Nick Kristoff makes the strategic error of writing something offbeat today. The whole column is about how we need to have more interracial love affairs on the big screen. Maybe we do, maybe we don’t. Who knows? But his discussion seems to omit entirely the 1970s, 80s and 90s. I mean Jungle Fever was over a decade ago, right? There’s also no mention of Save the Last Dance. Plus how you can talk about interracial canoodling without mentioning Star Trek’s notorious Kirk-Uhuru lip-lock is beyond me (several Southern stations dropped the show when they did it. Muckling with green chicks was no problem though).
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.