The View of Society on Interracial Marriage

The View of Society on Interracial Marriage

Just three decades ago, Thurgood Marshall was only months away from appoint-

ment to the Supreme Court when he suffered an indignity that today seems not

just outrageous but almost incomprehensible. He and his wife had found their

dream house in a Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C., but could not lawfully

live together in that state: he was black and she was Asian. Fortunately for

the Marshalls, in January 1967 the Supreme Court struck down the

anti-interracial-marriage laws in Virginia and 18 other states. And in 1967

these laws were not mere leftover scraps from an extinct era. Two years

before, at the crest of the civil-rights revolution, a Gallup poll found

that 72 per cent of Southern whites and 42 per cent of Northern whites still

wanted to ban interracial marriage.

Let's fast-forward to the present and another black-Asian couple: retired

Green Beret Lieutenant Colonel Eldrick Woods Sr. and his Thai-born wife,

Kultida. They are not hounded by the police -- just by journalists desperate

to write more adulatory articles about how well they raised their son Tiger.

The colossal popularity of young Tiger Woods and the homage paid his parents

are remarkable evidence of white Americans' change in attitude toward what

they formerly denounced as "miscegenation." In fact, Tiger's famously mixed

ancestry (besides being black and Thai, he's also Chinese, white, and

American Indian) is not merely tolerated by golf fans. More than a few seem

to envision Tiger as a shining symbol of what America could become in a

post-racial age.

Interracial marriage is growing steadily. From the 1960 to the 1990 Census,

whit...

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... gifted guys can more easily get away with

acting like Mr. Wrong.

George Orwell noted, "To see what is in front of one's nose requires a con-

stant struggle." We can no longer afford to have our public policy governed

by fashionable philosophies which insists upon ignoring the obvious. The

realities of interracial marriage, like those of professional sports, show

that diversity and integration turn out in practice to be fatal to the

reign- ing assumption of racial uniformity. The courageous individuals in

interracial marriages have moved farthest past old hostilities. Yet, they've

discovered not the featureless landscape of utter equality that was

predicted by progres- sive pundits, but a landscape rich with fascinating

racial patterns. Intellec- tuals should stop dreading the ever-increasing

evidence of human biodiversity and start delighting in it.