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Dear Mixed Media Watch,

I am writing in response to your posting on 6/21/06 entitled “Why uncritical celebration of Loving Day makes no sense.” In this posting you made statements regarding the idea of Loving Day, the celebrations, and the campaign materials available through LovingDay.org. I wish to clarify the mission of the Loving Day project, and the spirit in which the celebration and the project materials were created.

First, I wish to thank you for your honest opinions about the campaign. Thoughtful criticisms are a great benefit, and are therefore welcome and appreciated. I also appreciate amount of detail in this posting and your recent writings, which has been far richer than anything than anything that you have been kind enough to provide in years since I began working on this project.

To address your criticisms, I would like to draw inspiration from the campaign against breast cancer. This campaign, although more serious, serves as a great example of how campaigns work. On one level, curing cancer is an extremely complex medical issue. Only a small percentage of people are qualified to fight cancer directly through scientific research. No one disputes the incredible value of this work and the deep specific knowledge that is required.

However, there is more to cancer than science. On another level, breast cancer is something that touches all of us as people. This is where the campaign comes in. One of the most visible aspects of that campaign are the breast cancer walks. The average participant in these walks is not a doctor or a scientist. However, they know the basics. They also know how cancer has touched them or someone they love. Most importantly, they are working to be part of the solution. The fight against breast cancer is stronger thanks to the participation of regular people.

Race is a complex topic within history and sociology (among other disciplines), just as breast cancer is a complex topic within science and medicine. Some people have a Ph.D. in these subjects, and others like you devote a considerable portion of their adult lives to study and activism. There are a lot of people out there that have never heard of Loving v. Virginia and have never thought much about interracial couples or multiethnic identity. I was one of these people, even though my parents are an interracial couple.

This is where Loving Day comes in. The purpose of celebrating is to raise awareness of the Loving decision, just like the walks raise awareness of the fight against breast cancer. While the Loving decision alone does not encompass the hundreds of years of history that predate it, it does serve as an appropriate starting point from our perspective in time. The campaign is about making the Loving decision common knowledge like Brown v. Board of Education, which also serves as a starting point of a much larger conversation.

Laws and court decisions are at the core of the campaign. Loving Day was named after a Supreme Court decision, and sections of LovingDay.org are devoted to making this information accessible. People may have differing opinions about the value of laws and court cases, but knowledge of this material enables all of us to have a more productive discussion.

There is more to racism than law, just as there is more to cancer than science. We as people use stories to share our experiences and to learn from each other. LovingDay.org includes personal stories as a way of bringing the legacy of the past into a modern context. They also bring a human dimension to the conversation that laws and court cases cannot. People can relate to these stories; they are a popular part of the website and we receive new ones every day.

Loving Day is a campaign that has a visual identity. Just as the fight against breast cancer has the pink ribbon, Loving Day has the heart with a shield around it. Both campaigns also make use of images to bring a message to a large audience. All of the Loving Day campaign materials are created with volunteer labor and donated equipment and facilities. If they are not all inclusive, it is only through a lack of resources. I should mention that there is a new postcard/ecard of an Asian woman with a Caucasian man which is, as you mentioned in your posting, one of the most common pairings.

Your posting was particularly critical of the kissing imagery, which you characterized as “sucking face.” You also described it as being “fetishistic” and “meant to shock and titillate.” Kissing can be interpreted as sexual, but to be fair, it is also something we do with those we love. People kiss on their wedding day. People kiss in public. Close-lipped kissing may have been pornographic at point in history, but it has been quite acceptable in media for the past few decades. Furthermore, all of the couples in the campaign are real. The couple you referred to has been together for years; I had dinner with them last night. You are certainly entitled to your interpretation, but I wonder how many others share that interpretation with you.

Loving Day, like most things, is imperfect. It does not encompass the full range of the interracial/multiracial experience, nor does it claim to. I do not believe that any single entity could. Loving Day is not about a website, a postcard, a single event, or an organization. Loving Day does not claim directly or through suggestion that interracial couples are inherently praiseworthy, but it does does praise the overturning of racist laws.

Loving Day is an idea that belongs to everyone who wants to be a part of it. Loving Day is about awareness, education, and fighting discrimination. Loving Day is a small but growing part of a larger community.

There were seven public celebrations nationwide this year, each one hosted by a different organization. There were also many celebrations that people hosted at home for friends and family. Each one is different. If you or anyone else has ideas about Loving Day, I would encourage you to contribute in any way you can. If you have a specific vision, you can host your own event. You can also help us with our event and our work throughout the year.

You have always had an open invitation to participate in Loving Day. I am grateful for your past efforts to help publicize the New York event. I believe that your knowledge could contribute greatly to the project in a direct way. If the celebrations are not educational enough, then please attend and take an active role in educating our guests. I’m sure that the 500 people at the New York celebration would love to learn from you, myself included. You could also sponsor your own educational event around Loving Day. These are just a few ways that you make a positive contribution, all of which would far more productive than a critical and public blog posting. Please don’t let small things like a photograph stand in your way. Such details can be worked out with an open and direct dialogue.

