Love in Black and White: The Triumph of Love Over Prejudice and Taboo (38 page)

American acquaintance said more directly, “How could you have grown up black under apartheid and marry a white?”

Tahirih grew up in the Transvaal, the daughter of two schoolteachers.

The family moved every two or three years from one black township to another, from Rustenburg to Hammanskraal to Kgabalatsane to Ga-Rankuwa. At fourteen she enrolled at a boarding school in Rustenburg, and at sixteen she moved to Johannesburg, where her father had been appointed Consul General by the Bophuthatswana government. She attended an integrated university in Mmabatho, pursuing coursework toward her bachelor’s degree in economics.

Her parents were members of a local group of BahT’is. The BahT’i movement began spreading in South Africa’s black townships in the 1950s, despite the barriers posed by apartheid laws.

By attending meetings with her parents, which were racialiy integrated and therefore under surveillance by the police, Tahirih came in contact with whites on a human level, which rarely happened in the lives of most black children growing up in racially polarized South Africa.

Most whites, having grown up isolated from the townships and homelands, do not believe blacks are fully human, and in turn many blacks, seeing only the brutality of the white police, believe whites are inhuman, devoid of compassion or sensitivity. At these meetings Tahirih saw whites and blacks relating to each other as human beings with shared hopes and fears for the future of South <1

Africa.

“We used to wonder if the white kids were real, and they wondered the same about us,” Tahirih recalled. “We would touch each other’s hair, just to see what it felt like. When they skinned their knees, their blood was red, like mine. The barriers between us started to break down.”

As a child in South Africa, Tahirih heard rumors about the tragic fate of mixed couples that circulated through the townships. She heard the story of a German man living in Johannesburg who fell in love with a beautiful black woman. The man was arrested under the Immorality Act and died in police custody. Other mixed couples were forced to flee South Africa.

Tahirih left South Africa in 1982 on a Fulbright scholarship.

When she arrived in America she attended Hood College in Frederick, Maryland, completing her bachelor’s degree before going on to American University for her master’s in economics. Initially she felt let down.

“Because of the way America was portrayed in South Africa, I had high expectations of harmonious race relations in this country,” she said.

“When I got here I realized that attitudes have hardly changed-only laws have.”

After graduating from American University in 1987, Tahirih went to the Green Acre BahT’i School in Maine for a weekend seminar on women’s rights, history, and racial issues. While playing volleyball she met Bill, a tall, white American. They became engrossed in a conversation that seemed to have no end.

Born and raised in the Boston area-first in Westfield and later in Acton, Massachusetts-Bill had almost no contact with blacks. There were only one or two blacks in his high-school class of four hundred.

“Growing up in the sixties I was aware at an early age that racism was wrong. In school we learned about the civil rights movement, and my parents taught me to treat all people fairly, but in Acton there was no way to practice my beliefs in equality because there were virtually no minorities.”

After graduating from high school Bill went to Yale University in New Haven, where he had a black roommate who became a close friend. After graduating from Yale Bill moved to St. Louis to pursue a graduate degree in architecture at Washington University, became active in St. Louis’s BahT‘1 community, then returned to Boston.

During the summer of 1987, Bill often went to the Green Acre BahT’i School in Maine about an hour from his home. When he met Tahirih on the volleyball court, he was struck by her British-African accent and wondered if she were from the Caribbean. After the volleyball game they had lunch together. The atmosphere was open and warm, the friendship spontaneous. They returned to their respective homes and jobs but began corresponding. They arranged another weekend visit to Maine, then attended a three-day conference together at Princeton.

They started visiting each other on weekends, shuttling back and forth between Washington, D.C and Boston. This commuting went on for more than two years.

When they had been dating three or four months, it suddenly dawned on Bill that the relationship might fall apart. He started feeling selfconscious with her in public. He wondered how strong their commitment would have to be to weather the obstacles they would inevitably face. He knew his parents would not be happy about it.

