dday at Hullabaloo tips us to a repulsive National Review post in which Lisa Schiffrin claims that "for a white woman to marry a black man in 1958, or 60, there was almost inevitably a connection to explicit Communist politics" and concludes, "Time for some investigative journalism about the Obama family's background." Schiffin elaborates:

Political correctness was invented precisely to prevent the mainstream liberal media from persuing [sic] the questions which might arise about how Senator Obama's mother, from Kansas, came to marry an African graduate student. Love? Sure, why not? But what else was going on around them that made it feasible? Before readers level cheap accusations of racism — let's recall that the very question of interracial marriage only became a big issue later in the 1960s.

Exactly "what else was going on around" the Obamas when they met at the University of Hawaii and their son was born in Honolulu is readily available to anyone with a passing familiarity with the Google. As the barest amount of research shows, in 1956-1957, just a few years before Barack Obama's birth, rates for interracial marriage in Hawaii ranged from 22.0 percent for professional workers to 43.5 percent for farm laborers. Even in the 1950s, interracial marriage was commonplace in Hawaii. So now can we level cheap accusations of racism? That's a joke, folks. But what's not so funny is the way Schiffin's piece, knowingly or not, echoes 1950s-era white supremacist paranoia with its conflation of interracial marriage and communism. HalfricanRevolution has more, including this relevant quote from "Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Post War America" by Renee Christine Romano:

The White Sentinel, a white supremacist newspaper published out of St. Louis, called mongrelization of the white race Communisms' "secret weapon," while Robert Shelton, Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1950s, declared that "amalgamation is ultimately the goal of the Communist element...because it would weaken the morals of the people."

The good news is that the National Review's chasing a losing hand -- according to the latest Gallup poll, 77 percent of Americans now approve of "marriages between blacks and whites." Something tells us that the 17 percent who disapprove weren't going to vote for Obama anyway. Crossposted at AsiansVote.com.

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