Fifty years ago next week, on June 12, 1967, Mildred and Richard Loving won their landmark Supreme Court case, Loving v. Virginia, ending state bans on interracial marriage. Mildred was a homemaker of indigenous and black heritage, cast as a Negro by Jim Crow. Richard was a white brick mason who drag-raced cars with similarly mixed-race friends. They lived in Central Point, a rural hamlet with a history of racial mixing that began in the colonial era, and they were considered felons under Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924.
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After Loving was decided, politicians dog-whistled for five decades. Divide-and-conquer tactics like union-busting and gerrymandering destroyed the possibility of class unity among struggling people. In its absence, culturally dexterous people may be our only hope for disrupting hoary race scripts. I believe that growing interracial intimacy, combined with immigration and demographic and generational change, will contribute to the rise of this group.
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