Loving - Sheryll Cashin

In 1958, Mildred and Richard Loving were taken to court immediately following their wedding. Their crime: miscegenation, punishable by exile from their home state of Virginia. A few years later, a letter Mildred wrote to Attorney General Robert Kennedy led to what we now know as the landmark 1967 Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court decision that officially ended the ban on interracial marriage in the United States. Though throughout history there have always been what legal scholar Sheryll Cashin refers to as "ardent integrators" who defied the color line to marry or love, she argues that this historical moment was the beginning of an emerging class of "culturally dexterous" Americans. Drawing from the earliest chapters of U.S. history, Cashin reveals the legacy of America's original sin as we shifted from being a nation without an entrenched construction of race to a country obsessed with the fiction of racial purity, where one drop of non-white blood meant exclusion from full citizenship. But, in the years since Mildred and Richard first married, approval of interracial marriage jumped from 4% to 87%. As interracial mingling becomes less taboo, homogeneity gives way to a rapid demographic shift driven by immigration, biracial births, interracial adoption, and global neighborhoods with growing populations of young, multiracial families. Loving is a hopeful, engaging treatise on the future of race and intimacy in America, challenging the notion that the trickle-down effect of progressive politics is our only hope for a more inclusive society. Accessible and sharp, Cashin shines a light on the possibility of a refreshing redo on race, and a future where interracial love could serve as the catalyst for a social revolution that ends not in artificial colorblindness, but a culture where acceptance is mainstream, and difference is celebrated.