Fete Lifestyle Magazine September 2016 Family Issue | Page 41

Look at my face. I am a multicultural woman. My mother is Caucasian and my father was African American. I was born in 1970, just 3 years after the landmark Supreme Court decision to legalize interracial marriage. In Loving v. Virginia, the US Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional a law that made it a felony for a white person to intermarry with a black person and the other way around. The 1967 decision held that a law, in this case a Virginia statute, restricting the freedom to marry solely on the basis of race violated the central meaning of the 14th Amendment (the Equal Protection Clause).

Back in the day, my mother and father would have been either (i) jailed, (ii) exiled, (iii) fined, or (iv) even murdered, for marrying, sleeping together, and having … multicultural little ME. Why? Because race mixing or, miscegenation, was considered an egregious offense. A little history for you - Miscegenation is the marriage or cohabitation of different races, including sexual relations, especially resulting in mixed blood offspring. And until the Loving case, it was still a crime in 16 states.

The first such anti miscegenation law was a British colonial law enacted in Maryland in 1664. If you were a free white woman that married or had relations with a Negro slave, you became a slave as well, as did your children. Further laws tacked on exile and fines as punishment, added white men to the list, and Native Americans were included in the “colored” label.

"Be it enacted ... that ... whatsoever English or other white man or woman being free, shall intermarry with a negro, mulatto or Indian man or woman bond or free shall within three months after such marriage be banished and removed from this dominion forever …”