Mr. Speaker, some 31 years ago I sat down with my father to inform him that I had made a decision to be married. I had actually proposed to my fiancé, who became my husband. My father asked me if I had thought seriously about it, and I asked him why? My father said to me, “The young man you want to marry is white. Have you thought about the consequences of an interracial marriage in this day and age?” I am talking about the end of 1973.
I said it was not a problem. There was not really any discrimination against interracial couples, but it started me thinking. It became a defining moment in my life because my parents were an interracial couple. My mother, who was deceased at that time, was white. She was French Canadian from Manitoba, the daughter of a Belgian woman who had come to Canada with her family under the Homestead Act and a francophone Manitoban whose original roots were in Quebec.
It amazed me that my father, who was an African-American born in Alabama, raised under Jim Crow laws, emigrated to Canada in the mid 1940s when Jim Crow laws--