At NBC and Newsweek, it's still the late-1960s. The movie Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?, with its then-edgy portrayal of an engaged interracial couple visiting the white fiancee's parents, has recently debuted. Apparently the ink hasn't yet dried on the Supreme Court's Loving vs. Virginia decision, which nullified all remaining interracial marriage bans.
What else can possibly explain the breathtakingly ignorant tweets emanating from those two media outlets acting as if America might not be ready for the idea that Rachel Lindsay, the first black woman in the history of The Bachelorette, might end up getting engaged to someone of another race?
Here are, or I should say were, the respective tweets (HT Twitchy via Instapundit):
Both outlets pulled their ridiculous tweets, but only Newsweek has apologized:
Newsweek really owed everyone an apology for being so clueless, not for the "offense it caused."
NBC hasn't apologized, and is still carrying the pathetic article by Nikki Booker to which its tweet was linked:
Bachelorette Shines in Debut, All Eyes on the Dynamic Among her Diverse Suitors
As millions of Americans watched 31 suitors line up for ABC's first-ever Black Bachelorette on Monday night, many in the Black community held their breath.
After all, holding this coveted position is laced with the burden of navigating this racy role with as much dignity and class as possible. Then to add another level of pressure, being a black woman navigating this role as all eyes are glued to the racial dynamic being showcased.
Serious questions lingered ... Would Rachel Lindsay represent us well on national television? Would we be proud to call her our little sister? Is America ready to witness - week after week - the possibility of an interracial love affair? After 13 seasons of white couples riding off into the sunset, will America really embrace a black couple or an interracial couple in the end?
For heaven's sake.
While there's obviously a difference between fictional series TV and so-called "reality TV" (wherein television producers set up artificial situations like The Bachelorette which would never happen in real life, and still ludicrously get to describe it as "reality"), The Jeffersons, which ran for 10 years from 1975 to 1985, had an interracial married couple in its cast. The 2015 TV season featured 14 interracial couples. Yet Newsweek and NBC are worried about whether America is ready for a half-season of The Bachelorette ending in an interracial engagement.
In early 2015, Warner Todd Huston at Breitbart, citing a December 2014 Brookings study which showed that "Up to 8.4 percent of new marriages were interracial ... up from 0.4 percent in 1960."
The fact that interracial marriages had gained acceptance to the point of being portrayed in TV series by the 1980s is particularly germane, given that the nation's most recent former president, according to a new biography, became less accepting of the idea personally at about the same time. The book, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, claims that Obama broke off a live-in relationship with a white woman to whom he had twice proposed marriage and been turned down. Why? As reported in the Washington Free Beacon, it occurred "when he decided her race would hamper his political career."
Naturally, the race-obsessed New York Times couldn't resist devoting three reporters to The Bachelorette's season premiere Monday, "unpacking all the cultural signals" and dissecting the allegedly "fraught racial dynamics." Lord have mercy.
The press simply cannot handle the idea that the vast majority of America is so done with the obsession over race. They still all too frequently lecture us about our supposed intolerance while claiming to be better about all of this than we are. They not only aren't over it themselves; they refuse to believe that their audience is.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
