Two days from now the double-meaninged National Loving Day, celebrated every June 12th since 2004, will once again honor all forms of “loving beyond boundaries.” Its founder, Ken Tanabe, took his inspiration from the case of real-life interracial couple Mildred and Richard Loving, who were married in 1958 but were then arrested for breaking anti-miscegenation laws. Their story, including their legal case (culminating in the 1967 Supreme Court decision in favor of mixed-race couples being allowed to marry) was told in the 2016 movie Loving, with the main characters played by Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton.
Dana Stevens, Slate: “One thing that Loving gets right in a way that few civil rights dramas do: It insists on racial discrimination as a systemic problem, not merely an interpersonal one.”
Brian Tallerico, rogerebert.com: “When ‘Loving’ ends, one doesn’t feel like they spent time being manipulated by awards bait or melodrama. One appreciates a story well-told and having been allowed a brief, believable window into the lives of Richard and Mildred Loving, two people who changed the country just by falling in love.”
Unfortunately, what Alissa Wilkinson, Vox, wrote almost a decade ago is still relevant: “Loving’s biggest accomplishment may be eschewing too much of a rah-rah-we-won attitude after the case is decided in the Lovings’ favor, which serves to underline how little has changed. In one scene, Richard sits with three black friends, one of whom tells him the truth: Before, even though Richard was as poor as his black friends, he was still a white man. But now he knows what it is like to be black — to be constantly under suspicion, watching over his shoulder for law enforcement, jumping at the possibility that someone’s coming for him.”
Wilkinson’s conclusion: “That thread is drawn subtly throughout Loving, but it’s the most political and probably the most relevant statement the film could make. So much has changed. So much is different. But real freedom, Loving suggests, is still out there on the horizon. And things only change through ordinary people.”
See the Loving trailer below:
As pointed out by Zeba Blay, The Huffington Post, we need to remember, moreover, that this issue is not just about black and white (or straight).
So much of the discourse surrounding interracial relationships seems to center on black and white couplings. These are the images we see most in the media — cis white men with black women, or cis black men with white women. But we should bear in mind that there are all kinds of couplings in the interracial dating world that aren’t acknowledged nearly as much, and that interracial can mean a black woman with an Asian man. Sometimes, interracial couples may not even ‘look’ like interracial couples — some multiracial people can read as ‘racially ambiguous,’ or be mistaken for a certain race or ethnicity that they don’t identify with. All these kinds of pairings come with a wholly different context and meaning, as do interracial couplings between people who aren’t heterosexual or cis.
Brittney Melton just posted an article yesterday, “NPR readers share stories of love and adversity in honor of Loving Day,” that highlights the above fact.
