In the collective memory of the United States, mixed race did not exist until
1967. By giving legal recognition to interracial marriage, Loving v.
Virginia established a new context for racial possibilities in
the United States. In addition to allowing marriage across the color line,
Loving required states to give legal credence to the
existence of interracial sex and romance. In theory,
Loving, as a juridical approval of race mixing, heralds the
development of a racially nuanced and complex America. This
decriminalization shifted the legal discourse of miscegenation from illicit
to legitimate, beginning with the status of the mixed-race offspring. For
the children of Loving, legal obstacles to interracial
kinship became a thing of the past.
Praise of Loving as a transformative decision limits itself
to a post-1967 epiphanic moment that heralds the arrival of a new,
multiracial United States. Professor Jim Chen notes that
“[i]ntermarriage and its handmaiden, interbreeding, are running riot
in America.” From another angle, Deborah Ramirez declares that
“the number of biracial babies is increasing at a faster rate than
the number of monoracial babies.” Mass media express wonder at the
“biracial baby boom,” and open declarations of mixed parentage
are common, perhaps even fashionable. Novelist Danzy Senna (who is black,
white, and Jewish) proclaims that “America loves us in all our
half-caste glory.” In a combination of popular and scholarly work,
Gary Nash gloriously portends:
The invisible Berlin Wall, the racial wall, is being dismantled stone by
stone. … Today, in Hawaii, 60 percent of babies born each year
are of mixed race. In Los Angeles County, the rise in the percentage of
Japanese American women who marry out of their ethnic group has risen
from one of every ten in the 1950s to two of three today. Similar trends
pertain to other Asian American groups. Seventy percent of American
Indians tie bonds with mates who are not Indian. Even the most enduring
nightmare of Euroamerica – racial intermarriage between Black and
white partners – is no longer extraordinary. Outside the South,
more than 10 percent of all African American males today marry non-Black
women, and Black-white marriages nationwide have tripled since 1970.
Mestizo America is a happening thing. A multiracial baby boom is
occurring in America today.