Reverendly Yours - Rev. Tom Goldsmith
A powerful film called “Loving” was released November 4th and I finally got a chance to see it last weekend. The story traces the struggle to legalize interracial marriage. Richard Loving (a white man) and his wife Mildred (a black woman) were married in 1958 in Washington, D.C. Since they lived in Virginia they anticipated correctly that there would be fewer obstacles to legalizing their marriage if performed in the nation’s capital, but they were shortsighted in anticipating the wrath heaped upon them by law enforcement once they returned home. Contacted by the ACLU after Mildred wrote a personal letter to Attorney General Robert Kennedy asking for their civil rights to be restored, The Supreme Court finally took the case in 1967 (Loving v. Virginia), and ended the anti-miscegenation statute, which would apply throughout the whole country.
With some incredulity I took note of this being (from my perspective) recent history. Recent enough to make me realize following Trump’s victory, that despite newly imposed laws that uphold the civil rights of a diverse America, people’s view of race outside metropolitan areas, remains just as ugly as what the Lovings experienced in rural white America 50 years ago. The slogan pertaining to make America great again sends chills down my spine. I would guess that America was “great” when laws sanctioning white supremacy were congruent with how white America was feeling emotionally about such issues. Today, just a few weeks shy of a Trump inauguration, we worry (legitimately) about the repeal of civil rights laws, especially with a conservative Supreme Court carefully designed to enforce white identity over and against a multicultural society.
Four years ago I walked into a court in Virginia and performed the wedding of my daughter to her husband, a Muslim whom she met while working in Bangladesh. He’s a very witty guy, who knows The Godfather by heart and can run through Italian accents better than Al Pacino. You would hardly expect such a performance from a Bangladeshi, but what is one supposed to expect? Once we transcend stereotypical profiles of people from all races and ethnicities, it’s a beautiful world.
After my daughter encountered too many ISIS operatives in her work, the two of them quickly abandoned Bangladesh and settled in Chicago a few months ago. You would think all would be fine now: Happy ending/new beginning. But the anxiety produced by a Trump presidency has quickly dissolved any feelings of newfound security. Obtaining a Green Card, never an easy enterprise, may easily prove prohibitive when Trump takes office. All paperwork has been filed and payments made. It now feels like a race against the clock to get the bureaucracy to move swiftly enough to secure papers necessary for working and immigration before a Trump presidency will play the xenophobic card. In supporting the blue collar yearning for a white America to prevail, lives will be made unbearable for Muslims. After seeing the film, Loving, I can’t help but be concerned about old feelings against
interracial couples being revived. The raft of recent violence, given license by the bold impression that laws protecting all people were merely attempts at political correctness, signal a brutal reversal of what liberals like me had conceived as social progress. The Trump victory indicates that human relations remain as fragile as ever, and that identity politics triumphs across this land where we imagine times were better when laws kept white populations in control.
I married an interracial couple some years ago in the state of Virginia. I am concerned whether or not I could do so in the future. TRG