He doesn’t come right out and say it, but Colbert King must be mightily disappointed by the way the press is covering New York City mayor-elect Bill de Blasio’s biracial family. Mr. King had the right to expect something better than analysis about racists suppressing their gag-reflex, speculation that the election was won by Dante de Blasio’s afro, and repeated gratuitous references to Chirlane McCray’s one-time preference for ladies. Isn’t it enough to note that Bill de Blasio once championed the Sandanistas? It seems to me that his hard-left political history ought to be sufficient to signal the significance of his election without bringing his family into the discussion.
We’ve had a biracial president for five years, now, and it seems like his blackness is still a bigger factor than his whiteness. People seem upset that his father was from Kenya, not that his mother was from Kansas. But, at least the press doesn’t harp on the racial mixture within the president’s family. Maybe that’s because, unlike the de Blasio family, they all look black.
In Richard Cohen and Maureen Dowd’s ossified worldviews, the de Blasio family is not “conventional,” and they can’t get past that to look at the significance of the new mayor’s actual policies and what it might mean that the citizens of New York City overwhelmingly supported his candidacy.