Without realizing it, I started wondering what people were thinking about us,” he said. “And the fact that some might disapprove bothered me.”

But one weekend things changed. While visiting Tahirih in D.C. for a couple of days, it started snowing harder and harder until a fullblown blizzard developed. His return flight to Boston was canceled three times. Instead of leaving him alone to wait for the next plane, Tahirih took time off from work. During those days together, they recognized the depth of their feelings for each other.

“I became aware that I had been worrying too much about other people’s opinions and had overruled my own feelings, so I told myself, “I don’t care what they think.” Getting past that threshold changed the relationship for me. It became my conviction that, this is the right thing for Before they decided to marry, Bill and Tahirih talked to other mixed couples about their experiences. They learned it would be a challenge, but that with patience, persistence, and love even difficult situations could be resolved.

“In an interracial marriage, all normal marital problems are attributed to race,” Bill said. “Being forewarned of this makes it easier to work out your problems as individuals, not as a black person versus a white person. One of the main benefits of being a mixed couple is that you’re constantly learning from each other. You’re reassessing your cultural assumptions all the time.”

Bill’s parents were reluctant at first to grant him permission to marry Tahirih. They had many concerns: “Where will you live? What about the children? You won’t fit in. You won’t be accepted. What do you have against white girls?”

Because Bill and Tahirih were BahT’Is, they had to seek their parents’ permission to marry.

Instead of arguing with his parents, Bill planned dinners and events during which each of them could become better acquainted with Tahirih.

This forced his father to interact with Tahirih and the barriers between them gradually came down. Tahirih ceased being a stereotype and became an individual. When Bill’s parents finally gave their consent to the marriage, it was given unreservedly.

Bill’s father told his son, 4I’m so happy for you. As a father I have to say that I feel closer to you through taking the time to get to know Tahirih. I feel I’m part of the wedding now.”

Tahirih and Bill, in expressing their dream of someday seeing truly nonracial societies both in South Africa and America, offered these observations: 4Today black-white marriages are shunned,” Tahirih said.

“Tomorrow they’ll be appreciated. Reasonable people of all races feel comfortable with a mixed couple, because they know they’re in the presence of people whose relationship is a testImony that color doesn’t substitute for character, that prejudice can be overcome, and that people of different races can find common ground in mutually respectful friendship.”

“Racism is completely emotional and irrational,” Bill said. “Most people agree, at least intellectually, that it’s wrong. But they seldom do anything more than just talk about it. Many of the most prejudiced people adamantly deny being prejudiced. My grandmother insists she’s not prejudiced because she chats and has tea with her black cleaning woman.”

“A lot of people believe in racial harmony as an ideal, but that only goes so far,” Tahirih said. “Intermarriage is not part of their idea of racial harmony. They can form shallow friendships at work with coworkers of other races, but those tenuous ties end when it’s tIme to go home. We are one human family, but the divisions between us seem so real to us now, and so deep.”

It is Iitting that Love in Black and White be published in 1992, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court decision legalizing interracial marriages. Yet two-and-a-half decades after the 1967 court ruling, as has been shown by the stories in this book and by movies such as Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever, the issue of interracial love is still highly charged and riddled with taboos, misconceptions, sexual myths, and stereotypes.

There still is intense pressure not to date or marry across racial lines. Even platonic interracial friendships are increasingly frowned upon, particularly on high-school and college campuses. Political correctness, racial exclusivity, and cries for racial purity, from both blacks and whites, have smothered the idealism of the sixties, a decade when many advances were made in fighting bigotry and Improving tolerance and race relations in America.

Many Americans seem to have given up on the ideal of an integrated society. Two segregated, opposed, and hostile camps have emerged.

More and more, blacks and whites are hurling accusations of racism at each other and arguing rancorously over civil rights, affirmative action, and racially motivated violence.

