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What a load of bigoted, ignorant rubbish you published 11/21 with the series of articles on interracial relationships (“Love Knows Color”)! And all the more remarkable that they appear 30 years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the case of Loving v. Virginia, which finally set aside state laws banning interracial marriages.
Oh well, once again it appears that all the civil rights movement did for some black people was to make them believe they were entitled to publicly express their prejudices as fact and to behave as badly as white people.
I live in a neighborhood where there are at least a dozen interracial couples, some of whom have lived in Takoma Park, D.C., for decades. Most of us are active in community affairs in this predominantly black neighborhood, and committed to the ideal of integration. Where were the experiences of people like me and my girlfriend (and all of the other folks we know) in your pages?
Sometimes I see a remarkable intolerance among blacks for anything that smacks of difference, and by running those articles you pandered to that intolerance. But you wouldn’t have exploited other differences by running stories by gentiles about the problems they had with Jews who date non-Jews. You wouldn’t have run a series of stories by straights about their problems with homosexuality. And you wouldn’t have run a series of stories by the able-bodied about their problems with people in wheelchairs.
Black folks who have a problem with interracial dating and marriage had better realize it’s their problem, not the problem of those individuals with the courage to cross the color line. The numbers of such marriages is increasing, and not a moment too soon. Interracial couples may be the last, best hope for an America that for centuries has been bedeviled by the twin demons of race and sex.
Takoma Park
via the Internet