Once after preparing a broccoli and cheese dinner, I announced to my mother, a lifelong Democrat, that there was no danger of me marrying into the Bush family. I loved broccoli too much. (Former President George Herbert Bush, you'll recall, admitted his dislike of that vegetable shortly after his electoral victory, a declaration that prompted broccoli growers throughout the country to mail him samples of their product.)

My mom wasn't so sure, though. "Even," she inquired, "George Prescott Bush?"

Now that was a tough one. I, like countless other North American women, fell head over heels for the ultra-gorgeous George Prescott, whom his uncle George W. trotted out in the 2000 presidential campaign to woo female voters to the Republican Party. But long before his incarnation as Republican heartthrob, George Prescott came to the fore in another guise - as, along with his two siblings, the "little brown one." Yes, that was the appellation bestowed upon him by grandfather George Herbert at the 1988 Republican national convention. George Prescott Bush derives his brownness, however, not from his father Jeb (now governor of Florida) but from Jeb's Mexican-born wife Columba.

Jeb and Columba Bush belong to what appears to be a rapidly growing sector of the American population: Republican interracial couples. Other prominent examples include Senator Phil Gramm (married to Korean-American economist Wendy Lee) and African-American Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his white wife Virginia Lamp. Despite their racial composition, none of these couples seems particularly radical. On the contrary, Virginia Lamp Thomas strikes me as positively traditional. Though white women involved with black men are frequently portrayed as either social outcasts or rebels, Virginia's "stand by your man" attitude during the Anita Hill hearings would have put Tammy Wynette to shame. Even more importantly, other Republicans haven't made too much fuss about their fellow Party members' decision to cross the color line.

Outside the political arena, some conservative commentators in the media have actually extolled intermarriage. Others are declaring their own miscegenistic desires. For example, Canadian right-wing journalist Barbara Amiel, who spends most of her time these days lamenting the demise of the traditional family (she's been divorced three times herself, but we won't hold that against her), admitted she found O.J. Simpson looking "more and more handsome" throughout his murder trial. A 1994 article in the evangelical Protestant magazine Christianity Today spoke against hostility to mixed-race families and called on believers to "rejoice over the beautiful children born to interracial couples." Six years later, the magazine praised Bob Jones University's decision to end its longstanding ban on interracial dating. Finally, Boston Globe conservative columnist Jeff Jacoby delivered a paean to miscegenation in the article "Defeated in the Bedroom," in which he argued that with an increasing biracial population, it made no sense for the government to classify citizens by ethnicity.

That conservatives would be laissez-faire and even enthusiastic about interracial marriage seems almost counterintuitive. Miscegenation used to be such a black and white issue -- pardon the pun -- with conservatives opposed and liberals in favor. But things aren't so clear-cut anymore. Some of the harshest critiques of race mixing today come not from the right but from radical leftist minorities (a phenomenon I describe in the essay "Left-Wing Anti-Miscegenism"), who see it literally as sleeping with the enemy. Pro-miscegenist attitudes similarly span the political spectrum. In the 1960s, white leftists celebrated intermarriage as the key to eliminating racial discrimination. One author went so far as to call interracial couples the heroes of the civil rights movement. If everyone were of mixed race, he and others reasoned, there would be nobody left to discriminate against or for that matter do the discriminating. This fervor died down somewhat in the 1970s, perhaps because its proponents realized that interracial couplings alone could never achieve such a goal.

Unknown to many Americans, right-wing endorsement of miscegenation has a history preceding Jeff Jacoby, Barbara Amiel and the Republican Party. It goes back to the days following Christopher Columbus' so-called "discovery" of America in which Queen Isabella of Spain -- who sponsored the Admiral's voyage -- encouraged marriage between Spaniards and Native Americans as a means of strengthening the latter's loyalty to the mother country (Spain), converting them to Christianity, and helping them adopt a Western lifestyle. When the Netherlands ruled Indonesia, it too advocated white male/indigenous female unions for the same purposes, though the less evangelically minded Dutch didn't put as much emphasis on religion.

