Richard Cohen says that his latest piece was not intended to be and shouldn’t be read as racist.

“The word racist is truly hurtful,” he told The Huffington Post on Tuesday. “It’s not who I am. It’s not who I ever was. It’s just not fair. It’s just not right.”

The Washington Post columnist came under fire on Tuesday for writing that “people with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children.” He insisted that he was expressing the views of some people within the Tea Party and not his own.

“I didn’t write one line, I wrote a column,” Cohen said. “The column is about Tea Party extremism and I was not expressing my views, I was expressing the views of what I think some people in the Tea Party held.”

And those views are not held by the entire Tea Party. “I don’t think everybody in the Tea Party is like that, because I know there are blacks in the Tea Party,” he said. “So they’re not all racist, unless I’m going to start doing mind reading about why those black people are there.”

When asked if he believed that people who do “have a gag reflex” at the idea of interracial marriage are in fact racist, he said that he did. “I could have picked a better word, but it didn’t ring any bells with anybody, it didn’t ring any bells with me,” he continued. “But there is a context to the column. You’ve got to read the whole column and if you read the whole column you can’t honestly think that these are my views or I endorse the views that I articulated in the column.”

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Right. And saying, ‘You people in mixed marriages make folks wanna gag’ is not hurtful.