Mississippi GOP's Embarrassing Interracial Fears
Public Policy Polling released a survey last week that should cause stomachs to churn throughout polite society; among Republican primary voters in Mississippi, 46% of respondents believe that interracial marriage should not be legal.
Let’s set aside for a moment the question of whether or not this is a uniquely Republican problem, and deduce the basic message: nearly half of the poll’s respondents believe a marriage should be criminalized based simply on the skin color of its partners. Combined with 14% of those who said they were “not sure”, you have an astounding 60% of Mississippi Republicans believing that marriage between members of two different races may be a criminal act.
As an urban dweller and lifelong northeastern resident, it’s difficult to express my bewilderment with a poll showing the issue of miscegenation still being a considerable issue (one wonders what prompted PPP to even include the question). As a person of mixed race, it’s inherently understood that there are still pockets of the world in which such a thing is frowned upon. However, it’s quite another matter entirely to find 60% of a state’s voters unsure of whether interracial marriage is a crime. After all, those opposed to same-sex marriage fall back on the notion that marriage’s sanctity lies in its partnership between one man and one woman. What justification is there for the illegality of a marriage between one man and one woman of divergent skin colors? There apparently remains a sad but not inconsiderable portion of the electorate that considers the partnership between whites and non-whites to be endangering to societal norms.
There are plenty of substantive policy differences to be had between President Obama and Republican primary voters. But as our first black president begins his campaign for reelection, a sickening number of those who would oppose him appear to believe that his very existence should have been prevented in the first place. As a Republican, there are virtually no circumstances under which I would support President Obama for reelection. Yet all Republicans must acknowledge that a vote on the issues counts the same as a vote for intolerance, and do everything that they possibly can to separate the voice of the former from the latter.
We will likely never make as much progress on issues of race as most of us would like, and yet substantial progress has undeniably been made from the darkest days of our nation’s history. Republicans cannot permit themselves to appear to be a party—as F. Scott Fitzgerald timelessly wrote—“borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
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