Ebony and Ivory in Harmony

One of my friends has to write a paper for a college class she's taking this weekend, and one of the topics she is supposed to address is interracial marriage.  She asked me if I would take a few moments and write something up for her about my experiences, and I figured I would share it here as well (in case any of you had a burning curiosity about the same topic!)

Since I am half of an interracial partnership, sometimes I get asked what it’s like to be married to someone who is so clearly from a different background.  What kind of challenges do we have?  Do people treat us differently?  What does it mean for our children?

For the most part, the questions baffle me.  Quite frankly, our marriage is no different than nearly every other married couple I know.  We have differences, it’s true.  Our backgrounds are starkly different—we were raised in different regions of the country (Mississippi is a different world from Southern California), we are from different socioeconomic backgrounds and family situations (my husband was raised by a single mother who went through a series of abusive relationships, while my parents are a college-educated couple who have been married 40 years), and we even had different religious backgrounds as children (he was Baptist, I was Mormon).  However, all these differences can be a part of any marriage, even when the spouses have the same racial background.  We’ve had to overcome those disparities and work together in the same way that any other couple manages to reconcile their differences in a successful relationship.

There have been a few road bumps along a path that were specifically related to our different races though.  When my grandparents learned that I was going to marry someone black, they were so concerned that I was making a mistake that they met with my mother to try and get her to break up our engagement.  My parents had supported my choice all along (they loved Terence right from the start) so my mother just tried to reassure her parents as best she could, while reminding them that I was an adult and I would make my own choices.  It was never any more difficult than that.  Terence and I were not offended (we recognized that they came from a generation where interracial marriages had much harder challenges).  My grandparents never said a word to me personally, they came to our wedding and celebrated with us, and as they got to know Terence, loved him and took him in as part of the family.

On Terence’s side of the family, I have never felt anything but welcomed.  Most of them still live in Mississippi, but when we travel back as a family his family members have always treated me with love and kindness.  We do attract a lot of stares though.  Often while in public in the small towns we visit heads will literally turn as the people watch us go by.  Our family is even so unusual that while taking my children to the park in Terence’s tiny hometown, after we got the standard wide-eyed stares, I heard one of the men exclaim really loud, “Oh, I know who she is.”  Everybody in town probably knows by now that May’s grandson “married a white girl.”  But nobody is ever offensive or hostile, we are just so unusual still in that part of the country that our family is an object of curiosity.

Occasionally we have situations where we could take offense but choose not to.    Every so often someone assumes that I must be a stepmom or an adoptive mom of my five biological children.  (I guess they take more after their dad.)  When registering my two eldest children for school, the state required that we list their racial background—and only let us choose one (without even “mixed” as an option, as most paperwork does).  I flipped a coin and listed our daughter as black and our son as white.  (They changed that rule so that by the time our third child entered kindergarten I was allowed to check more than one box.)

With our children, we have made a conscious decision to make sure race has never been a part of our family life.   We don’t identify or put any of our family members into categories or label them as “black,” “African-American,” “white,” “Caucasian” or anything else.  When people ask our kids if they are black or white, my kids are puzzled.  They don’t see their skin color as any more important than their eye or hair color.  (The older ones have begun to be aware of racial categories though, and they will answer “both”).  We consider both parts of our racial heritage to be an important part of our family, without focusing on labels and stereotypes.  We have talked about racism and segregation with our children for we want them to know about the past and how things have changed, but we do not focus overly on the negative.  We feel that it’s important not to focus on racial differences, but rather on the truth that we are all human beings and children of God, and our skin color is not who we are.