It’s not uncommon for proponents of same-sex marriage to point out how recently interracial couples were granted the right to marry.
Advocates for same-sex marriage rights often draw comparisons between their cause and the former ban on interracial marriage. People have sloganized the phrase, “Be on the right side of history,” and usually present the phrase alongside photos from the civil rights movement.
Photos from marriage equality protests have more than once shown interracial couples holding up signs reading something along the lines of, “Our love used to be illegal too.”
It’s a nice sentiment, one that implies we live in a post-racial United States and that the fight for race-based rights is over and has been replaced by the sexuality rights movement. Unfortunately, that’s only the case on paper.
Just shy of 50 years ago, the Supreme Court ruled laws that prohibit interracial couples as unconstitutional, effectively legalizing interracial marriage in 1967. However, as anyone who has followed the development of the Equal Pay Act of 1963 will know, anti-discrimination laws can’t and won’t always be enforced.
Danièle Watts, acclaimed Django Unchained actress, could verify this firsthand. On Thursday, she was handcuffed and detained after “showing affection, fully clothed,” according to what she posted to Facebook, with her husband, Brian James Lucas.
Not detained, Lucas was able to photograph the detainment. His photos depicted Watts crying in handcuffs in front of two members of the LAPD.
After Watts refused to present identification—knowing she did nothing wrong and that the cops had no right to see her ID—the cops cuffed her, so aggressively they cut her wrist in the process, and put her in the back of their car.
“As I was sitting in the back of the police car,” Watts writes, “I remembered the countless times my father came home frustrated or humiliated by the cops when he had done nothing wrong. I felt his shame, his anger, and my own feelings of frustration for existing in a world where I have allowed myself to believe that ‘authority figures’ could control my BEING.”
(I encourage everyone to read Watts’ narrative in its entirety, as it is quite a moving piece).
Evidently, the police officers saw the couple displaying affection and assumed Lucas had hired Watts as a prostitute. It’s an easy mistake for those who build their schemas of the world from racist stereotypes. The idea of a rich white guy paying for sex from the exotic woman of color (as well as similar stereotypes) is one that damages interracial couples.
We like to think we live in a post-racial United States, one that accepts diversity of race and culture, but we don’t.
A Cheerios commercial, which first aired during the 2014 Super Bowl, featuring an interracial couple generated a considerable amount of racist backlash, indicating anything but a post-racial society.
Comedian Hannibal Buress jokes about a time he thought an old man was mad because Buress and his girlfriend were buying eight cartons of apple juice only to realize the old man was actually shaking his head because Buress, a black man, had a white girlfriend.
“I was so caught up in the euphoria of having all that apple juice that for like a minute I lived in a world where racism didn’t exist,” Buress said, reflecting on the experience.
Buress jokes, but this sort of experience doesn’t seem uncommon. People still hold unwarranted prejudices against all sorts, and these prejudiced people sometimes take jobs as police officers.
As recent events such as those in Ferguson have demonstrated, the abuse of executive power frequently goes unpunished, and those abuses often (if not always) stem directly from stereotypes and prejudices.
Until we stop viewing men who date people of a different color as fetishists or see those women as an exotic sex symbol, Watts’ experience will continue to be one of many (as it’s likely the only reason we heard about this slip up is because of the actress’ fame).
No, stereotypes about interracial couples may not be among our foremost concerns when it comes to police corruption, but it is a concern. Cops’ targeting interracial couples is an act of violent oppression. It’s a form of racial profiling that must be stopped if we want so much as to believe we live in a post-racial society.