For centuries, one of the great fears from racists was the specter of interracial relationships. Racists in the post-Civil War era worked strenuously to enshrine anti-miscegenation laws. The 1921 Constitution and Laws of the Ku Klux Klan called for adherents to “avow the distinction between the races”; the infamously racist Birth of a Nation was based on the fear of the rape of white women by black men; modern era KKK fliers complain about “THE ULTIMATE ABOMINATION … miscegenation, which decrees the death of a Race … Race-mixing is against God’s law.”
This sort of disgusting propaganda has, thank God, fallen out of fashion.
Except on the Left.
Today, over at Jezebel, this headline actually ran: “I’m tired of watching brown men fall in love with white women onscreen.” This is pretty incredible stuff. Why in the world would it be so terrible for a person with one skin color to fall in love with a person of a different skin color? In fact, the Left has been generating trumped-up headlines about supposed conservative objections to Cheerios commercials and Old Navy commercials and State Farm commercials. The Left can’t come up with any legitimate sources who actually object to these commercials, so instead they find random Twitter followers and build a story out of them.
But Jezebel is a relatively mainstream Leftist outlet. There, Aditi Natasha Kini writes:
The Big Sick has been roundly lauded in the press lately, including here at Jezebel, and not without good reason: it’s a funny, heartwarming love story based on the true-life experiences of cowriters/married couple Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon. But as much as I liked it — and I did — I also found myself exhausted, yet again, by the onscreen depiction of a brown man wanting to date a white woman, while brown women are portrayed alternately as caricatures, stereotypes, inconsequential, and/or the butts of a joke.
So the story is true and it’s still annoying to Kini. That’s because even using a white woman as a romantic lead means “in the complex hierarchy of power and race in America,” paying “lip-service to the one notion that has shaped the history of South Asian and American culture alike: Whiteness as the ultimate desire, the highest goal in defining oneself as an American.”
So racism against white women who have sex with brown men is fine, but racism against brown men who have sex with white women is taboo. As Kini says, “’Representation’ like this furthers white supremacy and does not engage with critiques of white allyship.” The only disagreement between Kini and the KKK isn’t on the appropriateness of interracial relationships, but on whether such relationships advance or inhibit white supremacy.
This seems odd, but intersectionality is essentially the flip side of white supremacy; interracial sex is a no-no because it might imply that separateness for non-white races is taboo. The only strange element here is that many on the Left fail to see their own hypocrisy when they don’t stand up to racism emanating from their own side.