One
gauge of the progress
we've made in American
race relations in recent
decades is the growing
number of blacks and
whites who have
integrated their hearts
and ended up marrying
each other.
As of
the 2000 census, 6
percent of married black
men had a white wife,
and 3 percent of married
black women had a white
husband - and the share
is much higher among
young couples. Huge
majorities of both
blacks and whites say
they approve of
interracial marriages,
and the number of
interracial marriages is
doubling each decade.
One survey found that 40
percent of Americans had
dated someone of a
different race.
But
it's hard to argue that
America is becoming more
colorblind when we're
still missing one
benchmark: When will
Hollywood dare release a
major movie in which
Denzel Washington and
Reese Witherspoon fall
passionately in love?
For
all the gains in race
relations, romance on
the big screen between a
black man and a white
woman remains largely a
taboo. Americans
themselves may be
falling in love with
each other without
regard to color, but the
movie industry is still
too craven to imitate
life.
Or
perhaps the studios are
too busy pushing the
limits on sex, nudity
and violence to portray
something really kinky,
like colorblind love.
Back
in 1967, "Guess
Who's Coming to
Dinner" helped chip
away at taboos by
showing a black man and
white woman scandalizing
their parents with their
- chaste - love. In 2005
we have a new version of
"Guess Who,"
but it only underscores
how little progress
we've made.
The
latest "Guess
Who" is about a
white man in love with a
black woman, and that's
a comfortable old
archetype from days when
slave owners inflicted
themselves on slave
women. Hollywood has
portrayed romances
between white men and
(usually
light-complexioned)
black women, probably
calculating that any
good ol' boy seeing
Billy Bob Thornton
embracing Halle Berry in
"Monster's
Ball" is filled not
with disgust but with
envy.
Off
screen, the change has
been dizzying. At least
41 states at one time
had laws banning
interracial marriage. A
1958 poll found that 96
percent of whites
disapproved of marriages
between blacks and
whites.
That
same year, in North
Carolina, two black
boys, a 7-year-old named
Fuzzy Simpson and a
9-year-old named Hanover
Thompson, were arrested
after a white girl
kissed Hanover. The two
boys were convicted of
attempted rape. As
Randall Kennedy notes in
his book
"Interracial
Intimacies," Fuzzy
was sentenced to 12
years, and Hanover to 14
years. Pressure from
President Dwight
Eisenhower eventually
secured the boys'
release.
Then
the mood began to
change, and 1967 was the
turning point. That was
the year that the
daughter of Dean Rusk,
then secretary of state,
married a black man.
Secretary Rusk proudly
walked his daughter down
the aisle (after warning
President Lyndon Johnson
of the political risks),
and Time magazine put
the couple on its cover.
That was also the year
of "Guess Who's
Coming to Dinner"
and of a Supreme Court
ruling striking down
miscegenation laws.
Yet
right from the
beginning, the
entertainment industry
has lagged society in
its racial mores. Films
and television have
always been squeamish
about race: in 1957, on
Alan Freed's ABC show,
the black singer Frankie
Lymon was seen dancing
with a white woman. ABC
promptly canceled the
show.
There
have been just a few
mainstream movies with
black men romancing
white women,
lower-profile films like
"One Night
Stand." More
typically, you get a
film like
"Hitch," where
the studio pairs a black
man with a Latina.
Popular
entertainment shapes our
culture as well as
reflects it, and one
breakthrough might come
late next year with the
possible release of
"Emma's War."
That's a movie that 20th
Century Fox is
considering, in which a
white woman - Nicole
Kidman is being
discussed - marries an
African. It's great that
Hollywood is close to
catching up to
Shakespeare's
"Othello."
Let's
hope that Hollywood will
finally dare to be as
iconoclastic as its
audiences. It's been
half a century since
Brown v. Board of
Education led to the
integration of American
schools, but the
breakdown of the
barriers of love will be
a far more consequential
and transformative kind
of integration - not
least because it's
spontaneous and hormonal
rather than imposed and
legal.
E-mail:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/24/opinion/nicholas@nytimes.com