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As the number of interracial relationships has increased over the years, so has their acceptance. But the understanding has been slow to follow.
By MARGO HAMMOND
© St. Petersburg Times, published May 14, 2000
When television's popular Ally McBeal fell for Greg, a black doctor, I eagerly tuned in. When the brooding Dr. Peter Benton got involved with Dr. Elizabeth Corday, a white surgeon, I became an E.R. regular. And now that West Wing is featuring a budding romance between the President's young daughter and a black White House aide, I never miss an episode.
As half of an interracial couple, I am perhaps more sensitive than most in tracking how cross-racial romances are portrayed in popular culture. Just how far have we come since television allowed what is generally reported as its first interracial kiss between Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura on Star Trek (apparently acceptable back then because they were under the influence of aliens)?
There are a number of signs that attitudes toward interracial couples have undergone a sea of change in America. Take the recent brouhaha over George W. Bush's appearance at Bob Jones University during the South Carolina primary. Most people seemed to take it as a given that an institution banning interracial dating should be taken to task for that policy (a policy that school officials adopted in the 1950s after an Asian family threatened to sue when their son almost married a white fellow student). Even more remarkably, Bob Jones University itself eventually felt pressured by the public outrage to lift its ban.
In the not so distant past, the majority of Americans would have been right there with Bob Jones in opposing the mixing of races. When the U.S. Supreme Court in Loving vs. Virginia in 1967 finally struck down laws against interracial marriage, 16 states still considered such marriages a crime. In Mississippi, miscegenation once carried a life sentence. In Florida, the standard sentence for crossing the color line in marriage was 10 years of prison.
In fact, it was only in June 1999, less than a year before Bush's election stop at that Christian university in Greenville, that South Carolina formally legalized interracial marriages, abolishing a state ban that had not been enforced for decades. That ban is still on the books in Alabama, although the 1967 Supreme Court ruling renders it unconstitutional.
According to a survey of racial attitudes conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, in 1998 12 percent of white Americans still said they believed that marriage between blacks and whites should be illegal. In 1990, 65 percent of non-blacks surveyed had said they would object to a close relative marrying a black person; in 1998 that figure dropped to 40.5 percent.
Traditionally, blacks have been more tolerant of interracial marriages than whites (in the 1998 survey only 3.4 percent thought they should be illegal), but recently many interracial couples have reported more objections to their union from black relatives than whites. Complaining about a lack of serious black-on-black romances on television, Eriq LaSalle, the actor who plays Dr. Benton on E.R., asked the writers to drop his character's liaison with the English surgeon. Benton's new love interest on the show is now a very light-skinned black woman.
Yet despite lingering objections on both sides of the color line, interracial unions are more numerous than ever. The 1990 U.S. census reported an increase of 550 percent between 1960 and 1990, from 150,000 to more than 1.1 million, a figure that is expected to rise in the 2000 census. And that doesn't include the 1.2-million marriages pairing Hispanics and other groups or all the unmarried mixed couples who may be deciding against a legal union out of deference to objecting relatives.
The fastest growing unions have been between black and white, which have grown fourfold since 1970. These are the cross-racial unions most often represented in popular culture, but not exclusively.
Last fall PBS aired a 10-hour documentary, An American Love Story, based on 18 months of filming inside the home of an interracial family: Bill Sims, a black man, Karen Wilson, a white woman, and their two children, Cicily and Chaney. Earlier this year Snow Falling on Cedars, David Guterson's haunting novel about the thwarted love affair of a Japanese-American girl and a Swedish-American boy, was released as a movie. And currently on Broadway, which has a long tradition of interracial themes involving Asian/White couples (from South Pacific to Miss Saigon), Elton John and Tim Rice's version of Aida retells the doomed love story of a Nubian princess and an Egyptian noble made popular by Verdi.
