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« To Those Who Knock. | Main | A Place Where Everybody Knows your Name »

October 14, 2021

Comments

Comments in 2018 publication


I'm Mexican. My wife is Greek. I want to watch this movie with my wife. Mother Teresa view says it perfectly.

Posted by: Humble Warrior | September 21, 2018 at 01:13 PM

Levi's
I suspect that for most young Americans growing up today, the concept of “miscegenation” is incomprehensible. That this epithet could have been an accepted and common part of culture and law in many U.S. states as late as 1967 might be unbelievable. Sure, we still have cases of racism, racial profiling among authorities, even hateful neo-nazi groups, and other serious issues of social justice that do not surprise people today. These were individuals or small groups. But state-sanctioned laws prohibiting intermarriage? What planet, what century, was that? Yet, that was our planet, our country…just 50 years ago. The very concept of “race” is senseless, easily disproven by science and by logic. Biologically, we are one species, period. There is race only in the historical-cultural sense, or the ethno-cultural sense. Physical or phenotypical differences exist on a spectrum a continuum that cannot be separated any more than the water of the of Gulf of Mexico can be separated from that of the Caribbean Sea. But there is no need to argue the obvious, no need to preach to the choir. That is the point. That is progress. That just 50 years after the landmark cases in the Supreme Court, we can watch a movie about the story of the Loving family and marvel at their hardships…that truly is progress.

I grew up in a cosmopolitan area on the East coast, attending a public primary school that was mostly non-white. I watched Sesame Street on television, where diversity was as natural as it was carefully planned. I didn’t even have a way to appreciate the incredible fortune of the era in which I lived, literally just a generation beyond a time when schools had been segregated, when opportunities for minorities were so very stifled. I heard stories from my parents about Martin Luther King, about Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali. I think I didn’t appreciate or understand the struggle until I read the Autobiography of Malcolm X, a book that really helped to peel back the layers of recent U.S. hist

The 14th amendment, though ratified in 1868, shortly after the Civil War and the subsequent Emancipation Proclamation, took nearly a century to achieve ratification in some states.

Would anyone today believe that California was one of the last states in 1959? It is true. The 21st century’s model of the American melting pot was, until the 1950s, a xenophobic state… strongly anti-immigrant and anti-minority, in politics and arguably among the general population, too, except in certain pockets such as San Francisco area. The story of the Lovings highlights both how far we’ve come to realize the spirit of the U.S. Constitution, but simultaneously how hard won the progress, and how recent and fragile it is.

Interestingly, the 14th amendment is deeply intertwined with the rights of women, a legal struggle that is still very much ongoing: no ERA for women was ever ratified (i.e. there is no 28th amendment per se). Even more surprisingly, it is intertwined with the resurgence of popularity of the 2nd amendment (right to bear arms), which was not much of a controversial topic until the Black Panthers challenged its reinterpretation for their own rights to self-defense and personal protection. There is a podcast that tells this story eloquently. I leave the link here: https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/sex-appeal

Posted by: Levi's | September 22, 2018 at 01:21 AM

MC

Very moving. Thanks. The need to discriminate seems to be so ingrained in our psyche.

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