to you Chief Justice Earl Warren, Justice Hugo Black, Justice William O. Douglas, Justice Tom C. Clark, Justice John Marshall Harlan II, Justice William J. Brennan Jr., Justice Potter Stewart, Justice Byron White, and Justice Abe Fortas! You made today, and every day, possible for my family.