This spring Black/White relationships are at the core of several novels, including Stanley Crouch's first foray into fiction, Don't the Moon Look Lonesome: A Novel in Blues and Swing; Jeffrey Lent's debut, In the Fall (See review on Page 5), and Rosellen Brown's Half a Heart. In Philip Roth's The Human Stain, offering an odd twist on an interracial union, the wife of the main protagonist, Coleman Silk, is unaware that she is in one: Her husband has passed for white. In Zadie Smith's London-based White Teeth (see review on Page 5), the characters are not only interracial but multi-national as well: "Children with first and last names on a direct collision course."
We've come a long way since 1967 when Spencer Tracy was hailed as a hero for finally welcoming into his family a drop-dead gorgeous man with a zillion Ph.Ds in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.
Or have we?
Unfortunately, most depictions of interracial love don't have the same ring of truth as Smith's nuanced portrait of multi-hued and multi-cultural lovers. In fact, only on rare occasions do novelists or filmmakers get it right. A few -- John Updike in his novel Brazil and Spike Lee in his film Jungle Fever -- simply drag out the tired cliches of eroticism and steamy sex. Most serious works with interracial themes, however, tend to fall into two extreme categories: Either they are veiled political treatises in which the characters in love are not people at all but walking social statements, or they unrealistically have the couple ignore race altogether in a misplaced attempt at colorblindness.
Stanley Crouch's debut novel falls into the former category, as does Rosellen Brown's story of a Jewish mother who tracks down her bi-racial daughter after an 18-year absence. In both cases, the conversations between people from opposite sides of the racial divide too often sound stilted and pre-programmed for effect rather than imbued with the give-and-take messiness of real life. "So what can you tell me about black life in this wonderful country?" the biracial daughter asks a white date in Half a Heart.
Crouch, a provocative essayist and journalist, is equally ham-handed throughout much of his long-winded novel, which traces the love life of a white jazz singer who is currently living with a black saxophonist. But to Crouch's credit, he offers up a protagonist who has had such a wide variety of experiences across the color line that generalizations about race become impossible. Crouch's execution is flawed, but his theme is right on target. "Ethnicity," he writes, "was the endless riddle because every group had so, so many versions of itself, from the bottom to the top, from the top to the bottom. When someone said, "I'm a ...' it didn't mean anything of particular substance until you got to know the person."
Television and film often go to the other extreme, soft-pedaling the race factor when presenting interracial couples, an idealistic approach that can distort how we know the real world actually operates. Would a white father, even if he were president of the United States, really tell the young black aide who wants to date his daughter that he's not fretting because the aide is black but because he's, well, a guy, and you know how guys are? That may make for a touching scene on West Wing but it's not likely ever to occur quite that simply in real life.
Not that every white father would respond in a racist way, but why didn't the show, which has been so straightforward about so many other sensitive issues, at least raise some of the obvious and valid concerns people have with interracial unions? For example, what of the father's worry about the safety of his daughter from racists, the complexities of raising mixed children or even how the stigma such unions still can carry could affect the family's social (and in the case of a president, political) standing?
Not everyone has Zadie Smith's abundant writing skills in presenting people of different races as people while still acknowledging the power of racial identity and prejudice. But Smith's talent is perhaps no accident: She herself is a product of an interracial union: Her mother is Jamaican, her father English.
To be fair, portraying the realities of race is tricky. People are confused -- if not downright weird -- about it. I give any writer a certain amount of credit for mustering up the courage to venture into such hostile territory. It is much easier to ignore the subject, as most of us have done for so long. But even more nerve is required to get it right. First and foremost an interracial union is made up of two people, not two races, interacting. My husband and I are not colorblind, but we are not representatives of our races either. We're just two more flawed people trying to get along, and race is one of the many differences we face.
Perhaps as writers become as familiar as Smith with people of different backgrounds, their images of interracial couples in films, on television and in books finally will take into better account the many shades of difference -- racial and otherwise -- that some of us experience from the inside.