Today's conservative miscegenation enthusiasts exhibit elements of both the colonizers of old and the '60s idealists. Like Queen Isabella, they genuinely believe in the power of interracial unions to bring "others" into the fold -- the fold being white Western society. Jeff Jacoby, for instance, chides "minority interest groups" for trying to stop their respective members from assimilating into the American (i.e. white) mainstream. He obviously appears to think that joining this mainstream is a goal towards which minorities should strive. On the other hand, he shares with the 1960s radicals the idea of intermarriage as a blow against racial discrimination. The very title "Defeated in the Bedroom" (which was first coined by conservative talk show host and author Ben Wattenberg) gives the picture of some huge interracial love-in laying waste to the racism of the past. Harold Myra, the author of the Christianity Today piece, notes the "positive contributions intermarriage can make toward breaking down prejudice." Yet judging from places like Latin America, where miscegenation has occurred for over half a millennium but where whites and white-looking people still hold a disproportionate amount of power, it is clear that intermarriage does not necessarily lead to racial equality.

I must confess a certain attraction to this brand of pro-miscegenism. It has an intrinsic appeal that neither traditional white racism nor contemporary left-wing opposition to intermarriage does. By endorsing miscegenation, authors like Jacoby and Wattenberg at least acknowledge that non-whites are human beings like themselves, a fact that old-fashioned racists, whether of the Ku Klux Klan or the seemingly more benign "separate but equal" variety, are loath to admit. They also appear genuinely interested in fostering harmonious race relations. In contrast, the anti-miscegenist attitudes of some leftists at times seem no more enlightened than those of the white supremacists.

Nonetheless, modern-day conservatives' pro- intermarriage chant leaves me with more than a few doubts. Sometimes they seem to believe, naively, that miscegenation means the battle against racism is over -- hence Jacoby's triumphalist conclusion that "tens of millions of Americans have learned to think outside the racial box." And like the colonialists of yore, they have their own agenda, an agenda that might fit a little too snugly into the right wing's overall vision for America. Jacoby, for example, accuses minority leaders of holding on to monoracial classifications for fear of losing "affirmation action largesse." In his mind widespread interracial unions and the blurring of racial categories would get rid of thorny questions like affirmative action and reparations to minority groups.

There's also the underlying theme of miscegenation as a means to an end. The end in this case is integration into mainstream American society, that is, becoming white if not in body then at least in spirit. And underlying that theme is the notion that non-whites should renounce their own cultures and meld into a "superior" one. It can be argued that such a philosophy isn't really any less racist than the "whites only" paradigm of the supremacists or their less vociferous "as long as they know their place" brethren. In his book Race and Ethnicity, Belgian-born sociologist Pierre van den Berghe describes the inherent but subtle racism of the assimilationist school. An assimilation policy, he says, "sometimes seem(s) progressive and tolerant by comparison with… rigid racial apartheid… however, an assimilation policy simply reflects an unquestioning belief in one's cultural superiority coupled with the logical corollary that other people ought to be made to resemble one and to be valued to the extent that they do so."

Conservatives have a point in recognizing miscegenation's potential for speeding up cultural assimilation. Here history has proven them right. For instance, perhaps the main reason why three centuries of Spanish rule made Mexico but not the Philippines a Western nation was that while race mixing was widespread in the former country, it took place on a much smaller scale in the latter. Whether intermarriage in modern-day USA would have the same effect of further "Americanizing" minorities, however, remains to be seen.

So is George Prescott Bush the wave of the Republican future? In a sense, perhaps the existence of couples like the Bushes, Gramms and Thomases shows that at a time when miscegenation is gaining increasing acceptance among the public, conservatives are simply going with the flow. Here they deserve credit for taking the enlightened route (something they have not always done in matters such as gay rights and women's issues). I would take exception to their view of miscegenation as a panacea against racism: in my opinion, the fact that interracial marriage is rising is not a cause of decreased racism but a consequence of it. With all its shortcomings, though, the right's endorsement of miscegenation shows good will towards minorities and mixed couples. And for this reason, it should be seen as a step in the right direction.

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