I hope you can see us as part of the same fight against discrimination. We all put in a lot of time, effort, and money for our cause. We all do this work in addition to our daytime responsibilities. We should find ways to be more supportive of one another’s work. Many people and organizations are already preparing for next year’s 40th anniversary events. I hope that you choose to be an active part of it, and I am looking forward speaking with you in the near future.

Sincerely,

Ken Tanabe.

First of all, I don’t see how you can deny that when people of different races learn to live together, that’s a good thing. Right? (I don’t just mean marriage and love, I also mean desegregation and community.) If you are an older Asian couple, grew up around Asians your whole life, harbored whatever stereotypes you harbored about non-Asians…and then your child married a person who is not Asian, and you get to know that person, and that person gets to know you, and even if there is tension (and in what family is there no tension?) love and understanding develops…doesn’t that break stereotypes? Isn’t that a good thing? I’m not saying that couples should get married in ORDER to break stereotypes, but isn’t that a positive byproduct of interracial marriages? And can’t those of us who grew up watching Star Trek and reading Science Fiction (yes, I’m a geek) extrapolate a little on the notion that more interracial marriages leads to better understanding between the races leads to the weakening of racism?

I’m not naive enough to think that increasing interracial marriages is the only factor involved or that it can happen anytime soon, or even in our lifetimes…but without utopian notions, what’s OUR GOAL here? I believe in trying to repair the world, and if I sound like a hippie, so be it. And I think interracial marriages can often help break racial barriers for the extended families involved, and if that sounds naive, then so be it. It’s not why I married interracially, but I feel encouraged when I hear that interracial marriages are on the rise because maybe my future children will have more mixed-race friends than I did growing up, and they will hopefully live in a less racist world than I did (and I believe they will).

I find it hard to believe that you don’t have your own utopian dreams, and I’d like to hear more of them. A leader has to also be a dreamer. See MLK. He had lots of “asinine utopian notions,” and we’re still quoting them today, though we haven’t gotten there yet.

I also feel like there is a positive, constructive solution beyond simple criticism of the Loving Day party: organize something beforehand. Maybe all Ken wants to do is hang out and party; maybe he is not the political organizer that you are. There’s nothing wrong with social events built around the commonality of being mixed race (see: Swirl). If however you believe this is the occasion for politics over partying, then next year I think you should lead a rally at City Hall and then we all march up to the party together. That will combine your political activism and his party-organizing, and I will absolutely attend, and would be happy to contribute my time to help.

I see your point about not using erotic images to promote Loving Day. But it was a party, and he was trying to attract young people. If this was about politics, perhaps it would be much more powerful to use images of children. Or a group of various races and ethnicities. On the other hand, if black on white skin really does “shock and titillate” (though I don’t really see it), and the goal is to be in-your-face about interracial marriages, then maybe that is indeed the best example even though it’s the rarest coupling, demographically. The gay-pride movement says “we’re here, we’re queer, what are you going to do about it.” Let’s go plaster Ken’s postcards in Alabama or somewhere (Chicago, perhaps, where I was yelled at on the street for being in an interracial relationship); sometimes shock value is a necessary tool in breaking stereotypes or gaining civil rights.

If it’s really shocking to someone that a black guy is kissing a white woman, I’d want to keep that image in front of their face until it wasn’t shocking anymore.

Maybe if we honestly study interracial relationships before 1960, a different picture emerges from that of the official mainstream propaganda that BM/WW relationships are the so called epitome of progress.

Stephanie

What I’m trying to say is that mainstream media has the tendency to celebrate black male/white female pairings at the expense of all others.

I personally, am sick of meeting people who expect me to “enrich” them about my Peruvian side of the family as if they can’t pick up a book and read about the culture themselves or take an interest in other parts of the world besides the U.S.A. Like it’s our job to “educate” them. It seems they expect to co-opt some authentic piece of culture by consuming food, wearing ethnic prints, or f*cking someone. I suppose I’m really bothered by the fact that no matter what, I’m still looked as as “the other”. And, yes, as Jenn pointed out, it seems like the commentators are really into patting themselves on the back. “Hey, I’m dating someone of another race! Look at ME! I’m so open-minded and cultured!!!”

So are we going to ignore the whole purpose of antimiscegenation laws, which is more about protecting white privilege and wealth than it is about anything else. Ignore Strom Thurmond’s relationship with a young Black housekeeper in the twenties? How about the much-publicized case of Alice Rhinelander and how it tore the couple apart, literally.

Also, the media seldom gave the Lovings themselves any credit. It was a black woman/white man couple who challenged the Virginia antimiscegenation laws, but you wouldn’t hear about it much in the media.

Furthermore, I think the motivation of the “progressive” BM/WF relationship is to cover up the past on the part of mainstream society. What say you?

Stephanie

http://journals.aol.com/jenjer6/StephaniesJournal/