Seeing Race Through a Liberal Lens

Jason Riley is a black editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal. He has experienced the focus on race and finds that Liberals are more race conscious that Conservatives.

Your wife, who unlike you is white, and who is expecting your first child, has been receiving the oddest reactions to the news of her pregnancy. Upon finding out, friends can't resist informing her that "interracial children are beautiful." It's said in a tone that suggests deep gratitude and admiration, although the reasons are a little unclear.

The comment may be kindly meant, as a sort of reflexive compliment, but it inevitably suggests that she is being congratulated for her willingness to place the aesthetic enhancement of the populace above the imperatives of racial purity. She's heard the remark, or some variation of it, from a dozen different people if she's heard it from one. And more often than not, your wife tells you, it's the first thing they blurt out, even before asking about gender and due dates.

Wondering how to respond, your wife turns to you for advice. You mull it over and begin rationalizing. These are friends, after all, who bear no ill-will. And while you find the comments more revealing than crude, you don't doubt your friends' sincerity. You advise the mother-to-be to laugh it off.

A short time later, at a wedding reception in London, your wife finds herself chatting with a Danish woman she has just met. Back at the hotel, your wife informs you that the woman asked her, "How do you feel about having a baby who will look nothing like you? I have a lot of friends who have interracial babies, and they feel totally alienated from their children."

Wondering whether to expect more such questions and how to respond, your wife turns to you for advice. You tell her to avoid Scandinavian women for the balance of her pregnancy (and you promise to do the same).

* * *
It's no surprise that these comments all came from white people; surveys have long demonstrated that blacks are much more accommodating of interracial relationships. More noteworthy is that in all but a couple of cases, the remarks came from white people parked on the political left, the kind of superior folks who might run you down in their Prius for even suggesting that they harbor racial hang-ups. As liberals constantly tell themselves, only conservatives have race issues.

But you know the truth is closer to the opposite. It is the left's obsession with skin pigmentation -- invoking it everywhere and always, regardless of its relevance -- that keeps race front and center not only in our public policy debates but even in everyday life. In his latest book, "White Guilt," Shelby Steele tackles this phenomenon with his usual peerless eloquence. He describes the endless frustration of dealing with whites "who have built a large part of their moral identity and, possibly, their politics around how they respond to your color."

* * *
Last year, you and your wife quit Brooklyn for a shady cul-de-sac in a hamlet on the Hudson River, 45 minutes north of New York City. Two months after you settled in, you attended a Christmas party up the block, where a woman welcomed you to the neighborhood by saying, "I'm sure you chose our town for its diversity. That's what we like about it." Another chimed in, "Jason, you obviously believe in diversity. I mean, you're in an interracial marriage."

Ignoring the last comment, you smiled and told them that your decision was based on the fact that you couldn't afford properties in the more expensive (and less "diverse") adjacent towns, which you heard had better schools. You were half joking, but judging by their expressions your new neighbors weren't amused.

More recently, you and your wife attended an engagement party in Greenwich Village for a longtime friend, and you spent the latter part of the evening talking to the future father-in-law. He's a corporate lawyer in the Midwest, and the conversation moves genially from parenting to taxes and tort reform -- topics that interest him and that you cover as a Journal editorialist. Realizing you'd monopolized him long enough, you begin to excuse yourself. You congratulate him once again and sing the praises of your friend's parents, generous and thoughtful people whom you and your wife have gotten to know quite well over the years.

But before you can break free, the man moves closer and says that he has a personal query. He asks how you can be such good friends with this family his daughter is marrying into, "given that you're black and they're conservative. Doesn't that bother you? How do you deal with that?"

You know the answer probably isn't in your cocktail, but you stare at the glass you're holding long enough for him to regret the line of questioning. He starts apologizing. You instinctively tell him he's done nothing wrong. Having been raised to behave a certain way in public, and unable to respond in kind without betraying that upbringing, you mumble something about his premise being off-base and then say you have to check on your spouse, who's somewhere heavy with your beautiful child. You walk away.

Wondering whether to expect more such questions and how to respond, you turn to your wife for advice. She advises you fetch the coats so that you two can go home.