snip...

French, who is white, went viral last week after his appearance on a podcast called the Fifth Column. Asked if he considers himself a conservative, he answered in the affirmative, but then went on to describe how, despite that political affiliation, he has "Absolutely changed in my perception of the lingering severity of race problems in this country." This sudden enlightenment fell on him, he explained, after he adopted a child from Ethiopia.

"This might sound super nave, but when we adopted our youngest daughter, I did not have in my mind that she was going to come to my community and have a substantially different experience as a child than my two older kids. But by golly, she had a substantially different experience. There was not a school that she went to where she was not called the N-word repeatedly."

He went on to tell a story about a time the abuse went beyond language. "There was a point," he said, "where I picked her up after a high school football game " this was in Nashville at a game at Montgomery Bell Academy, one of the highest end schools in all of middle Tennessee. This is a very wealthy school. We went to pick her up and she was shaking, and her friend, who was a Latina, was shaking as well and it was like, 'What happened?' And she said, 'A truck full of guys was screaming the N-word at us and drove straight for us and they just swerved away at the very last second.'"

French said that raising this African child caused him to realize, "all of a sudden," that he had "been in a bubble and that my white, educated, upper-middle class bubble in the South had really, intentionally, screened out racism."

final snip ...

But then, I'm black which means I'm a native of that other America. White conservatives, on the other hand, typically find it impossible to imagine themselves into any America other than the one they know - which is to say, into the lives and challenges of people who are not like them, unless one of those people happens to have a seat at the dinner table. Remember in the early 2000s how Dick Cheney, the former vice president, towed the conservative line on every litmus test issue, but broke ranks with his fellow travelers over marriage equality? It was absolutely not coincidental that his daughter Mary was a lesbian.

Yes, it's great that he was willing to go against his own in order to support his child, but make no mistake: that's not conscience and it's not principle. It's self interest. It's a statement that bad things don't matter until they touch you and yours.

And that, at bottom, is the statement David French just made.

It makes you worry for his daughter. His ideological predisposition will likely render him next to useless to her as she navigates the gauntlet of race in America. Yes, he can assure that she is loved, and that's not nothing. But practical advice or even a relevant explanation of what she's going through? Don't bet on it. How can you explain a country you've only just discovered yourself? His daughter will be forced to figure that out on her own. She will have no other option.

See, blindness is a choice some of us don't get to make.