By Dionne Ford

When former Louisiana Judge Keith Bardwell denied an interracial couple a marriage license in mid-October, it called to mind my family’s long history of straddling the color line. I’m black, my husband is white, and we have two biracial daughters. I am, like First Lady Michelle Obama and most other African Americans, the descendant of a black slave and a white master.

Bardwell defended his illegal action as concern for future offspring, telling reporters, “In my heart, I feel the children will later suffer.”

My college boyfriend’s parents expressed a version of that sentiment when he brought me to their home in Maine over Memorial Day weekend of our junior year. After a four hour long train ride to Boston, two hour car trip to Portland, gussied up in my most respectable skirt and blouse, they refused to even meet me. They were worried, they said of how society would treat us, but their society treated me just fine. About 50 of my boyfriend’s pals threw a swinging barbeque in my honor. It was the 1990s and society was evolving, even in heterogeneous Maine where, ironically, I was born. The face of America was increasingly contrasting in hue.

It would be easy to file away my college boyfriend’s parents, the judge and others like them as racists. But that misses an opportunity to call out their race-mixing angst for what it and all racism is—an entrenched fight for power and privilege.

That’s the reason why miscegenation laws were enacted in the first place. Long before the pilgrims reached Plymouth Rock, races were mixing, and in the newly-colonized America, white indentured servants and black slaves lived peacefully together and even cohabitated. Realizing that these coupled servants and slaves would quickly outnumber them, landowners came up with a strategy of divide and conquer.

According to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, “Black and white worked together, fraternized together. The very fact that laws had to be passed after a while to forbid such relations indicates the strength of that tendency. In 1661 a law was passed in Virginia that `in case any English servant shall run away in company of any Negroes’ he would have to give special service for extra years to the master of the runaway Negro. In 1691, Virginia provided for the banishment of any white man or woman being free who shall intermarry with a negro, mulato, or Indian man or woman bond or free.”

Those laws made it illegal to marry interracially. They set up a class system that put blacks at the bottom, giving the indentured servants incentive to move away from their black brethren and strive to become more like the landowners. Under the cloak of preserving racial purity and superiority, a direct route to securing money, power and privilege was paved.

But the laws didn’t deter everyone, especially slave masters, from raping their female slaves. My slave master forebear had children (several it seems) with his slave, my great-great- great grandmother, Temple Burton. In his obituary, headlined “Death of a Distinguished Southerner” the paper said, “he left no children. The only member of his family surviving him is his invalid wife.”

Had they been recognized as his only heirs, my descendants could have inherited his hundreds of acres of Gulf Coast property in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, and maybe even proceeds from the strand of pecan he cultivated, which he claimed made him more money than cotton and is still grown today.

I often imagine that sleepy seaside town, its pecan trees and Spanish moss undulating in the Gulf breeze, my colorful family varying from mahogany to butter cream, sipping lemonades and telling family stories on porches all across the town. I wonder if my grandfather would have ever moved to the big city of New Orleans, or if my father would have ever entered the military if money and racial prejudices weren’t a constant concern. I wonder what America would look like from its backyards to its boardrooms if all slave descendants had the same access to economic and social privileges that their white counterparts enjoyed.

When at age 12, I asked my grandfather if his pearl skin and straight black hair meant he was white, he told me, in certain terms, that he was a black man. While he could pass for white (and sometimes did to make better money as a grocery clerk in New Orleans), he took the one-drop rule seriously. Enacted in his home state of Mississippi in 1917, the rule is a direct descendant of the anti-miscegenation laws, decreeing that any amount of black blood made you black.

In my ancestry research, I found a census file from 1910 where my grandfather his siblings and parents were all described as mulattoes. The mulatto distinction didn’t give my grandfather or his parents any different rights than blacks, and I know it was just another category like negro (sic), colored or slave, but something about seeing the word there in the census made me hopeful. It seemed closer to a detail than a sweeping category and the truth is in the details. They are what make us human.

I felt that same hope when the 2000 Census gave Americans for the first time the opportunity to check more than one box under the category of race. I was excited that our family and others like us would have the chance to officially encompass all of our parts. I sensed the redemption in it since the truth was supposed to set us free, but it didn’t address the carefully crafted notions about race that have kept blacks at the social margins and still loom large.

Even my nine year-old daughter, who teeters between identifying herself as white and biracial, has felt the weight of stigma attached to being black in this country, and has told me that it seems easier to be white. That’s an astute observation from someone who has not had to face the Jim Crow south or segregated schools yet has absorbed on some level – perhaps through interactions with classmates or images on TV — the old idea that “if you’re white, you’re alright, if you’re black, get back.”

Judge Bardwell might take my daughter’s statement as an “aha” moment substantiating his claim that he’s saving children from the grips of tragic mulatto syndrome, where a mixed-race child is not accepted by either white or black society. But I see it for what it really is: an honest reaction to our country’s complex racial history and the stigma about being at all black that still exists.

As the number of Caucasians decreases and brown-skinned people increases, it is privilege and power that the judge and so many like him are concerned in protecting, not the perceived fragile identities of biracial children.

It is my hope that injecting the literal truth about our identities into our often sterilized American history the way Alex Haley did with Roots will humanize our stories, dismantle the carefully-rafted marginalizing stigmas attached to being black, and loosen the privileged majority’s grip on power.

Dionne Ford is a writer living in Montclair, NJ. She blogs about her family’s history at findingjosephine.com