My Thoughts on The FP's "Liberals Once Embraced Interracial Marriages Like Mine. What Changed?"

I'm white. My ex is black. Our kids are biracial. I'm left wondering at times if they doubt my love for them.

Last week I read an article in The Free Press called “Liberals Once Embraced Interracial Marriages Like Mine. What Changed?” It’s a good question. With a pretty easy answer.

Anti-racism happened. That’s what. (Which is basically the answer the writer, Paul Kix, provides.)

Like Kix, I have children from an interracial marriage. My first husband is black. We have two sons, both grown now. The oldest is 23. The younger one is 20. I’m so grateful I got married, birthed and mostly raised these boys before this anti-racism fever took hold. If my kids had been placed in affinity groups throughout elementary and middle school and constantly told that all white people are racist, would they have come home each day wondering if I really loved them? I honestly don’t know how or if I could have navigated it with the parent-child relationship in tact, as it is now.

Though my marriage didn’t survive, it ended for fairly mundane, very typical reasons. I don’t know if we would have made it quite so long if this divisive ideology had gained purchase in the mainstream sooner. I know for sure it would have made raising our mixed race children much more difficult.

I got married in 1999.

We had been together for 5 years at this point, and had lived together in our modest Gen X-y (that used to mean hip, not old) San Francisco apartment for 4 of them. When I met my ex I worked in an advertising agency and I made $16k a year. So that gives you a sense of how long ago it was. How different the world was. I was able to live in San Francisco, sharing an apartment with 3 other people, and feed myself, go to the club and pay rent for $16k/year.

We met in our early 20s. We had a whirlwind romance filled with the intensity of emotion that comes with first love and youthful idealism. We partook in the 1990s rave scene in San Francisco, we debated politics and stayed up all night just talking shit and pondering our futures — as individuals and as a couple.

Sometimes during our all night/late night fever dream sessions, he’d paint and I’d marvel. During the weekends he taught himself to program (as in computers) while I read novels, trying to make my way through the Modern Library List of the Best Novels of the 20th Century. He’d show me lines of code, which to me were indecipherable: Look, look how beautiful this is! How elegant! I’d nod, having no idea what I was looking at but wanting to seem supportive and then go back to my Willa Cather or Toni Morrison.

We were those people — I was pierced and tattooed with a new hair color every week and a yearning to be more than an assistant at an ad agency but with no idea what that more was; he was an artist and a dreamer and a scientist, all rolled into one. He was (and still is) a foot and a half taller than me which got us plenty of craned necks — more for that height differential than for being interracial.

We were mad with the freedom of being young, with our whole lives ahead of us, just waiting to be carved out of stone into the shape of something wild and real. It was glorious.

Most of my friends’ early 20-something romances didn’t survive past the age of 30. Mine did. He proposed on my 30th birthday and we got married in Philadelphia, my hometown, 6 months later. But, just like my friends’ relationships that didn’t survive the sheen of youth, mine disintegrated in my 40s. We held on longer than most everyone I knew, but suffered the same demise.

I got divorced in 2011 after more than a decade of marriage. We had a go. It didn’t work out, but it had nothing to do with race. Like many couples, we found ourselves wanting different things, each frustrated with the other, and we lost the ability to communicate and compromise. We were both angry and sad all the time.

Making the decision to leave my marriage was the saddest and hardest day of my life. It’s a brutal realization — that the future you imagined for yourself is no more, that the person you’ve given 16 years of your life to is not going to be the person you grow old with, that whatever love remains is not enough. And that there really isn’t another path (because you’ve exhausted them all already) but to leave and get through it.

And of course, there’s the fact that the kids you had together will grow up with divorced parents; and never forget the day you told them you wouldn’t be together anymore; and then live their young lives shuffling back and forth between households.

That moment — telling my boys — still breaks me if I think about it too much. I try not to.

I don’t regret any of it though. I loved him the way I knew how to at 25 then 30 then 35. We tried our best. And made many mistakes. And we have two smart, creative, kind children who are now young men. And I got through it. I had the lowest lows after separating and divorcing — as an atheist, I was brought to my knees to pray out of sheer desperation — and I came out on the other side, still an atheist, very happily married with two more kids.

I don’t write too much about this part of my life. It’s private, the boys are grown, and I’d like to leave them out of all this as much as possible. But I’m prompted to say a bit having read the piece by Kix in The Free Press. From my own perspective, not presuming to know what my boys feel or think on this subject.

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Like Paul Kix, I sometimes felt our marriage carried significance beyond just any marriage. He wrote:

Our wedding day, in 2007, was not just intimate and beautiful—both of us crying as we exchanged our vows—but felt as though it carried some political significance.

That’s probably too much to put on a marriage. Being married is hard enough. But I felt it too. It felt important. Like a social statement of some sort. Like we were the embodiment of progress. Add to that, we assumed non-traditional gender roles in the marriage after the kids were born. I worked, he stayed home with them. That created its share of tension. We were renegades, in more ways than one.

Though unlike Kix, who writes that in 2007 interracial marriage was rare in his social circle, in mine — in 1994 when we met — it was pretty common. In fact, most of the couples I knew at the time in San Francisco were interracial. All varieties: Latino and white; black and white; Asian and white; Asian and black. Both heterosexual and homosexual couples. We mixed it up. It seemed like a big nothing really. Not even worthy of notice or discussion. Even my parents shrugged as if it were nothing when I shared that my new boyfriend was black. It was almost a why are you even telling us this response. And then: when do we meet him?

