Today's op-ed on Hollywood's horror with interracial intimacy by Nicholas Kristof, Blacks, Whites, and Love, stuns me with its abject foolishness. Memo to Kristof: Americans will not fuck each other into racial harmony. The childish concept of ending oppression through orgasm alone subjects all sufferers of racial bias and cultural difference to the hordes of the unlucky and unattractive, ultimately ignoring all the pervasive institutional power dynamics that encourage and demand publicly acknowledged and supported racial bias among throughout American society, even among its simplest and youngest members.

Kristof finds Hollywood lacking in its reflection of interracial romantic harmony - especially involving Black male and White female sexual chemistry. On his major thesis, I can agree, but must remind Mr. Kristof that Hollywood's comfort with interracial copulation extends only to those pairings that mainstream White America will pay dearly to support - namely pairings where White male sexuality is completely dominant and utterly self-assured. Here lies the truth behind the slave quarters' sexuality of Billy Bob Thornton and Halle Berry in Monster's Ball: White Everyman misuses and abuses the mulatto mystery of the poor Black beauty without remorse, pity, or sorrow, pausing only to calm his gastrointestinal moral tract from all the excitement. Thornton's character is the specter of Death, a black-hooded axeman involved in the unneeded and unjust extermination of both Halle Berry's Black male husband and son from the pastoral reflection of their worthless and unimportant lives. Berry's character, cut adrift from the familial moorings that would otherwise cement her dusky sensuality within the confines of a minority subculture drenched in both mind-numbing Mississippian poverty and 150-proof crunk juice, presents in her grief-stricken loss a worthy acquisition, a beautiful bauble, a vulnerable vixen lost amid the state-sanctioned murder of the Black men she loves and her guttural primitive physical need for White male paternal sexual control. Essentially, when removed from all other worldly concerns, Monster's Ball posits that all Black women revert to Sally Hemmings' harlots, wanton whores of God's own design whose craven need to fulfill Jefferson-era White male overseer lust overpowers all other sensible or practical concerns, promoting bent-over, backside-baring Beyonces, bobbing and weaving their ample posteriors for the sexual gratification of those who demean, oppress, lambaste, maim, and kill Black people. Monster's Ball was shocking in its honesty - of course Billy Bob had to execute Sean Combs, but he's justified since Halle was too bootylicious to leave amongst the natives. Western male conquest through heterosexual intercourse has a long and varied history within Hollywood productions, and offers a more sensible reason behind Hollywood's reluctance to embrace the on-screen male lead of color as a profitable visual image. If Hollywood reflects anything about the social fabric of American life, then the ruling class holds a vested interest in ensuring that whoever's plucking Halle's ripe, juicy berries reflects Establishment control and Establishment complexion, Census data be damned.

Think about it - sure, you may not see Denzel Washington in a steamy, lurid, make me feel good carpetburn sex scene with Julia Roberts anytime soon (not that Julia would mind!) but you also won't see him making love to Zhang Ziyi either. And when's the last time Jet Li gave any female lead anything more than a longing look and a patient smile after beating the living hell out of half the Parisian underworld to save the prostitute's towheaded daughter like in Kiss of the Dragon? Minority male sexuality on-screen must endure the 'clash of civilizations' background that all heterosexuality is based upon in America, not to mention the archaic yet virulent prejudices most Americans still possess in regard to interracial relationships. Here's the most damaging perception caused by Kristof's column: the assumption that Hollywood is lagging behind the rest of our liberal sensibilities in regards to interracial sexuality. It's simply not the case. Most Americans still feel most comfortable with 'their own people', a designation that rarely applies on basis of nationality, or local community. Ithaca, NY, a locale so shamelessly blue-in-blue state liberal it reminds one of Fremen optics in Frank Herbert's Dune, boasts probably the highest concentration of interracial couples I've ever encountered outside of a major metropolitan area, yet these relationships are strictly influenced by class considerations that emerge through racial stratification patterns. Cornell University students, largely White and Asian, engage in amorous pair-bonding with high regularity. Nearly all of these relationships involve young White men and nubile Asian women. Outside of higher education's privileged plateau, Ithaca, NY proper holds all kinds of interracial relationships involving Black men and White (or sometimes Latina) women. Usually these relationships exist within rural middle class drudgery, where White women engage their feral fantasies of field nigger Jim's thirteen-inch Mandingo warrior without the social ostracism their Southern counterparts endure for such taboo delights.

