Admixture

One day, while at the drugstore, I came across a flyer on "navigating sexual wellness." Ho, hum. What interested me about it was the photograph of a twenty-something couple on the front of the flyer. It was a mixed-race couple; he was Black, she was White.

I always find it interesting when businesses (in this case, a national pharmacy chain) prominently feature mixed race couples in their advertising and other materials. Mainly because I'm old enough to remember when this sort of thing was somewhere between vanishingly rare and completely unheard of. The implication that two people of different racial backgrounds were a couple, let alone having sex, came across as something of a taboo when I was a child. (Keep in mind that Loving v. Virginia, which struck down anti-miscegenation laws, was decided only the year before I was born.) Of course, it wasn't an ironclad social prohibition; there was the occasional mixed couple on television when I was growing up. But even after I was out of college, mixed marriages had yet to gain full acceptance.

Nearly I'm well into middle-age, and mixed couples with a Black man and a White woman have become something of a diversity cliché. This is, I suppose, because they're one of the more common visibly mixed-race couples that one is likely to encounter, despite the fact that there are still undercurrents of disapproval to that specific pairing in both the Black and White communities. I don't pretend to understand all of the reasons why, but matters of identity and presence seem to play a leading role when people push back.

I do find myself curious as to how other people see mixed-race couples in advertising. They stand out for me, because for much of my life, they simply weren't present. I don't expect to see such portrayals, and so they catch my attention. I would presume that for people younger than myself, "Gen Z" and perhaps Millennials, they might simply fade into the background, as unremarkable as any other advertisement. If that's the case, I suspect that the number, and types, of mixed-race couples in advertising will grow. As long as the practice stays out of the Culture Wars, that is. And who knows what the thing to be sucked into that teapot tempest will be.