Sheldon Whitehouse’s white houses

Score one for unexpected nominative determinism! All this time, people figured Sheldon Whitehouse’s name must foretell a quixotic attempt at the presidency. Instead, it turns out he just likes sitting in a giant house full of white people.

Last Friday, as part of the nation’s Juneteenth ebullience (at least eight dead so far!), some enterprising reporter decided to ask the Rhode Island senator about his membership in the Spouting Rock Beach Association, better known as the Bailey’s Beach club. Whitehouse was asked if the club was still all-white — and if he was still a member.

Whitehouse was apparently unprepared for the question, which is fairly inexcusable for a politician who has spent a year seeing others consumed by America’s racial ‘reckoning’. Whitehouse awkwardly indicated that the club still was all-white (in 2021, one might as well admit it’s all-evil) and ‘the people who are running the place are still working on that’. Why was he still a member? Well, it’s a ‘long tradition in Rhode Island’.

Come on, Sheldon! That’s the best you could come up with? ‘It’s a tradition?’ Equality under the law, freedom of speech, and ‘not letting mobs loot neighborhoods at will’ were American traditions too, and we’re not allowed to have those anymore — so why should your club for New England has-beens to commit adultery be exempt? You sound like a hapless Republican upstart trying to apologize for attending a private school founded to evade Brown v. Board of Education. Where’s the coldblooded political opportunist who decided Brett Kavanaugh was a rapist based on ultra-flimsy allegations from a party 30 years ago?

Everything about this is stupid. Does anybody know anything about Newport? Bailey’s Beach is the WASP nerve center of Newport — and Newport is basically the WASP capital of the universe. It’s been in decline since the Eisenhower administration. Its population is one-half what it was 60 years ago. Like most WASP recreational fixtures, Bailey’s Beach amenities are famously restrained, while the beach itself is famously ugly. It strikes Cockburn as plausibly that if the club has no non-white members, it’s because no non-whites wanted to join.

Nevertheless, Whitehouse’s fumbling answer was such a mess he may have to quit the club just to make everyone go away. Or he may not; if anyone in America still enjoys genuine freedom of association, it’s Democratic senators representing safe blue states.

This moment says a lot more about America, or at least its political-media trendsetters, than it does about Whitehouse or Bailey’s Beach. It reveals how their obsession with melanin has totally consumed a party that once aspired to anti-elitism. In 2003, a Bailey’s Beach member told the New York Times that there were still people in Newport who had ‘literally never met people outside their class who didn’t work for them’. New Deal Democrats might find a senator secluding himself in such an exclusive milieu at least a little off-putting. But today? They just want to make sure the exclusive club has some black people around, like furniture to which they can can apologize.

And the moment says a lot about the poor political judgment of conservatives, who quickly piled on to ridicule Whitehouse for his membership. The gesture is useless. They won’t drive Whitehouse out of office — and they aren’t going to beat him in an election. What they have done, though, is entrenched the idea that any assemblage of white people, no matter how small, private, or provincial, is implicitly bad. They have accepted the premise that white people in numbers possess a wicked miasma that can only be dissipated through the purifying presence of melanin. They have, in short, accepted the core principle of America’s new political revolution.

But hey, at least Sheldon Whitehouse got embarrassed for a couple of news cycles.