Wedding Band was a tragic play written by Alice Childress about the taboo relationship between a black woman and a white man. Near the end of WWI in South Carolina where anti-miscegenation laws are in full effect. A forbidden love, Herman tries to stabilize himself so that he and his partner, Julia, can move North and legally get married.
This play gives an intimate look into early twentieth century racism in portions of America. Far from a history buff, I don’t know that I ever realized the severity of legislature in America even within the last century. I mean, in today’s society, it just seems crazy that my grandparents lived in a time where it was illegal for a consenting male and female to be joined together legally in marriage. I had always known that the black civil rights movement was slow to take off, but banning interracial marriage sounds like a pretty feudal concept.
I can’t claim Wedding Band revealing part of a timeline of racist legislature as changing my view of racism in America, that’s more on me and my personal lack of knowledge. I do think it’s worth mentioning though; as sad as it is, I’m probably not the only person.
The real eye-opening aspect of Wedding Band is the racism that you see, but did not necessarily expect. Wedding Band does an excellent job of removing the filter in its snapshot of early 1900s society. Rather than a simple, snide and pretentious white population that would have made an excellent romantic setting for an interracial relationship, Childress fills every character with a prejudice and that is shown in dialogue and story line throughout the play. Black people throughout the story exhibit racism against not only white people, but Jews, Germans and Asian Americans.
It seems naive, now that I think about it, but I guess I would have hoped that a group of people that had been on the wrong side of a ridiculous basis for judgement, that the African American population would not have passed judgement on an entire race. Now that I think about it, it makes a whole heck of a lot of sense. Hostility breeds more hostility and if people live in a society where racism is the norm, it is unfair to expect anything less from much of the population.
Wedding Band opened my eyes to the entirety of racism in a society. How the hatred can permeate every ethnic and socioeconomic group. It’s depressing, disappointing and it isn’t much in terms of a happy read, but if there’s a bright side to this realization, and I sincerely hope that there is; It would be that if the idea of racism can be adopted so fully by civilization, then so can the idea of universal equality. Several positive steps forward have been made in the past century in the civil rights department and hopefully they continue to develop.
Who knows? Maybe in a few years, people will be writing about how crazy it is that marriage wasn’t acceptable in 2010 and look back at today in disbelief. That’s a whole separate topic, one that I probably won’t delve into this week.
Certainly something to think about!
I didn’t realize the severity of the laws back then dealing with the interracial relationship laws either until I read this play. I do not have an interest in history so a lot of this information was new to me too. It is hard to believe that this wasn’t that long ago. Only two generations before us and now it is something we don’t even think about for the most part. We see interracial couples all of the time and it is seen as a normal thing. Back then it was outlawed that is crazy to me too.
ReplyDeleteThe racism was spread out in this play and like you said it wasn’t just aimed at one culture. It was also uncensored and it showed the real emotion of the heat of the moment. Nothing was held back and the mom and Julia had a hell of a confrontation.