How Racists Ruined Our Anniversary

Going Outdoors While Interracial

Published June 12, 2022, Loving Day. Photo by author.

It was one of those gloriously bright, extremely windy and slightly brisk days that feels like Fall up north, and feels rare and magical in Southwest Florida. As we hustled to the boardwalk leading to the beach, long strands of my curly hair got stuck in my lip gloss, which felt simultaneously annoying and glamorous. I’d had my hair cropped short since 2001, and only grew it out due to COVID; at first, because I wasn’t comfortable going into a salon, and then, to see how far I could go with it. I now have a love-hate relationship with it — lightweight but curly and apt to tangle, a product of the Italian roots I only recently learned existed, and possibly the 3% Afro-Caribbean ancestry, according to one DNA test. I was wearing sunblock on my face, because my fair skin is apt to burn when it’s been shielded from sun exposure chronically, as it has these last two years. My husband never wears sunblock, relying on his ample supply of natural melanin to protect him, passed down from his Nigerian, Cameroonian and Kenyan ancestors. We both wore jackets; it was a chilly 52 degrees in January. This was why we’d come to the beach on this day; the cold, which we’d expected and hoped would drive away other people.

It was our first wedding anniversary. Both being nature-lovers and especially enamored with the ocean, it felt right to go there to celebrate our first year together as husband and wife. The cold weather was the perfect opportunity to do that in peace, without the inevitable hardened stares of small-town white people — Florida natives and transplants from the Midwest and North. Homogenous in style, generally over age 50, and dripping with the markers of their politics and ideology — Trump 2020 bumper stickers, “assault life” decals on their cars, fishing shirts and weathered faces, perpetually sour and angry. The cold weather would drive away those people, who invariably come with the hostile body language, the disapproval and visceral disgust showing through their tightly pressed mouths when they see us. They wouldn’t be there. That was our expectation.

Laws banning interracial marriage, specifically between Black and white people, date back to the 1600s. It wasn’t until the 1967 case of Loving vs. Virginia that the US Supreme Court deemed “anti-miscegenation”…