Mixed race

I'm sticking with the race theme, at least as long as the media do. Over the weekend I read Loving v. Virginia, a 1967 Supreme Court case that struck down a Virginia anti-miscegenation statute. A white man and a black woman from Virginia went to Washington D.C. to get married, and when they came back to Virginia they were arrested on criminal charges, simply because they were of different races. This was only 40 years ago! What's especially appalling about the law is that black people were still allowed to marry Asians, or any other ethnicity — only whites could not enter interracial marriages. The idea was to protect white supremacy. The Supreme Court decision was the death knell for anti-miscegenation statutes across the country. According to this NY Times story below, today there are 3.1 million couples in America who identify their marriages as interracial ones, or 6 percent of all U.S. marriages. The 2000 census was the first time that Americans were allowed to identify themselves as having more than one race.

Here's a great piece from the NY Times this morning, on the difficulties of growing up in America with a mixed-race heritage. (Any story that mentions Tiger Woods and Barack Obama has to be cool.) Also, watch the video, of an interracial student group at Rutgers University called "Fusion."