Loving Day was a very interesting read about Warren Duffy, a modern day character who just happened to be an unsuccessful comic book writer that is nearly broke, recently divorced, and orphaned. He is of Irish American decent from his father who has recently died. He returns to settle the estate which turns out to be a haunted mansion in a questionable neighborhood.
While at a comic book convention he meets a daughter he never knew he had who he encourages to embrace all aspects of her ethnicity, although he struggles to fully do so himself. Although he identifies with black culture his complexion looks white and he often finds himself in questionable situations because of this. Warren enrolls his daughter into a special school, the Melange Center, (a charter school for mixed race children) which Warren begins to believe is a cult. All sorts of problems arise that lead us up to the Loving Day- a celebration that recognizes the Supreme Court decision about the Mildred and Richard Loving Case.
The book was funny at times and I really liked that it takes place in the present day and coaches us to acknowledge and think about what it means to be biracial in today’s America. The author did a great job of fully developing these characters and handling this topic.
I really liked this book. I think the author did a great job of capturing the craziness, frustration, fury, confusion, and also beauty of being in the “middle” in a country where the predominant race — caucasian — thinks everyone is either black or white, period! As if we all didn’t have enough trouble growing up and trying to figure out the world and our place in it. I think this was a very funny, ascerbic and also loving book.
This book helped me start to expand my notions about the word ‘race’ and the concepts I harbor about that word. It deals with the complications around those whose parents are not of the same race, e.g. the words used to describe themselves and the concepts of self identification. My own very limited view has been reflected in the fact that I often wondered why all the people of so-called ‘mixed race’ seemed to identify as black. My problem was the generalization of “all the people,” i.e. I was not seeing and recognizing all the people. I gradually realized, helped by reading Boy Snow Bird and Life on the Color Line that identifying as white is known as ‘passing.’
Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book, Between the World and Me, further helped me by introducing the term People Who Think They Are White instead of the more usual White People. At first this fillip was annoying but I gradually came to see the truth of it. For years I had refused to believe the oft stated premise that most white people in the south have some black blood. My blinders didn’t allow me to see how this was even possible. People of a particular phenotype can and do have varying genotypes. Generations of children fathered by white owners on slave women produced slaves of virtually indistinguishable phenotype from the owners. Upon emancipation some of these people chose to ‘pass’ likely by simply relocating.
This is an incredibly rich area for discussion. It seems to me that in our efforts to come to grips with race and racism and discrimination we don’t even have agreement on what these words mean to us personally and how we use them.
-Written by an Old Man Who Thinks He is White
John you are exactly right! My grandfather could have easily passed but chose not to. Also, its interesting that you brought up Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book. That was the next one on my list of books to read and he just won a National Book Award for that book.