LUCKILY WE WERE YOUNG BULLHEADED AND FOOLISH

 

I’m African-American and my husband is Caucasian. We married when we were 19 and 20 years old and we’ll celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary this year. We love that we get to celebrate such a milestone as the Supreme Court verdict celebrates a milestone too.

After we got engaged (which was mainly because I was pregnant) my then-boyfriend was asked by one of his family members: “Do you really love her or are you just trying to tick your parents off?”

We learned quickly that we couldn’t answer all of the questions that our families had. Luckily we were young, bullheaded and foolish, so we decided not to let other people’s issues with our marriage become our own. We had to focus on us. This meant that my husband had to sacrifice some of his relationships for a short season in order to marry me. Thankfully, they have since reconciled.

We made it a priority to make sure that our kids had friends of all races. Early on in our lives, we hung out with another biracial couple that looked like us, so that our kids saw black moms and white dads as normal.

As a couple, we learned to be upfront with each other about race. It didn’t start that way. Attraction led to confusion. Our life experience and cultural filters created a need for us to learn each other’s ways. Like, letting him, when he was my boyfriend, into my dorm room while I was relaxing my hair. I had to let him see me being fully me. Another time when my father-in-law and I went to a country music concert with his favorite artist — that was culture shock! But, it was the music of my husband’s experience and it helped me learn more about the people in my family.

It’s taken a long time to learn this, but we believe that our relationship is more important than one of us being right. We don’t want race to ever become a wall that divides us.

Eileen Lin Goutier and Edwin Goutier

Married: Washington, D.C., May 30, 2016

Credit: Roxana Bravo

‘We learned that sometimes things just take time.’

Eileen: I am Taiwanese-American. I moved to the U.S. during high school. My husband is a Florida-born Haitian-American. We both grew up in immigrant households.

For two seemingly different individuals, we share a love for food, family and passion for social and environmental causes. As much as our relationship seemed normal to both of us, we learned that it wasn’t for my parents and relatives. It took a year of argument, tears, anxiety, smiles and patience for my parents to finally accept our relationship. We waited for their blessing before we had our wedding. Unfortunately, my aunt, whom my family is very close to, decided to stop talking to me because she feels ashamed of me. We learned that sometimes things just take time for acceptance.

Nathan Wright Jr. and Carolyn May Wright

Married: Las Vegas, July 19, 1969

‘Many in the Black Power movement that my father helped lead for a time came to oppose interracial marriage.’

Submitted by Chi Bartram Wright, their son, based on his research and interviews with his mother: In July of 1967 — just one month after Loving vs. Virginia — Nathan Wright Jr., chairman of the Black Power Conferences in Newark, met Carolyn May, a blonde Long Island niece of socialite Marjorie Merriweather Post, who built Mar-a-Lago. As a publicist in Manhattan, Carolyn began promoting Nathan’s public speaking engagements.

My parents fell in love at a time when many in the Black Power movement that my father helped lead for a time came to oppose interracial marriage. My parents wed in Las Vegas to avoid attention, but soon found themselves back East defending their hearts to both blacks and whites, telling family, friends, and colleagues, “Love is colorblind,” and “The heart knows no color.” My mother recalls, “Very few white