Earlier this month, Beth Humphrey (who happens to be white) and her boyfriend, Terence McKay (who happens to be black), went to a Louisiana justice of the peace seeking a marriage license.
The judge’s answer? He does not perform inter-racial marriages.
The story made headlines worldwide. According to London’s Guardian, justice of the peace Keith Bardwell, who is white, claimed that “he is not a racist.” Rather, Bardwell said, he does not “do interracial marriages because [he doesn’t] want to put children in a situation they didn’t bring on themselves. I feel the children will later suffer.”
Of course, Bardwell is wrong: he is: or at least his actions have been: undeniably racist. Denying a marriage license on the basis of race reeks of unforgivable bigotry and prejudice.
The controversy pricks sensitive nerves in the South, where the U.S. Supreme Court struck down laws against interracial marriage (then called miscegenation) in 1967, barely forty years ago.
Moreover, it reinforces stereotypes of the southern United States, and allows those of us who don’t live in Louisiana (or Alabama, or Mississippi, or Georgia) to mount our moral high horses and proclaim our righteousness. That could never happen here, we might say, not in Walla Walla or Seattle or Portland or New York City or Los Angeles. We’re too educated, too liberal, too modern for such blatant prejudice.
But by saying that, we isolate racism as a regional problem, virulent only in former bastions of segregation and Jim Crow laws. The reality is that racism lurks beneath the surface throughout the United States.
The United States passed a major milestone in race relations with Barack Obama’s election. But his inauguration did not strike down racism with one swift blow.
Rather, President Obama has served as a lightning rod for America’s hidden racism.
Nationally syndicated radio host Glenn Beck has accused Obama of harboring “deep-seated hatred of white people,” despite the fact that Obama’s mother is white. When a white police officer arrested Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. at his own residence in Massachusetts, Obama found himself in the middle of a national controversy. Countless easily-duped conspiracy theorists nationwide ignited a furor over Obama’s birth certificate, claiming that the president was not born in Honolulu but rather Kenya. The “birther” movement’s claim Obama could not really be an American smacks of poorly hidden racism.
Most Americans think of racism simplistically, focusing only on injustices to blacks. In the process, we ignore very real discrimination faced by Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans and American Indians.
Sadly, the United States: the whole United States: has many obstacles to surmount before it becomes a colorblind nation. By pretending that racism is unique to the “Deep South,” we hide those obstacles, and make them more difficult to overcome.
We must face the facts: racism is still very much alive in the United States.