This twenty-fifth day of Filipino American History Month brings more detailed information on Filipino American families and the discriminatory anti-miscegenation laws that kept them from forming.
Whether it is dating or marrying someone of a different race, interracial relationships are not a new phenomenon among Asian Americans. When Filipinos arrived en masse to the United States during the 1920s and 1930s, a major gender imbalance existed, at 14 Pinoys to 1 Pinay. This made marriage and family development difficult, if not impossible, for many Filipinos. A few of them eventually married women in the U.S. who were not Filipino. However, many people soon saw Asian intermarriage with Whites as a threat to American society. One action to stop this threat took place on January 26, 1930, when a Los Angeles Superior Court judge ruled that Filipino/White marriages performed since 1921 were invalid.
One Congressperson wrote about miscegenation, “Intermarriage between Whites and Blacks is repulsive and averse to every sentiment of pure American spirit. It is abhorrent and repugnant to the very principles of Saxon government. It is subversive of social peace. It is destructive of moral supremacy, and ultimately this slavery of White women to Black beasts will bring this nation a conflict as fatal as ever reddened the soil of Virginia or crimsoned the mountain paths of Pennsylvania. ... Let us uproot and exterminate now this debasing, ultra-demoralizing, un-American and inhuman leprosy."
Although anti-miscegenation laws in many states, including California (Civil Code 60 and 69), prohibited marriage between Whites and “Mongolians,” “Negroes,” and “Indians,” Filipinos continued to assert their rights to marry who they wanted to. In 1932, Salvador Roldan sued the State of California for the right to marry his English wife. He pointed out that the law specified “Mongolians” and that Filipinos were “Malay.” He won, but lawmakers quickly added “Malay” to the law.
The constitutionality of anti-miscegenation laws only began to be widely called into question after World War II. In 1948, the California Supreme Court in Perez v. Sharp ruled that the Californian anti-miscegenation statute violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. California was the first state since Ohio in 1887 to repeal its anti-miscegenation law.
One political theorist, Hannah Arendt, believes that anti-miscegenation laws were an even deeper injustice than racial segregation. The free choice of a spouse, she argued in Reflections on Little Rock, was "an elementary human right": "Even political rights, like the right to vote, and nearly all other rights enumerated in the Constitution, are secondary to the inalienable human rights to 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence; and to this category the right to home and marriage unquestionably belongs."
It was not until 1967, during the height of the civil rights movement, that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Loving v. Virginia case that anti-miscegenation laws were unconstitutional. At that time, 38 states in the U.S. had formal laws on their books that prohibited non-Whites from marrying Whites.
Before the case escalated to the U.S. Supreme Court, in 1965, Virginia trial court Judge Leon Bazile, who heard their original case, refused to reconsider his decision. Instead, he defended racial segregation, writing, "Almighty God created the races White, Black, Yellow, and Red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix."
When the U.S. Supreme Court heard the case, they ruled unanimously in Loving v. Virginia, stating, "Marriage is one of the 'basic civil rights of man,' fundamental to our very existence and survival.... To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not to marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State."
The U.S. Supreme Court condemned Virginia's anti-miscegenation law as "designed to maintain White supremacy."
Statistics today show that U.S.-raised Filipino Americans have a very high level of intermarriage with people of other races, which would not even be possible if anti-miscegenation laws were still in effect. It is important to remember these lessons in order to prevent injustices like these from continuing.
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