USA: Breaking The Last Racial Taboo

You may remember Booker Rising highlighting controversy over Bill de Blasio's campaign literature for his Public Advocate campaign in New York City, which micro-targeted black neighborhoods using his black wife. Well, Politico.com highlights interracial relationships in the political landscape (hat tip: Christine Byington). With U.S. President Barack Obama having rewritten the history of race relations in this country, Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat, may be demolishing one of its last taboos, “For so long in American history, interracial couples went out of their way to keep their relationships out of the public eye that it’s remarkable to see them used in a campaign like this,” said Peggy Pascoe, a historian of interracial marriage at the University of Oregon, who referred to the campaign as “a post-Obama phenomenon.” That’s a perception that Chirlane McCray, the wife of Mr. de Blasio, said she shared. President Obama, she said, “opened a door” and “made it easier for us to go there.”

While Mr. de Blasio’s success in New York City reflects the increased acceptance of mixed marriages, recent history suggests that the new tolerance may still be dependent on geography and race. A sharp counterpoint was the 2006 U.S. Senate race in Tennessee which then-Rep. Harold Ford, a black Democrat, lost narrowly to Republican Bob Corker after the final days of the campaign were consumed by a Republican National Committee ad linking Mr. Ford to a scantily clad young blond woman. Mr. Ford’s allies charged it was a thinly veiled attempt to tap into old Southern fears about black men and white women. And it seems to be a current that still remains just below the surface in Tennessee politics: Mr. Ford’s subsequent marriage to a white woman (pictured) was widely viewed as a major barrier to another run.

Gallup surveys indicate that only 48% of Americans approved of marriage between blacks and whites as recently as 1994, a number that had risen to 77% by 2007.

Other barriers fell long ago: Phil Gramm, for example, a prominent conservative elected to both the House and Senate from Texas, is married to woman of Korean heritage who was born in Hawaii. This year, in deeply conservative South Carolina, state Sen. Nikki Haley (R-S.C., pictured), who is of East Indian descent, has put her husband, who is considered white, and their children front and center in her campaign for governor. “It’s a total nonissue,” said her spokesman, Tim Pearson.

For Mr. de Blasio, his family seemed to serve two political purposes: establishing his credibility with black voters, and projecting the image for all voters of a candidate suited to the Obama era. Mr. de Blasio said that he had little choice about projecting his family. “This is literally who I am, and these are the most important people in my life, and my life revolves around them. My wife is my partner in everything,” he said.

Mr. de Blasio's efforts to make his family a kind of symbolic coalition drew some resistance. A black nationalist city councilman, Charles Barron, called his mailing “disgraceful” and “an insult to the black community.” Rival campaigns, meanwhile, were unsure of what to make of it. A senior aide to one rival said they tested Mr. de Blasio’s mailings in a focus group and left hoping that voters would find the appeal “crass.” On the campaign trail, though, the reception was overwhelmingly positive, Ms. McCray said in an interview. “People loved the literature. Some people have it hanging in their living rooms,” she said.

Mr. De Blasio, who is expected to win handily against a token opponent in next month’s general election, declined to offer a simple lesson from his win. “We’re not in post-racial politics, but we’re in a politics of racial possibility,” he said. “Our obligation is to keep pushing it...to keep trying all the permutations of it.”