Loving, Not Loved
Now that the 2017 Oscar season has officially drawn to a close, I want to go back to one of its contenders, "Loving". Based on the true story of Richard and Mildred Loving, it is about an inter-racial couple arrested for violating Virginia’s anti-miscegenation laws. While I had known about the 1967 Loving v. State of Virginia Supreme Court decision vaguely, I had never really paused to reflect on the full import of this historic civil rights case in the context of both American history, AND America’s present. Early in the movie, the newlywed couple—played by a beleaguered Joel Edgerton, but a buoyant though subdued Ruth Negga--is barged in upon by a local sheriff who lets himself in the Loving home in the middle of the night without a search warrant and completely unannounced. (Some people might call the sheriff’s actions breaking and entering…they’d be correct). The belligerent policeman has the unfettered audacity to invade the intimacy of the young couple’s bedroom, shining a government-issued high-beam flashlight directly into the eyes of these poor young people still abed, indicting them for breaking the law…BY BEING MARRIED. And yes he does haul them off to the local jail in the middle of the night, whilst the bride is in her third trimester of pregnancy. The crime? They acted on the brilliant stroke of genius—sometimes referred to as love— driving 90 miles to D.C. to get themselves hitched.
That’s right married; they weren’t masterminding a human trafficking ring or plotting to extend a potentially toxic oil pipeline through sacred Native lands. They merely exercised a basic civil right as two consenting adults which they naturally assumed applied to them… to wed…to have and to hold, till death they do part. Yet their local and state governments, which had already received sweat equity from the two of them, she as a sharecropper and he as a construction worker, and perhaps even their income tax dollars, criminalized them for living [un]lawfully precisely because they were lawfully wedded. Let’s pause for a moment: we are talking about the law, the blindfolded scales of justice, and one man’s desire to commit to one woman, and vice versa, for the rest of each party’s natural life. How could two such enduring institutions--1) marriage between two consenting, otherwise unmarried adults, and 2) the law (presumably created by a body whose members regularly engage in and practice the former)--be at odds? Pondering this question helps clarify the actual role of law in this country: to govern, control; not to mete out justice.
Naively, I had always understood the law to be society’s framework for fostering and maintaining rightness, uprightness and order. I think the collective American citizenry is acculturated to see the law in a similar, simplistic light; the law protects the good guy from the bad guy. But as anti-miscegenation ordinances and many other laws (along with how they are enforced) bear out, laws are frequently (over the breadth of history, almost always?) drafted and deployed for no other reason than to prey upon and exploit exposed and underprotected human beings. People who are exposed and underprotected precisely because they are inadequately represented in the legislative bodies which come up with these laws in the first place. This country has a highly supported, highly sophisticated, highly skilled, and highly subsidized army of local law enforcement agents whose purpose is to rob citizens of their basic human and civil rights, using the law as its principal weapon.
Let us return to the Lovings. What is most galling about their case—the fact that these two particular human beings’ personal privacy was entirely and unconscionably invaded by the brutal imposition of law—is that at that time there were countless products of miscegenation all around: the state of Virginia was rife with light-skinned Negroes sired by white fathers. None of these fathers were indicted for their crime of miscegenation, though they were the principal offenders. Their ‘high-yaller’ Nigra offpsring had no formalized claims to any of their father’s assets, or social position. In this context, the point of anti-miscegenation laws was to grant white men the free opportunity to prey on Black women and other women of color, conceive with them, then abandon mother and child, consigning the latter to poverty and pariah status. This is the very HEIGHT of social and moral irresponsibility. Chief Justice Earl Warren asserted in his 1967 decision (10 years after the Lovings were legally expelled from the state of Virginia):
"There is patently no legitimate overriding purpose independent of invidious racial discrimination which justifies [making the color of a person’s skin the test of whether his conduct is a criminal offense]. The fact that Virginia prohibits only interracial marriages involving white persons demonstrates that the racial classifications must stand on their own justification, as measures designed to maintain White Supremacy."
White Supremacy?? It would appear the Chief Justice misspelled D-E-P-R-A-V-I-T-Y.