Wisconsin State Rep. Francesca Hong, the Socialist backed frontrunner for governor, described having a biracial son as continued “proximity to whiteness” in a 2021 interview that has resurfaced and drawn widespread condemnation.
In the ListenMKE interview, Hong stated: “My proximity to whiteness continues, right? My son is biracial. He is half-white and half-Korean. I think navigating what his identity is and how people perceive him is always at the back of my mind as well.”
The remarks come from a candidate who married a white man, Matt Morris, with whom she had the child, and later divorced. Hong, a Korean-American who has built her political brand around racial grievance and identity politics, presented her own son’s partial white heritage as something requiring ongoing management and concern.
Critics across the political spectrum and within mixed-race communities have called the framing outlandish and damaging. Many have argued that Hong effectively treats her own flesh and blood’s white heritage as a defect. Mixed-race observers have noted that a mother publicly framing her son’s white parentage as a problem she must “navigate” risks instilling identity confusion and a sense of rejection in the very child she is raising.
The statement stands out even among Hong’s other controversial comments. It is almost expected for a far-left progressive politician to traffic in abstract anti-white rhetoric. It is another to apply that lens to the child she deliberately brought into the world with a white partner, effectively signaling that half of her son’s identity is an unwanted continuation of “whiteness.”
Hong remains the leading Democrat in the Aug. 11 primary. The clip, amplified by accounts including Greg Price, has circulated widely alongside her more recent “86 Trump” remarks and her desire to cancel Thanksgiving. Still, observers rank the comments about her own son as the most revealing and disqualifying of all.
