"Loving Day" celebrates the historic ruling in Loving v. Virginia, which declared unconstitutional a Virginia law prohibiting mixed-race ma
Coincidentally, today is Valentine's Day in Brazil. ❤️🇧🇷
This was only 55 years ago. You can understand a lot of what’s wrong with the US if you realize that the average age of our elected senators is about 63. “Good old days” is a dogwhistle.
Our current Supreme Court might’ve ruled against the Lovings.
[Image ID: excerpts from the article linked above, reading:
“The couple is given a choice: flee or go to jail. After they were arrested, the Lovings were sentenced to a year in prison. Then, a judge offered them a choice: banishment from the state or prison. They chose to leave Virginia at the time, but after several years, the Lovings asked the American Civil Liberties Union to take their case.Bernard Cohen and Philip Hirschkop, two young ACLU lawyers at the time, did.”
and “On June 12, 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court justices ruled in the Lovings' favor. The unanimous decision upheld that distinctions drawn based on race were not constitutional. The court's decision made it clear that Virginia's anti-miscegenation law violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.” /end ID]
It was 55 years ago.
My father just had his 70th birthday.
When my parents first met it'd been less than a decade since the ruling was official.
They were convinced it'd be overturned and did not want their children to have to suffer for it, so they did not get married and searched desperately for each other in their own races. They could not find the love they had together in anyone else. They did eventually get married.
Too late for them to have the amount of children they'd desired. They had two, adopted a third, and that was that.
It was near enough to now that I, my sisters, and my parents were directly affected by it.
This isn't ancient history. It's just my parents' childhood.
As a mixed Asian person married to a mixed Black person rulings like this, along with violent backlashes against race mixing are barely recent history. Living in Texas we still run into people who actively harass us for being a mixed race couple in public (even though neither of us are white) The Loving Case and subsequent reactions to it by different states determined where my in-laws chose to settle in the US as a mixed couple. Several states kept anti-miscegenation laws on the books. and State judges in Alabama continued to enforce its anti-miscegenation statute until 1970, when the Nixon administration obtained a ruling from a U.S. District Court in United States v. Brittain.
The Watsonville riots of the 1930's where white mobs attached Filipino farmworkers for being seen in dancehalls with white women, are part of a very long history of whiteness violently asserting its need to "protect" the purity of it's women and future children. And these kinds of backlashes are not in the past, we've just moved to different battlegrounds, the same accusations, of defiling the purity of white womanhood and white childhood are now leveled at the dangerous "othering influences" through book bans and other right wing conservative censorship efforts.
According to PEN America’s Banned Book Index, 41% of banned books include LGBTQ+ themes. 40% feature characters of color and 21% address issues of race or racism.
Remember, if we don't keep standing up loudly for equality the biggots on the right will be louder and keep dragging us further backwards from every step towards equality we make.
That's why I write stories for mixed, brown, bi, folks to see ourselves and our loves reflected in.
Its important to record ourselves into literature, into history so that they can never fully erase us no matter how hard they try to stamp us out of existence.
I was in kindergarten when this happened. Star Trek was in its second season. Scooby Doo was just a few sketches in a notebook somewhere. My neighborhood was redlined. I wouldn't see a Black clerk in the mall for several years. This is the bullshit they want to go back to.