In truth, even interracial relationships are typecast in our society, falling back on repetitive perversions of racial sexuality to justify their own existence. The twenty-something Abercrombie & Fitch underwear model and varsity crew captain seen sharing a laugh and an iced latte with the Korean pre-med Biology major with patient, alluring eyes and pale, warm smile engages in an odd double consciousness to woo his chosen lady. Drawn more to his unjust application of exotic Eastern sensuality than her love of Star Wars and slam poetry, this smooth operator speaks in glowing terms of his love of anime and old samurai flicks, even learning Japanese to watch new Beat Takeshi classics like Sonatine and Zatoichi without annoying subtitles or piss-poor dubbing, while he relates his personal fears and public triumphs to her without subtlety or suspicion, in late-night bull sessions turned real-life love connections; his life laid bare in a innocent, unadorned, open need to trust another human being. He racializes, yet attempts humanity; trusts, yet typecasts. In this he is not alone, for the model minority, weary from a life of endless study and constant improvement, allows herself the open dissolution of personal inhibition around her shining White knight, learning to live and love openly and enjoy more than cardiac diagrams and piano concertos between hours of note-taking and exam worry. There's always something wistful and warm about two people who connect and care for one another, but unfortunately, all our personal choices have political consequences. When we neglect the personal-as-political ramifications of our expressed free will, we serve only the general antagonism and interpersonal strife that so plague the human condition.

This is where Kristof goes awry: no interracial relationship benefits racial harmony any more than any other relationship. The heightened visibility of interracial couples and mixed-race Americans in our post-Tiger Woods, post-Barack Obama landscape serves no positive or negative purpose through mere existence alone. America will never procreate a true Rainbow Coalition; commercialized globalism via culturally-sensitive mass-marketed media blitzes allow the only interracial harmonizing present-day John and Jane Q. Public can handle. Here, interracial interaction degrades into transracial mobility, as the best and the brightest of minority Americana integrate into the professional technocracy of Wall Street finance and Johns Hopkins medicine through dedicated hard work and affirmative action programs within the hallowed halls of Ivy League grandeur, and shed personal racial strife and underclass political concerns like so much dead, exfoliated skin; Third World politics cast as racial dandruff for the colored Pentium IV silicon-chip sluts that compose my generation's techno-organic Talented Tenth. Those who date interracially are exposed to racial difference, and are subject to all accompanying political scrutiny.

Take for example Mr. Kristof's referencing of the Wesley Snipes - Robert Downey, Jr. film One Night Stand. Here, Wesley is a comfortable, financially stable Black man with two loving children and a Chinese wife, played by Ming-Na Wen. The subsequent interaction between Wesley's character and an alluring White woman played by Nastassja Kinski embraces the stress of adultery on an already taxed marriage, not the obvious big Black buck stereotyping always prevalent in Black male promiscuity, but especially apparent when coupled with an on-screen White woman fetish. True, professionals of color can engage in the most harried and harrowing sexual complications just like all Americans, but we have not yet encountered a point in American race relations where the political imagery presented by colorblind casting obscure completely the American audiences' instinctive recall of base race stereotypes and commonplace prejudices in favor of total immersion in a presented storyline. Even when Wesley Snipes plays a commercials director irate over his friend's upcoming death from AIDS complications, his African American heritage persists, unobscured by the motion picture camera's all seeing glance. His color does not wash off. Snipes' dark melanin monotone can not and is not overshadowed, even when he plays a character that never reflects upon the damaging political effects of his brief encounters with Black hedonism. In order for Mr. Kristof's overall point to ring true, American audiences would have to look past the ebony countenance of Wesley Snipes to view his character in One Night Stand as a cosmopolitan Everyman, to gaze only at this movie's quirky low-budget parable on metropolitan marriage without paying any attention whatsoever to the racial differences of the participants. Frankly, my cynicism abounds. I do not believe any American looks past race.

Besides, Mr. Kristof himself does not. Honestly, his short column elicits my disdain because of its unabashed misuse of important facts. Yes, during much of the Twentieth Century, interracial marriage was illegal in most states, and universally taboo. However, altered judicial attitudes that slowly deconstructed anti-miscegenation statutes through the logical application of the Fourteenth Amendment committed little to the American electorate's acceptance of interracial relationships. To believe that the modern American public is anymore accepting, tolerant, or otherwise encouraging of interracial bonding takes an optimism I find unsafe for all persons of color in this country. Distrust is the consistent American pathology; for Nicholas Kristof to spend his white male privilege today to assert the obvious premise that interracial couples are just like the rest of us, and that Hollywood should show more of them onscreen, allows a basic conclusion: it's great to be White. With all the research of a quick Google search, he can promote the most banal dinner party drivel on the American racial condition without much public sanction. To find that the nation's newspaper of record can promote such uncomplicated, infantile analysis on the nation's most consistent domestic malaise should trouble us all greatly, before the next Jennifer Lopez movie that portrays an ambitious Latina maid who finds financial success and Western acceptance by bedding an influential White male politician finds itself in a theater near you.