Virginia, the Supreme Court case that struck down laws prohibiting interracial marriage, centered on the union of a white man and a black woman.
They don’t resent de Blasio’s marriage to a black woman they resent a culture that offers that relationship public acknowledgement and legitimacy. The people with “conventional views,” as described by Cohen, don’t actually gag at the sight of the union that produced Dante de Blasio they gag at the type that produced Barack Obama. Theodore Bilbo, the segregationist governor of Mississippi, died a year before the Dixiecrat Party’s founding, but not before he penned a treatise with the none-too-subtle title “Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization.” The super-majority in the Gallup poll is exactly the outcome the Dixiecrats presciently warned would be the byproduct of desegregation, and took as their rationale for existence. But they do represent a thread connecting the politics of the past to those of the present-and it is easy to imagine the view of the embattled minority on this subject feeding the kinds of cultural resentments that have helped fuel the Tea Party’s emergence. The views Cohen ascribed to Tea Partiers aren’t “conventional” they’re antediluvian, a brand of racism that is still running the old operating system. A top-rated network television show features a philandering President and his P.R.-maven mistress, and viewers care more about the amorality of its characters than about the interracial relationship at its core. In fact, I exult in them.”)Įarlier this year, Gallup reported that eighty-seven per cent of Americans saw no problem with blacks and whites getting married. I don’t have a problem with interracial marriage or same-sex marriage. (After the uproar, Cohen told the Washington Post, “What I was doing was expressing not my own views but those of extreme right-wing Republican tea party people.
What makes this interesting is that Cohen is simultaneously right and deeply wrong, in ways that he likely didn’t suspect, and that have serious implications for our current politics. To cultural conservatives, this doesn’t look like their country at all. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?) This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts - but not all - of America. People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York - a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. Today’s GOP is not racist, as Harry Belafonte alleged about the tea party, but it is deeply troubled - about the expansion of government, about immigration, about secularism, about the mainstreaming of what used to be the avant-garde.