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Race - the good news

Tuesday, 12th June 2007

Matt Yglesias points to some cheering data on American attitudes to what the old-time segregationists used to call "race-mixing". As it happens, today is the 40th anniversary of a landmark Supreme Court decision on the subject. Somehow it seems only right that the case should have been called Loving v. Virginia:

In June 1958, Virginia residents Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter travelled to the District [of Columbia], got married and returned home. An unexceptional story but for one fact: Richard was white and Mildred black. Their marriage therefore violated Virginia's Racial Integrity Act.
The Lovings were convicted in Virginia court and sentenced to a year in jail, with the sentence suspended on the condition that they leave Virginia and not return together for 25 years. They got back sooner. On June 12, 1967... the Supreme Court struck down Virginia's ban on interracial marriages.

The article goes on to consider the obvious - and sensible - parallels with the same-sex marriage movement:

Interracial marriage bans now seem obviously invidious. But go back far enough and the consensus flips. At one point, most everyone thought such bans were legitimate. The same is true of segregated schooling and discrimination against women. It is true of just about everything the Supreme Court has held that the equal protection clause prohibits: At one point, all of these practices were seen as legitimate reflections of the world, not as invidious attempts to impose inequality. When the court held these practices unconstitutional, it was neither enforcing a rule that had existed since 1868 nor creating a new rule. It was recognizing that social attitudes had shifted, and with them the understanding about what is reasonable and what is invidious.

Of course, not everyone likes the idea of drawing comparisons between the black civil rights movement and the gay marriage campaign. La Shawn Barber makes the case for the dissenters.