Emhoff reflects on interracial marriage case: Without this ‘I would not be married to Kamala Harris’

Second gentleman Doug Emhoff reflected on the “powerful” impact of the Supreme Court landmark ruling in Loving v. Virginia legalizing interracial marriage, saying he would not have been married to Vice President Harris if not for that decision.

Emhoff could be seeing viewing the historic court documents from the case in a recent visit to the National Archives. 

“I gotta see this. … Geeking out as a lawyer on this one, hold on,” the second gentleman, an attorney who was also a partner at law firm DLA Piper in Los Angeles up until last year, said in a clip of the moment.

“For hundreds of years, you could not literally marry somebody that you loved because of their race. I would not be married to Kamala Harris but for that Supreme Court decision,” Emhoff, who has been married to Harris since 2014, said.

The nation’s first @SecondGentleman Douglas Emhoff got to touch a piece of U.S. history at the National Archives, where the landmark court ruling that legalized interracial marriage lives pic.twitter.com/uZIF0VgjHX

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) February 24, 2021

“I’ve worked on hundreds and hundreds of cases as a lawyer and you know what goes into these decisions and how much hard work and you see the lawyers and the efforts right there in front of you and then I’m living the decision,” he continued.

“So, it’s powerful. I know how we got here has been brutal and the history has been brutal, and we experience it viscerally all the time. But I really look at it as a time of celebration to celebrate excellence,” Emhoff said.

In footage of the visit obtained by NowThis, Emhoff could also be seen viewing the 13th Amendment signed by President Abraham Lincoln as well as documents detailing payments made to a slave owner for enslaved people to work on the “President’s House,” or the White House. 

Emhoff said the it was “really compelling” to see “the bill for the slaves who built the President’s House, the White House.”

“And you’re thinking now we’ve got a woman a woman of color, Kamala Harris, who’s vice president sitting in that office, in that house that was built by slaves,” he said. “And so you can see where we were and you can also see how far we’ve come.”

“But when you look around at what’s going on every day, you know we have a lot more to do and a lot more work to do. But by studying history and knowing where we’ve been, it might help us better get to where we need to be,” he added.

Harris in January became the first Black American, Asian American, and the first woman to assume the vice presidency.