While reading about miscegenation this week I thought about how mixed race couples are portrayed in contemporary film. In particular I remembered a pivotal scene in the movie Save the Last Dance. (See here for the trailer - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xzdCd15gqE) In the movie, Julia Stiles' character (Sara) becomes romantically involved with a black man (Derek, played by Sean Patrick Thomas). In this scene, Sara accompanies Derek's sister (Chenille) to the clinic to get a doctor's appointment for her child.
Here's the transcript (because I couldn't find the youtube video):
SARA: So you agree with her? You think I don't belong with Derek.
CHENILLE: What I think don't matter. But you and him act like it don't bother people that you're together. Like it don't hurt people to see.
SARA: We like each other. What is the big fucking deal? It's him and me. Not us and other 'people.'
CHENILLE: Black people, Sara. Black women. Derek's about somethin'. He's smart. He's motivated. He's for real. He ain't gonna make no babies and not take care of 'em or run the streets, fuck up his life. He's gonna do somethin' with himself. Here you come, white so you gotta be right, and you take one of the few decent men left after jail, drugs and drive-bys. That's what Nikki meant about you up in our world.
SARA: There's only one world, Chenille.
CHENILLE: That is what they teach you–we know different.
This scene was of particular interest to me because I have mixed race parents - my mother is white and my dad is black. While watching this movie with my mother, she watched this scene and said, "Wow. They got it right. That's exactly what happened to me when I first started dating your father and what happens to me all the time still." When my parents got married the issue wasn't that my white mother was marrying a black man, the issues were in the black community that a white woman was taking away a black man from other black women.
In contemporary discourses on miscegenation, it is assumed that everyone embraces it, that it is the next step in making a new "multicultural" society (as Time Magazine lauded in it's famous 1993 cover story - http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19931118,00.html). So much focus has been put on righting the wrongs of the past anti-miscegenation laws by white society that not many people have looked within "marginal" groups to discover their views on miscegenation. Chenille's arguement is not uncommon. I've heard it before - that because there are so many black men in prison, or in gangs, that the "good ones" are few and far between and should be snapped up by a black women so they can have black children and then ensure that there will be a new generation of black Americans to continue the work of everyone who came before them.
This issue becomes even more complicated when you factor in gender's place in the miscegenation discussion. Fregoso discusses on page 140/141 how white male miscegenation was tolerated in part because it would lead to the "[betterment] of inferior races" (141). We know from most of our readings that white female miscegenation would never be tolerated because of the way white society tried to protect white female purity and virtue. In contemporary society, how much have these views shifted? Is there a new element of racial purity being expressed and taught to people belonging to minority groups? If your friends' parents have placed restrictions on them about who they can and cannot date/marry, do you find a trend amongst them racially?
It is obvious that legally we have moved far beyond the anti-miscegenation laws of the past, but culturally how far have we gone?
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2 comments:
very interesting post, Kat. I think reasons the old "white man with WOC miscegenation" was okay, while "white woman with MOC" was not, have to do with the objectification of women. It wasn't about mixing races, it was about white men keeping what's theirs, THEIRS. And now, to some extent, since mixed-race relationships are okay (or more okay, at any rate) yet the beauty ideal is still a white woman, its a problem for black women that black men are choosing to date white women. It is taken as a sign that, because of such beauty ideals etc, "black men prefer white women." I don't remember if I read that or heard that, but supposedly there are more white women dating black men than there are black women dating white men. If that's true, it is certainly an interesting switch from the past, troublesome in its own right. And makes all the more sense for the line you quote in Save the Last Dance.
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