Although Loving has forever changed the lives of interracial
couples by allowing them to legally marry in every state, it has not led
society to embrace all multiracial couples and families. More than forty
years after Loving, 95 percent of all individuals marry a
person of the same race. Additionally, interracial couples continue to face
both physical and verbal threats to their existence, and they also continue
to be largely invisible from the media, textbooks, and other types of
communications.
In other words, more than forty years since the Supreme Court decided
Loving, we, a black woman and a white man who are
married and reside with our three biracial children in Iowa, continue to
live the legacy of Loving’s named plaintiffs,
Mildred and Richard. Although we benefit from the Lovings’ courage
and courtroom victory through a range of legal privileges and protections
that stem from the Supreme Court’s recognition of their fundamental
right to marry regardless of race, we also endure the legacy of their social
lives. Even after the historic decision, the Lovings’ lives were
affected by both conscious discriminatory attitudes and unconscious
biases.
Today, society and law continue to work together to frame the normative ideal
of intimate couples and families as not just monoracial but also
heterosexual. In this chapter, however, we focus solely on the issue of race
and the privilege of monoraciality among intimate couples and do not address
the privilege of heterosexuality among couples, which is readily evident
within our society. As our primary focus, we analyze contemporary challenges
that interracial couples, particularly blackwhite couples, may face in the
public eye. First, we identify and explicate both the social and legal ways
in which interraciality may affect and alter the treatment and recognition
of multiracial, heterosexual couples and their families. Thereafter, we
utilize housing discrimination law as one example of the way in which law
can render multiracial couples and families invisible and thus fail to
address fully the harms to such groups.