Interracial Intimacies

Salon has an article by Joan Walsh on “interracial intimacy,” and especially on Randall Kennedy’s new book on that topic. Though Walsh is at least somewhat guarded on the idea that miscegenation will somehow solve America’s racial problems, the main contention in her article is that blacks, rather than whites, are the ones responsible today for opposing interracial sex, marriage and relationships. I’m sorry, but this is yet another example of a sincere white liberal blaming the victims of racism for racism’s perpetuation….

Salon has an article by Joan Walsh on “interracial intimacy,” and especially on Randall Kennedy’s new book on that topic. Though Walsh is at least somewhat guarded on the idea that miscegenation will somehow solve America’s racial problems, the main contention in her article is that blacks, rather than whites, are the ones responsible today for opposing interracial sex, marriage and relationships. I’m sorry, but this is yet another example of a sincere white liberal blaming the victims of racism for racism’s perpetuation….

“Get too close to the fiery eruptions of toxic, black double standards on race,” Walsh writes, and you will get burned.”

Walsh speaks as a white person who was once married to a Jew, and who is now dating a black man. She admits that “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.” Yet she continues to harp on black opposition to intermarriage with whites; she even says that “racist whites and some supposedly enlightened civil rights advocates have traded places”; the former supporting interracial sex (like Strom Thurmond, who had a daughter with a black woman), while the latter try to keep the race pure.

Walsh proclaims that she is trying not to take rejection by black people personally, she obviously does: “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.” This is really just the same resentful reaction as that of “angry white men” who take it personally when feminists denounce male domination in the household or the workplace, or any other sort of inequality between the genders. The “how dare you accuse me!” reaction takes the place of any critical understanding of social hierarchies and norms.

I can get as personal as Walsh–since I’m a white Jewish man married to a black woman, and with a black child–but I won’t. I’ll just observe that insidious racial hierarchies, and the fantasies constructed around them, aren’t abolished just by people having sex across racial lines. In fact, interracial sex is one of the places where such hierarchies and fantasies get most fully played out. That in this context, there is no equivalence between white racism, on one hand, and a silly article in Essence (quoted almost obsessively by Walsh) urging black men to date black women on the other.

The most offensive thing about the article, however, is how Walsh responds to Randall Kennedy’s book. She is pleased that Kennedy is, on balance, pro- rather than anti-“interracial intimacies.” Her tone in saying this is condescending to the extreme. It is as if she were saying, ‘thank God we finally have a sensible, moderate Negro, instead of all those racist-in-reverse rabble-rousers.’ Such an attitude is itself evidence that white supremacy is still a big problem in America, no matter how much people deny it; since even a sincere, well-intentioned, cross-racially-intimate liberal like Walsh is not exempt from it.

I’m not calling names here, or trying to trash Ms. Walsh; rather, I am trying to point out that racism is structural in American society, and good intentions by themselves are not enough to eliminate it.