American love stories have a default race: white. If the love story is “interracial,” one person is white, and the other person is not. In a standard American rom-com, the only nonwhite characters are the white lead’s helpful best friends or underwritten colleagues. Quincy, a Black man, and I, a South Asian woman, are none of these things. “All I could think on the way here is when am I going to kiss you,” Quincy told me one day in 2009, three weeks after we had met.
But it was the civil rights movement led by Black Americans that truly gave these newcomers a shot at a more humane, equitable life here. And yet if it weren’t for Loving Day, I’m not sure I would have been aware of the Lovings as civil rights pioneers. It was Quincy who pointed me to their story.