“Can be, will be, whatever. Young lady, are you splitting hairs with me?”
“No.”
“Good. Now, I see you are under indictment for Discrimination and Conspiracy.”
“Conspiracy? All we wanted to do was get married.”
“Which is against the law. Surely you knew that or you wouldn’t have gone to the Marital Law Administration in the first place.”
“We were trying to get a special license.”
“Precisely. And what is that if not trying to evade the Melanin Redistribution Act which prohibits black intramarriage? The mere presence of you two in line A21 is in itself evidence of a conspiracy to circumvent the provisions of the Melanin Hoarding Ban.”
“But we were trying to obey the law!”
“That makes it even worse. The law is a just master, but it can be harsh with those who try to sabotage its spirit by hypocritically observing its letter. However, I’m going to delay sentencing on Conspiracy and Hoarding because we have an even more serious charge to deal with here.”
“Sentencing? We haven’t even been convicted yet.”
“Young lady, are you splitting hairs with me?”
“No.”
“Good. Now let’s move on to the Discrimination charge. Deep issues are involved here. You two aren’t old enough to remember the Jim Crow Days in the South, when blacks weren’t permitted to swim in the public pools. But I remember. Do you know what Discrimination is?”
“I read about it in school.”
“Well, then you know that it is wrong. And blacks who don’t marry whites are denying them the right to swim in their gene pool. Discriminating against them.”
“Nobody’s denying anybody the right to do anything! I just want to marry Yusef.”
“That’s a conveniently simplistic way of looking at things, isn’t it? But it won’t wash in a court of law. You can’t marry Yusef without refusing to marry Tom, Dick, or Harry. It’s the same difference. If you marry a black person, you are denying a white person the right to marry you; and that’s a violation of his rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. Do you recognize those two pictures on the wall?”
“Sure. Martin Luther King and John Kennedy.”
“John F. Kennedy. Somehow your generation has lost sight of the ideals they died for. Let me pose a purely hypothetical question—would it be fair to have a society in which one racial grouping, such as yours, had special rights and privileges denied to the rest of us?”
“It never bothered anybody before.”
“Are you getting smart?”
“No. But what about the Fourteenth Amendment? Doesn’t it apply to me?”
“Certainly it does. To you as an individual, and to your young man as well. But as African Americans you are more than just individuals; you are also a precious natural treasure.”
“Huh?”
“Under the Melanin Heritage Act, your genetic material is a national resource, which America is now claiming for all its people, not just for a privileged few. It is the same genetic material that was brought across the ocean (bought and paid for, I might add) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.”
“But the slaves were freed.”
“And their descendants as well. But genetic material, being immortal, can be neither slave nor free. It is an irreplaceable natural resource, like the forests or the air we breathe. And whether you kids like it or not, the old days when our resources were squandered and hoarded by special interests are over. Your genetic heritage is a part of the priceless national endowment of every man, woman, and child in America, not just your private property to dispose of as you please. Am I making myself clear?”
“I guess.”
“You guess! Would it be fair to have an African American child born double M; while a white child, denied his or her Melanin Birthright, was doomed to twice the chance of skin cancer and god-knows-what-else?”
“Nobody ever worried about white kids being born with twice everything before.”