Mixed couples in old-time Phoenix


I thought about titling this "Biracial couples in old-time Phoenix", but to me that doesn't really make any sense, as I know that the concept of race is an imaginary one, and that there is only one race, the human race. But I've known a lot of people who disagree with me, and today I'm pondering mixed race couples.

As as someone who was a teenager in Minneapolis in the '70s, mixed race couples were not unusual for me to see. There were a lot at my high school, and while it may have outraged the older generation, to me it didn't get a second glance. When I moved to California, in the 1980s, I saw a lot of mixed race couples, myself included (I'm a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, but some of my girlfriends weren't).

When I moved back to Phoenix in 1989, I prepared myself for a more, uh, traditional point of view. And I've been trying to understand.

Nowadays, of course, mixed couples, whether of ethnicity or religion, are pretty much taken for granted. But in 1994 when I did the Art Direction for the new Bank One brochures, which included something that puzzled a lot of people back then, diversity, although I was able to hire models who were Black, or Hispanic, or Native American, or Asian, I wasn't ever allowed to mix them as couples. I was told specifically that that was a no-no. Of course, if it had been up to me, I would have mixed them all up, but these brochures represented a very conservative business, a bank, so that was simply out of the question. Was 1994 really that long ago?


Other than my models for the Hispanic photoshoots, who were married, mostly I had to match up couples that would be photogenic, and look appropriate together. I distinctly remember that my female Asian model did not like the husband that I chose for her, and thought that I would be better (she really did say that!). I would have done that in a heartbeat, but if I did a mixed couple, it would have cost me my job, so I didn't.

I do try to be fair from an historical perspective. "Staying with your own kind" was something that many families just took for granted, and there were even laws against marrying someone outside of your race. You can Google miscegenation if you want to learn more about it.

When people look back on this, many times they simply want to pretend it never existed, but it did. And to me it gives me a feeling of hope for the future.
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