ALEKSANDAR HEMON
I come from a place where a notion of “mixed marriage” has existed for a while. That place is Bosnia and Herzegovina, mainly known for the worst of the wars of Yugoslavia, where I was born and lived before it all came apart and I ended up in Chicago, Illinois. “Mixed marriage” (miješani brak) referred to a marriage between two people of different ethnicities, and I happened to be a product of one of those. There were no laws against “mixed marriage” when I was growing up, and the concept was not particularly frowned on, at least not in Sarajevo, my hometown. On the contrary, these marriages were cherished as evidence that the ideology of brotherhood and unity successfully bonded the myriad ethnicities of the socialist Yugoslavia—Bosnia and Herzegovina being its most diverse part—and helped people overcome their ethnic differences. Some say that up to 40 percent of marriages in Sarajevo before the war were interethnic, which was deemed to be a mark of its cosmopolitan openness.
When I was young, I hated the term mixed marriage. For one thing, I’d rail, unless you’re marrying yourself, every marriage is inescapably mixed. Indeed, the whole point of getting voluntarily attached to other people is to mix with someone who is not you—however you may define or perceive yourself. Moreover, mixed marriage implied that what was being mixed was not two people but some larger categories—ethnicity, race—to which the people congenitally belonged. While two people may have felt that, by way of love, they reached a degree of connection that rendered boundaries and differences between them irrelevant, or at least less important, their involuntary belonging to their respective categories superseded all their desires and agency. The label “mixed marriage” was culturally available to convince them that no human connection could ever transcend those essential differences. “Mixed marriage” suggested that people were deprived of emotional agency because their feelings were inherently nationalized. No one could ever fully own their love.
In retrospect, the mixed marriages of the multiethnic socialist Yugoslavia look positively quaint, for with the advent of the basest nationalism that would destroy the country, the concept acquired a more sinister value. In nationalist imagination, as practiced in the Balkans (and now in the Trumpist United States), the nation is defined by some mystical, transcendental, historical essence, shared by its members and acquired at birth. That essence is the locus of difference and the source of inherent superiority over some other nation (ethnicity, race); that essence, which is both metaphysical and biological, must be kept pure lest the nation be weakened by foreign contamination. Individual people contain the essence; it is what connects them to the other members of the nation, so that mixing with others (who are arranged as individuals around their own, different national essence) severs the connection with their national kin. The ideological victory of the Balkan nationalists therefore resulted in cultural and political devaluation of mixed marriage to the point that outside a few urban centers that contain relatively mixed ethnicities, it is effectively prohibited due to local segregationist policies that, among other things, might prevent children of different ethnicities from attending the same school. With all that, there are no segregation laws as such in Bosnia and Herzegovina, nor are mixed marriages illegal. They’re just considered unnatural by the nationalists and actively discouraged by their rhetoric and blatant discrimination.
All this is to say that my understanding of Loving v. Virginia is at least partly determined by a historical experience acquired thousands of miles away from the American history and reality in which I now live. Mildred and Richard Loving’s marriage was deemed to be mixed and therefore subject to anti-miscegenation law of the Commonwealth of Virginia. What deep connection they might have felt between them was invalid because, as the local court wrote in its ruling on the motion to vacate in the case of Loving v. Virginia, “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.” The monstrous logic of Judge Leon M. Bazile, the author of the ruling, is painfully familiar to a Bosnian like me, as is its natural and transcendental essentialism; the presumed eternal quality of the “arrangement”; and the alleged danger of mixing that could be redressed only by vigilant segregation—up to and including ethnic/racial cleansing and genocide. The absurd cruelty of such logic ought to have been self-evident, but it wasn’t until the Supreme Court ruled against the Commonwealth of Virginia, holding that “the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.”
For more than twelve years, I’ve been married to an African American woman; we have two children together. One of the many things that bonds me to Teri, my life partner, is the way our personal and family histories overlap in our hatred of bigotry. Her maternal grandfather was a lawyer who was friends with Justice Thurgood Marshall; his children registered voters in the South in the 1950s. Her paternal grandfather, who in the 1930s had an integrated dental office in segregated Pensacola, Florida, was known to stand up to white men with a shotgun in his hands. Race and American racism are our life, our bedtime and morning conversations. Hence we appreciate the fact that a generation ago in large parts of this damaged country, our marriage would have been illegal and our daughters illicit. When we drive through the territories of the former eastern Confederacy (including Virginia, to see my in-laws in Pensacola), we tell our girls that a generation ago, their mother and father would have risked arrest and imprisonment just for sleeping together. The last time Teri and I drove down to Florida with our girls, we talked to them about Loving v. Virginia—about the meaning it has in the history of our family and of this country. They’re still young, only beginning to learn about the terrible, complex history of America, but they could admire Mildred and Richard’s love and the courage that came with it, just as they could see the exquisite value of loving so soundly defeating bigotry.
Soon, we hope, they will be able to understand the importance of the work the ACLU did in undoing American racist laws, the work without which our lives would be much different. And with that, they might be able to learn that laws can and must change to reflect the indelible realities of human life and love.