On the news that I've been attached to the Rsspect Project, I found some interesting new blackified blogs. In Black in Business (hmm, why do you think I went there first?) we encounter the old Loving question:
He somehow felt this black white talk was upsetting because he married white. Now we are brothers and have always been close but I have to stop being my self because he has a white wife? This point to the tension black-white marriages can cause in families. It is becoming more and more normal. I found a site that puts humor in it. Check it out. To my little brother, I love you but that will not stop me from kicking your ass is you get upset over nothing again.
'Married White', now that's a phrase with legs.
Here in the Old School we have no particular difficulty with jungle fever. We neither encourage or discourage it. We only note with raised eyebrows that it takes a little extra gumption to handle the raised eyebrows.
Coming up in California, I never thought that the big deal was such a big deal. I basically had my first white girlfriend about the very same year I went to my first white school, so the question was pretty much settled in 1974 as to capability. But there is certainly an aesthetic debate which is worth engaging at the level of 'boys & girls', ie dating and sex.
As a rule, I don't much talk about dating and sex, and generally regard the entire dating and sex industry to be a huge luxurious waste of time. To the extent that America retains an ample sample of hardheaded highly functional individuals and collectives which attend to the business of the nation, and they are not falling off, by and large, then we can afford that huge luxurious waste of time. You won't catch me holding a picket sign outside of MTV headquarters but I don't let my kids watch it. So I basically don't care about people's dating and sex issues and problems and trends and all that rot. Let us recall Cobb's rule #2:
There is Marriage and there is everything else.
So how much does the color inflect the trajectory of the marriage. Well that depends entirely upon whether it is a good marriage. People try to knock the institution simply because they are incapable of handling its demands. That's kinda funny now that I think about it. How many people think that their college degrees are more important than their marital status. Damn, this is a big society. We can afford that too. Of course we conservatives remain amazed that things hold together, that's why we defend core principles to the bone. If we lost every university, we'd be better off than if we lost every marriage. The loss of the latter would send us more quickly to ape-like status than the loss of the former. But let me not rag on higher education. The point is that a good marriage can survive what have now become the trifles of class three racism.
I think it's important to recognize that the most essential principle that enabled the greatest threat to black progress and freedom has been eliminated. The phrase "We don't want them in our schools" has no social resonance today. The idea that blacks and whites shouldn't marry is essentially the complaint of (ahem) unattractive people who are looking for a racial lock on some quarter of the dating scene. Them and the Klan are equally weak. Even so, I don't think that there is anything socially superior or significant about an interracial marriage. I don't look at a black and white couple and say, my my how far we've come. It's a trailing indicator.
There are class issues and religious issues and regional issues, but these have always been the case in marriage since the days of King Arthur and before. Nothing new in that.
