Interracial Love
Monday, April 25, 2005
Nick Kristoff of the (free [for a while] sub. req.) New York Times takes on the lack of interracial relationships in Hollywood films and manages to make a message of inclusion disclusionary. Leave it to a squishy New York lib to screw up a good message.From the piece:
Back in 1967, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner helped chip away at taboos by showing a black man and white woman scandalizing their parents with their - chaste - love. In 2005 we have a new version of Guess Who, but it only underscores how little progress we've made.
The latest Guess Who is about a white man in love with a black woman, and that's a comfortable old archetype from days when slave owners inflicted themselves on slave women. Hollywood has portrayed romances between white men and (usually light-complexioned) black women, probably calculating that any good ol' boy seeing Billy Bob Thornton embracing Halle Berry in Monster's Ball is filled not with disgust but with envy.
While I agree 110% with Jonah Goldberg's Corner critique of Mr. Kristoff's reasoning:
Moreover, while I agree that the rate of interracial marriage is an important and revealing statistic about race-relations, a more heroic approach would be to question the left's insistence that any product of a white-black interracial union must be black. It is, as Stephen Thernstrom noted long ago, the most bizarre reiteration of the old racist one-drop rule in "progressive" clothing.
...it is the section I quoted above that I believe holds the most hair-raising stupidity.
A white man in love with a black woman, in 2005!, is an "archetype from days of slave owners?" How the hell am I supposed to know what it is like to be a slave owner; slavery ended over 140 years ago! Am I to believe that all white man - black woman love today is simply an unconscience yearning for the days of slavery? I have always found the protestations that conservative blacks and Jews are "self-hating" - along with being off-base - to be quite silly. Now, I'm beginning to wonder. Is it possible for a white man to so hate other white men that he can write such drivel?
Just to correct a little history, let's fly with that "Kirk-Uhuru lip-lock" that Jonah mentioned (What, you didn't read Jonah's post?) In interviews included in the Star Trek DVD Box Set, both the creator of Star Trek (Gene Roddenberry) and the actress who played "Uhuru" (Nichelle Nichols) have denied that there was any major backlash against that famous scene.
Mr. Roddenberry has stated in an interview that the show did not receive ONE SINGLE letter protesting that scene. Miss Nichols contradicts her old boss slightly, but only slightly. She states that she received only one letter relating to that scene, and it was of the "I don't like race mixing but what is a red-blooded Kirk supposed to do with such a pretty lady" variety.
I do agree with one thing about Mr. Kristoff's column, he targets the right community (or should I say left?) While left-wing Hollywood has failed to join us in the Twenty-First Century, a very conservative portion of the United States has: our military. I'm sure that it may seem counter-intuitive to that poor New York mind of Mr. Kristoff's, but the rates of interracial marriage by members of the military far outpace that of the rest of the population.
How can that be? How can all of those racist, right-wing yahoos in the military be so "progressive." Maybe it's because the left isn't quite so progressive after all?
UPDATE 4/25 @ 2:53: I should have kept reading. Mr. Goldberg's very next post takes on the same portion of Mr. Kristoff's column that mine does. Great minds think alike?
UPDATE 4/25 @ 3:03: The Corner is a font of wisdom on this column. From John Miller:
The irony is, if the gender roles were reversed -- i.e., the movie featured a black man and a white woman -- some NYT columnist would tell us how this feeds into white sexual paranoia that has its origins on the plantation. But then this is the liberal burden. When the rest of us see the possibility for an amusing comedy at a time when racial tolerance never has been greater, and can rejoice in the humor of a black man putting down a white whippersnapper, liberals see black people and think of slavery.