But now, in the name of “progress,” I think it would feel like a big deal. And not in a good way. Not in a see we’re past racism! way. But in a you’re a traitor to your race (him) kind of way and a you’re culturally appropriating/husband stealing from black women/appeasing your own white guilt (me) kind of way. You’re the worst kind of racist (me), kind of way.

Around 2018, anti-racism became not some fringe idea but THE thing you had to embrace or else you were an unrepentant racist, deserving of being ostracized and demonized in polite society. And of course in 2020, it spread like wildfire. It became not the purview of far Left activists but the ethos of all of our institutions — not just universities, but corporations, elementary schools, the NBA and NFL and even USA Gymnastics (which, before the summer of 2020, was best known for presiding over the most abusive sports training environment imaginable — but yeah they’re anti-racists now).

These organizations and institutions hired massive DEI departments, deployed trainings for employees on how not to be bigots, and posted incessantly on Instagram about what marginalized group they were standing with.

Suddenly white people were asking themselves if they had enough black friends, if they’d been in a black person’s home (I had many friends come to me and ashamedly confess that they had not), if they knew enough about black culture.

But they (we) were in a bind. If you had no black friends you were a racist. If you had too many, you were some sort of guilt-assuaging pretender, which was worse and even more racist. You might as well be wearing white guy dreadlocks, it was so cringe. You were damned if you did and damned if you didn’t, which I realize was — and is — the point: you’re white, you’re racist. Period. No discussion. Do your self-flagellating penance, please.

And what was I to do with two mixed race children? Apologize to them? How? Certainly I was never to mention that I even had them in all my anti-racism trainings at work. That would be me trying to shield myself from the accusation of being a natural born racist — and the act of attempting to shield myself would be further evidence of my racism.

To put it bluntly, I felt fucked. Not at work. Not in the world. Not in my friendships. But in my role as the white parent of biracial children.

The goal used to be a color blind society where all men (and women) are judged by the content of their character not the color of their skin. Today, the Left imagines a society defined by color and race, separated by race, and with each individual viewed first and foremost through the lens of race.

Ibram X. Kendi happened. Robin DiAngelo happened. DEI happened. That is what changed.

In 2023, Robin DiAngelo, the author of White Fragility and a white woman herself, said: “I’m a big believer of affinity space and affinity work and I think people of color need to get away from white people . . .”

Ok. But what are my children supposed to do? Say “bye” to me? What if you’re in a mixed race marriage? Are you supposed to get divorced? Are you supposed to stay together but only if the white member of the relationship is willing to do some sort of daily supplicating ritual, lying prostrate on the ground in humble apology for existing? The work, as it is called.

I’m sorry but WTF is she talking about? This rhetoric divides families.

There are approximately 72 million Gen Z kids and young adults. About 5% of them are mixed race. That’s 3.6 million people. Are they supposed to say goodbye to their white parent — if one of the parents is white in their mixed race combination? Bye Paul Kix! Bye Jen Sey!

Honestly Robin — STFU already.

I’m not here to cry white lady tears, rather to simply explain how and why it has been difficult for me, to be the white parent of mixed race children in this divisive world. The world tells my children I hate them. I’m a white supremacist, according to not just DiAngelo but every DEI department in every university and corporation across America. I’m a bigot whether it is apparent or not, they are told. I benefit from systems tilted in my favor and I am invested in furthering those systems for my own benefit. To my kids’ detriment. Subconsciously I want them to struggle with systemic racism so that I can succeed. Or so the story goes.

It’s bullshit.

But this toxic ideology would tell my flesh and blood that I believe in and love my two white children more than my black children. That I think my white children are more worthy and capable and good. That I can’t help but think this. And, per DiAngelo, I subconsciously teach my white children through osmosis that they are superior to their older siblings. And this ideology would tell my older boys to shun their younger siblings, as well as me and their step father, because we are white.

It’s ridiculous on its face. But that is the message being sent. And that my children must receive on a daily basis.

Some of it must sneak in right? Some of it must pierce and muck up — just a little bit — the love they must know I have for them. Right? They must come to doubt me and my all-encompassing, full body, sometimes-I-can-barely-breathe-when-I-know-they-are-sad kind of maternal love. Right?

It makes me ill to think about it. That they might not believe how much I love them. Because the world tells them I can’t possibly.

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The boys (I need to start calling them men) are tall and lanky, like my ex. But if you look closely, they do look a whole lot like me. People don’t see it. The height (they are 6’4” and 6’3”) and hair are distracting. But the smiles are unmistakably mine. As are some of the facial expressions. And I’d like to think some of the passion for working and making things comes from me.

We joke about race a lot in our family, in ways that are off-limits now in the world. I’m not going to share how or what we say because that would get me in a world of trouble, more than I find myself in on the regular. Suffice it to say that my ex and I used to joke in ways that were “not PC” even then, and it carried through to our progeny. They both blithely — and I’d like to think jokingly — use the N-word all the time, and my biggest fear in life at this point, is that the two little white children go into 1st and 3rd grade and do the same without a second thought.

N-word please! the 7-year-old might shout, as if it’s the catchphrase on a sitcom, like What you talkin’ bout Willis! was in the 80s. That’d be it for us at our cute and diverse language immersion school, I suspect. Can they kick you out of a public school for being a public nuisance? I hope I don’t find out.

At Thanksgiving one of my older kids noted that all of the “color and spice” at the table was in the under 25 set — not just my boys, but their partners and friends as well.

Was it a joke? Or was it a dig? I’m not sure. And that makes me kinda sad if I let myself think about it too much. I try not to.

We had a great Thanksgiving.