As a descendant of slaves and slaveholders, I embody uncomfortable incongruities — just as America does. In “Notes on the State of Virginia,” Thomas Jefferson wrote with anguish about the risks of amalgamation, or interracial sex, to a new nation. Whites were “stained” when they mixed with blacks, whom he speculated were inferior in mind and form.

There was a Strom Thurmond-esque artificiality to this cry for racial purity. Southern patriarchs made an art out of objecting to what was happening under their own noses — or pelvises. As history would prove, human urges, whether violent or amorous, inevitably muddy lines, and master-slave rape and coupling produced many mixed people.

Today, the “ardent integrators” who pursue interracial relationships are motivated by love and are our greatest hope for racial understanding. Although America is in a state of toxic polarity, I am optimistic. Through intimacy across racial lines, a growing class of whites has come to value and empathize with African-Americans and other minorities. They are not dismantling white supremacy so much as chipping away at it.

Fifty years ago next week, on June 12, 1967, Mildred and Richard Loving won their landmark Supreme Court case, Loving v. Virginia, ending state bans on interracial marriage. Mildred was a homemaker of indigenous and black heritage, cast as a Negro by Jim Crow. Richard was a white brick mason who drag-raced cars with similarly mixed-race friends. They lived in Central Point, a rural hamlet with a history of racial mixing that began in the colonial era, and they were considered felons under Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924.