Interracial Romance & Fandom | Black History Month Vid #3

*Sorry for the camera issues, tried to add clips so you wouldn't have to be subjected to the horror that is my camera being passive aggressive (our relationship is still new).*

In 1967 The Supreme Court of the United States agreed that anti-miscegenation laws were unconstitutional in the groundbreaking Loving v. Virginia case. However, it wasn’t until 2000 that Alabama finally repealed all their old anti-miscegenation laws with nearly 526,000 voting against the repeal. That was only sixteen years ago. So if you are older than sixteen you were born in a time where there were laws on the books were it was illegal for two people of different races to marry. Not to mention in 2009 when a Louisiana justice of the peace refused to officiated an interracial couple.

What is important to recognize is that these laws only existed to protect white superiority in the context of in the United States.

I Love Lucy was the first interracial couple on television, featuring real life couple Lucy and Ricky Ricardo. The Jeffersons television show featured the first interracial black and white couple on television, with Helen and Thomas Willis. Star Trek very notably featured the kiss between Kirk and Uhura in “Plato’s Stepchildren.” People were a little salty about it, but society seemed to get over it…well until Uhura x Spock, but that’s something else altogether. So today we are going to look at five interracial romances across different genres and how fandom has treated them for better or worse.

This is not to say that there are not popular interracial ships: Archer x Lana, Ichabod x Abbie and Wash x Zoe are very popular, but they are the minority in terms the majority of ships feating a mixed-raced relationship. I am only going to be focusing on five ships for the sake of this video, so I’m not going to be able to cover everything, but I wanted to talk on this issue.

The focus on each of these couples are mostly BWWM, but these problems can come about in BMWW relationships as well (ie. Hale x Kenzi from Lost Girl, Xena x Marcus from Xena and Jimmy Olsen x Kara from Supergirl).

*Click Here For A Great Run On The Shawn x Angela Relationship*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ko-elQHMpNo

Next episode

S01E291 - Black Sci-Fi & Fantasy + BOOK RECOMMENDS [BHM VID #4]