It was over a decade before that decision one of my uncles courted and married my aunt, a white woman. It was a dangerous thing to have done and it nearly cost them both their lives in Pennsylvania. - Gregory
Three decades later one of my brothers introduced a white fiance to the family. It sent ripples throughout our relationships, and for months every emotion, and issue related to the subject was brought up and flipped into diverse postures within the nucleus of our family dynamic. It was grueling at times, and at all times uncomfortable. The idea and the fact of a person of color marrying a white person is full of great angst and questions unanswered. It deserved the scrutiny in our family. My father said, "We are too close to slavery times to take this lightly..."
The family eventually attended their wedding, and the marriage has produced deep kinship, three children, a tight bond with our sister-in-law, and an enhanced legacy for two families that would have never come together under any other circumstances.
Reconciliation is work. It isn't a glib announcement, or a frivolous toss of the head against convention. Marrying a white person is a deep subject. It challenges notions of nobility, assumptions of supremacy; it measures guilt, lists histories, remembers slavery, deceit, resurrects fears, and places love into a light of scrutiny. The act exposes a couple to dangers that require a great deal of the entire family, and demands of all to re-evaluate what love is and isn't.
Anything less is disrespectful.
- Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories 2.24.13
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| "Mildred & Richard Loving - Loving v. Virginia, (1967), was a landmark civil rights case in which the United States Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, declared Virginia's anti-miscegenation statute, the "Racial Integrity Act of 1924", unconstitutional, thereby overturning Pace v. Alabama (1883) and ending all race-based legal restrictions on marriage in the United States." - I Love Ancestry |
Three decades later one of my brothers introduced a white fiance to the family. It sent ripples throughout our relationships, and for months every emotion, and issue related to the subject was brought up and flipped into diverse postures within the nucleus of our family dynamic. It was grueling at times, and at all times uncomfortable. The idea and the fact of a person of color marrying a white person is full of great angst and questions unanswered. It deserved the scrutiny in our family. My father said, "We are too close to slavery times to take this lightly..."
The family eventually attended their wedding, and the marriage has produced deep kinship, three children, a tight bond with our sister-in-law, and an enhanced legacy for two families that would have never come together under any other circumstances.
Reconciliation is work. It isn't a glib announcement, or a frivolous toss of the head against convention. Marrying a white person is a deep subject. It challenges notions of nobility, assumptions of supremacy; it measures guilt, lists histories, remembers slavery, deceit, resurrects fears, and places love into a light of scrutiny. The act exposes a couple to dangers that require a great deal of the entire family, and demands of all to re-evaluate what love is and isn't.
Anything less is disrespectful.
- Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories 2.24.13
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