Site Presented By
Friday, Jul 10, 2009
Will the civil rights battle finally be won in bed?
Feb 5, 2003 | One of George W. Bush's biggest campaign blunders was his February 2000 visit to South Carolina's Bob Jones University, a bastion of the segregationist South that had finally admitted some students of color, but still banned interracial dating. Critics had a clear shot at Bush, whose own brother Jeb could have fallen victim to the university's invidious rule, since his wife Colomba is Mexican (producing three mixed-race grandchildren whom the first President Bush famously called "the little brown ones.") "You could make the case that 'compassionate conservatism' died Feb. 2 when Bush appeared at Bob Jones U," conservative William Kristol fulminated. Of course, the beleaguered GOP candidate had to denounce the school's interracial-dating ban, and soon even benighted Bob Jones U. did away with it, too.
Nowadays, with the president's brother a miscegenationist, and the right's favorite black man, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, married to a white woman, it's hard to find anybody who will publicly attack interracial romance, beyond the fringes of white supremacist Web sites -- and, of course, the popular black media. Take November's Essence magazine, a glossy geared to black women, which featured a major spread headlined "Bring me home a black girl" by contributing editor Audrey Edwards, laying out how and why she's indoctrinated her stepson not to date white women.
Edwards, a respected, veteran journalist, is unapologetic about her racially biased home training. "For Black women, one of the inequities on the current playing field has been the rate at which Black men are marrying outside their race," she says. Too many black men think they're marrying up socially by marrying out racially, Edwards believes, so it's up to black moms to convince their sons by any means necessary -- including guilt, shame and ostracism -- not to date white.
I tried not to take Edwards' piece personally, but it was hard, because I'm one of the race mixers; I have intermingled, interdated, intermarried. My ex-husband, still a close friend, is Jewish, my boyfriend is black, as are several of my best female friends. I know from experience: Get too close to the fiery eruptions of toxic, black double standards on race, and you will get burned. The first time I encountered the old "I like whites just fine -- but I wouldn't want my brother to marry one" hypocrisy, it felt like I'd been slapped. Over the years I've come to see that as a minority sentiment in the black community, and despite stories about angry sisters harassing white woman-black man couples, by far the worst treatment I've encountered as a result of being with a black man -- dirty looks, nasty comments, rudeness -- has been from whites.
Still, it's stating the obvious to observe that no mainstream magazine today would publish a comparable piece by a Caucasian mom exhorting her son to "Bring me home a white girl!" (However, Jews are allowed to voice such misgivings publicly; convicted Iran-Contra felon Elliott Abrams developed a sideline as a crusader against Jewish intermarriage before Bush hired him as the National Security Council's director of Middle Eastern policy. Even after the Bob Jones debacle, nobody from the administration asked Abrams to renounce his stand against Jews marrying non-Jews, but I'll get to that later.) Yet black-oriented magazines and Web sites continue to clamor with a debate over interracial romance that's alternately infuriating and poignant -- and also on a collision course with demography.
In a recent Gallup/USA Today poll, 57 percent of teenagers said they'd dated someone from another race, up from 17 percent just 20 years ago. The number of interracial marriages has more than doubled in that same period, and while blacks are still less likely to marry outside their race than other minority groups, the number of black-white marriages has almost tripled. Maybe most remarkable, because Edwards is right that the trend has favored black men, the number of black women marrying white men has more than quadrupled, while the number of black men with white wives only doubled. In 1998, black-white couples in which the wife is black made up 37 percent of all black-white marriages nationwide, up from only 22 percent in 1980. It's not 50-50 parity yet, but at that rate of change, we'll get there soon. Race-mixing is clearly the future, and the more I looked at the data, the more I felt sympathy for Edwards, rather than resentment, because she's clearly clinging to a bygone past.
But when it comes to race, the past is never very far away. Beneath a discussion marked by surface consensus -- Of course we can all get along! I mean, Justin Timberlake dated Janet Jackson after Britney! -- roils confusion and rancor. Now along comes Randall Kennedy and his new book "Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity and Adoption," whose tone, against all odds, is scholarly, sober, even soothing. Kennedy's great accomplishment is his exhaustive recounting of the history of interracial intimacy in America -- from slavery and Jim Crow through the civil rights movement, up to Spike Lee's "Jungle Fever," interracial adoption battles and even online dating today. He clears up some misconceptions about famous folks who did or didn't have interracial dalliances -- Booker T. Washington probably didn't, despite some claims to the contrary, but Strom Thurmond did. Yes, the man whose segregationist run for the White House in 1948 cost Trent Lott his Senate leadership 55 years later almost certainly fathered a child with his family's black maid, Kennedy concludes -- a fact that was revealed in Marilyn Thompson and Jack Bass' biography, "Ol' Strom," but was barely mentioned during the national conversation on race that ensued after Lott's racist remarks at Thurmond's centennial.
Having looked at all sides of this historical morality play, the black Harvard Law School professor takes a strong and bracing pro-mixing stance: "The flowering of multiracial intimacy is a profoundly moving and encouraging development ... It signals that formal and informal racial boundaries are fading." One can share Kennedy's racial openness and optimism and still be skeptical, though: Does interracial intimacy herald the end of racism?
We don't know -- yet -- but Kennedy's book gets us closer to an answer. He offers tantalizing hints of the way psychosexual issues and economic ones combined to create the taboo against miscegenation, and he tackles related questions that emerge from our new interracial alliances. Are black men (and now, maybe, black women) ever trying to marry up when they marry out -- and is that ever OK? Is interracial intimacy an engine of racial progress, an indicator of it, both, or neither? And is there ever a case for racial solidarity, for discouraging cross-racial intimacy, whether in dating, marriage or adoption?
Kennedy knows exactly how complicated those questions are, and he grapples with all of them -- always sympathetically, occasionally a little naively. I scoured the Web to find out if he's married to a white woman, and was relieved to learn his wife is black -- then ashamed of my relief -- but not particularly surprised. He sometimes seems a visitor in the land of interracial romance, but mostly that makes for interesting observations. Sadly, given how polarizing this debate can be, it actually matters that Kennedy isn't justifying his own choice of a white wife, that he doesn't particularly have a stake in this battle. That is, beyond the stake all of us have: to create a prosperous multiracial democracy unblemished by the tragic inequities between blacks and whites -- in family income, in education, in health, in crime statistics, on virtually every major indicator of well-being we use -- that persist to this day, even as we intermarry and congratulate ourselves for it.
