Loving v. Virginia

Today marks the fiftieth anniversary of Loving vs. Virginia, the civil rights ruling that made it illegal to ban interracial marriages in the United States. June 1967, not so long ago in pop-cultural history. We were sending troops to Vietnam; watching Muhammed Ali, a conscientious objector, get barred from boxing for refusing military service. We witnessed the fiery disaster of Apollo 1. Watched Sydney Poitier star in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. If you were Nigerian like my family, depending on your politics, you were cheering or wringing your hands as the first Nigerian troops invaded Biafra.

Loving vs. Virginia was jumping aboard the progress-boat of the 1960s, showing the world that the United States was ready to strike down the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which rested on the notion of white racial purity.

Fifty years later, where has Loving vs. Virginia left us? This Pew Research Report found that interracial marriages accounted for 17 percent of all U.S. marriages in 2015. That's a 14 percent increase since 1967.

Surely more people are allowing themselves to be motivated by love, rather than fear, in choosing their marriage partners. But most of us are still entering partnerships with people who are physically and culturally familiar to us.

How can we be sure that our romantic preferences, especially those related to skin-color and ethnicity, are not simply results of social conditioning? After all, we relate most to people with whom we can empathize, people who are similar to the people we've known all our lives.

In what ways might decades of housing discrimination and social segregation be limiting our romantic possibilities?

Video Addendum: includes words from one of my favorite professors from grad school, Errol McDonald. To view, click the screenshot below.