Towards the end of the film Lincoln, Radical Republican Sen. Thaddeus Stevens returns home to his African-American housekeeper (who doubles as his mistress) with good news: the 13th Amendment, banning slavery, has just passed in Congress. As they lie in bed looking at the document, she expresses a sentiment that encapsulates how the nation's struggle with racism is experienced on a personal level: "You can't bring your housekeeper to the House. I won't give them gossip. This [the Amendment] is enough. This is more than enough for now."
Deliberately, the personal is entwined with the political. But why? Is it important that one of the few egalitarian political voices of that era had a black girlfriend? Did Stevens support racial equality because of his interracial relationship, or was his relationship a natural extension from his views? Perhaps neither. Stevens' personal life was exploited by his opponents to discredit his politics; in the case of the pro-Stevens filmmakers behind Lincoln, his personal life is exploited to bolster the film's characterization of him.
Even in a time when our President is the product of an interracial relationship, people of many different racial and political persuasions seem to believe that dating outside of one's race is done to make a statement. Dissecting this impulse can lead us to a deeper understanding of the link between casual and institutional racism.
One issue that creates stigma around interracial relationships is lack of visibility. Roughly 9% of marriages are interracial, a figure that has tripled since 1980. Yet this reality is not reflected in our media. Interracial couples are uncommon on TV, and those instances are marked by controversy -- discussion about characters played by Mindy Kaling and Kerry Washington regularly focuses on the race of their love interests. Even "progressive" corners of the web complain about characters of color dating white people.
Monoracial unions are rarely described in terms of affirming the viability of a people, yet interracial ones are often presented as posing a threat either to racial "consciousness" or society at large. This sort of bigotry is certainly not exclusive to any one group. Louis Farrakhan and David Duke have identical positions on the topic.
More subtle than the outright hostility that interracial couples often face is fetishization. As a white man dating a black man, I've often been asked -- by friends -- if I'm in the relationship because I want someone well-endowed. Those outside of interracial relationships have a tendency to make assumptions about the relationship's dynamics based on stereotypes.
In both cases, these responses reduce people to their skin color and the value that society ascribes to them based on that; individuality is lost and the personal is forcibly politicized.
We can see how this sort of devaluing manifests itself in our politics. In 2013, then-Mayor and "Third Way" visionary Michael Bloomberg accused his successor Bill de Blasio of running a "racist" campaign by highlighting his multiracial family in advertisements. For Bloomberg, just being a white man who has raised a family with a black woman was a political and even "racist" act. The former Mayor ramped up stop-and-frisk; the current Mayor has overseen its decline.
As our country becomes increasingly multiracial, the Democratic Party will continue to benefit from demographic change only if it lays out a dynamic approach to fighting systemic racism.
One important step is to elect Democrats who will embrace Sen. Cory Booker and Sen. Rand Paul's REDEEM Act. By reforming our criminal justice system to end racial disparities in the application of law -- what Professor Michelle Alexander refers to as the "New Jim Crow" -- and allowing non-violent offenders to reintegrate into society, we can begin to chip away at the cycle of oppression that forms the basis of institutional racism and feeds the stereotypes that stigmatize people in interracial relationships.