With such tension and acrimony, it is not surprising that individuals who dare to fall in love across the color line find themselves caught in the cross-fire. They’re doubly detested because they are proof that racial harmony can become a reality, that the misunderstanding, suspicions, fears, and hatreds between black and white can be replaced by trust, cooperation, mutual respect, and even love.

It’s ironic that as the battle lines between blacks and whites in America become sharply drawn and entrenched, in South Africa, once the prototype racist state, the walls of legalized segregation have crumbled. As a result, interracial relationships are finding greater acceptance. African National Congress leader Oliver Tambo has a white son-in-law, and l’resident de Klerk’s son is marrying a Coloured woman.

While a new era of hope in race relations has dawned in South Africa, many in America believe that the best days in racial cooperation and harmony are past. Some have even given up on the dream that visionaries lIke Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr died for.

Appropriately, in these trying times for race relations, interracial couples have begun speaking out against racism and feeling proud of the racial harmony their union reflects.

Children of mixed marriages, fed up with being labeled and forced to identity with the race of one parent and reject the other, are forming support groups at universities across the country. At the University of California at Berkeley, the Multi-Ethnic Interracial Student Coalition, known as Misc has sixty members. Multiracial student groups have also sprung up at the University of Michigan, Harvard, New York University, Stanford, Kansas State, and UCLA. There are twenty chapters nationwide of the Association of Multi-Ethnic Americans, based in San Francisco, which is fighting for the creation of a 4multiracial” classification on standardized forms.

Births to black-white couples increased fivefold between 1968 and

1988.

When our second child was born, the unease and selfconsciousness we had felt at Bianca’s birth was gone. Color, Fmally, no longer mattered to us. With tears of joy filling our eyes, we hugged and kissed each other in front of the entire hospital’s childbirth staff the minute our son Nathan Phillip arrived January 20,1991.

We called Diana at home to tell her she had a new nephew. She screamed with delight and got Bianca equally excited. Diana dropped the phone on the floor and jumped around the room with Bianca shouting, “Nathan!

Nathan! It’s a boy named Nathan!”

“Nafen! Nafen!” Bianca echoed.

When the family in South Africa was informed of Nathan’s birth, Mhani and Granny ululated and danced with joy. They shared the Epilogue.

good news with practically the entire ghetto, and held a celebration to which friends, relatives, neighbors, and strangers were invited.

“I told you you’d have a boy,” Mhani said jubilantly over the phone.

“I prayed so hard for you, my American daughter and my son Mark. Now God has blessed you. Now, when are you bringing my beloved grandchildren over to visit me, to see Africa? They’re half African, you know.”

“Soon, Mhani, soon,” we assured her.

Grampa, now in his late eighties, eagerly welcomed his new great grandson into the world. When he received the birth announcement he sent Nathan a letter which read:

Dear Nathan Phillip, I am sure that you know in your very bones and blood and brains that even beyond the love that just greeted you at your birth, you are a part of a larger wholeur family. We love you.

We believe in you. We will give you the best of what we are and of our love. Thanks for joining us, and for just being you.

None of us are really “on our own.” We must share, or we cannot live.

We n,“‘er can do It alone. For now, we want you to be as cozy and close to us as you can. As you grow up and away from us, we will miss your being that close, but you and we will fInd ways of sharing what we both need-to have, to be, and to give. You have taken the gilt of life, which love has given you, and, with your heartbeat and breath and sigh, you tell us how glad you are to be alive, and to join us. You already know, down to your tiny toes, that we need each other love, GGsMn’fr Time and understanding have healed the rifts we once felt between ourselves and our extended families.

Gail’s father flew down from Minneapolis to see his new grandson.

Bianca led him around the house, from her tape player to her toys to her kiddie videos, saying over her shoulder in an insistent voice, “Grampa, c’MON!” He followed her obediently, marveling at how much her confident, adventurous, and fearless personality reminded him of Gail as a child. After all the pain and misunderstanding Gail and her father had been through over our relationship it is heartwarming to see him affectionately and unreservedly embracing his biracial grandchildren.