NOTE: THIS IS NOT A RACIAL / PREJUDICE THREAD!
I remember being told by someone
I do not want to start a racial riot on the SDMB, I just want feedback from both sides as to why to or not to date / marry a person of a different race.
My feedback:
[list=1][li]Don’t make race part of your criteria for a date.[/li]
Quit hobnobbing with bigots who say things along the likes of: “I don’t think a person should date or marry someone of a different race because it dissolves the culture.”[/list=1]
What a stupid thing to say. Race is different from culture.
Secondly, as someone in an interracial relationship I will say -
Interracial relationships can be more difficult than “normal” relationships, but this doesn’t have to be true.
My fiancé is Japanese/Korean, raised here in the US.
She’s got her “Asian” parts: very polite to adults, has certain ideas of honor and respect, loves Asian food and music, etc.
And her “American” parts: Cynical, sarcastic, loves Star Wars, McDonalds, and pizza.
There are different levels to it. I could never date my fiancé if she was traditional, old-school Japanese/Korean and she would never want to date me. Her parents, who are fairly traditional, are not too happy with me being white, but at this point, they know they are only going to see grandchildren through me, so they have sort of “adopted” me as an Asian.
We plan to raise our children up with a mix of understanding and appreciation for both cultures/heritages/backgrounds. They will celebrate Christmas, eat with chopsticks, speak Japanese and English, bow to adults, and eat lots of steak, etc.
And we aren’t going to clarify them as asian and white. I prefer to think in terms of grey rather than black and white. We aren’t only going to eat Asian food with chopsticks and American with forks and knives, but rather, whichever is easier.
And I think that our children will be much richer for it.
Oh darn, I forgot the computer is set to Korean. Do the "e"s in fiance look crazy to everyone else?
Only marry members of your own “race”. Better yet, only marry members of your own family. What’s a little inbreeding when compared to the benefits of genetic purity?
Interracial marriage is very good indeed for society, IMHO. What you personally should do is up to you. My white cousin married a black woman 37 years ago, and they have had a wonderful life.
I am in total agreement with december (I love it when I can say that :D). I am also in favour of mixed-race adoption.
The assumptions your friend have seems to be that culture is static, unchanging and tied exclusively to race.
Thing is, it isn’t. People grow within a culture and the culture grows within the people. Bring in new views and/or people and the culture/people change. Trying to freeze culture through race identity is about as useful as telling the tide to stop rising.
I don’t think that interracial dating is a good or a bad thing. It can be harder to date someone who is extremely culturally different from you, but that doesn’t make it bad. It can be easier to date someone who is culturally similar to you, but that doesn’t make it good.
Having someone love you is good. Loving someone is even better. The rest becomes much less important after that.
Whoever you have a relationship with, whatever your differences and similarities are, there are going to be problems, and there are going to be good things about it. It’s true that, especially in certain locations, people will give you a hard time about interracial relationships, but if you date based on what other people think, you’ll never be happy!
Also, I’ve kind of always had an idea that racism would pretty much disappear when interracial parenting was so wide-spread that everyone would be some shade of pink/tan/brown and no one would care about race any more.
I find it hard enough to get any woman. You think I’m gonna cut my options down by thinking about race?
If it works it works. End of story.
Well, for one thing, you could miss out on marrying the best person for you.
Your acquaintance is a nitwit. For one thing, these sorts of separations are always arbitrary, and change from year to year. Mrs. RickJay and I are both white, so is it okay for us to date? Maybe, but 60 years ago it would have been frowned upon, because she isn’t Catholic.
White athiest married to a hispanic catholic. I guess I get to fend off two lynch mobs! Works for me :D.
Not much to comment on the cultural side except to say that my cousin is happily married to a black guy. Half of my old school southern family frown on the union, but the other half, a slight majority, couldn’t care less about his skin color. It’s interesting to note that they would not have married 30 years ago, even though they are almost a perfect match. I love the guy except for the fact that the f*cker always, and I mean always, beats me in chess.
What I really want to address is the biological side of interacial marriages - specifically the children from such unions. There is a certain advantage in breeding with someone outside your own “race”, as nature loves diversity. No cite as the statistics are sketchy at best, but I think that the genetic diversity involved lowers the incidence of birth defects and genetic based diseases. The difference may not be statistically signifigant (I did say I don’t have a cite), but anecdotal evidence would seem to indicate that the children tend to be very healthy. At the very least it is as far away from inbreeding as possible.
This principle is easy to see in other animals, especially dogs (admittedly an extreme comparison). Mutts tend to be smarter and healthier than the pure bred breeds. Incidences of blindness and hip dysplasia are much reduced. Obviously, the “racial” divisions of humans have not undergone the level of inbreeding that dogs have, and this is more of an argument against eugenics than for mixed race couples, but I believe the comparison has at least some validity.
Finally, a simple illustration about interacial versus single race offspring:
Famous interacial people: Tiger Woods, Lenny Kravitz, Halle Berry, and Bob Marley
I’d much rather my offspring resemble one of these people than a famously single race celebrity like, say, Prince Charles :).
But if we mix the races, sooner or later there will be no diversity left.
That diversity that is celebrated as the spice of life, the interesting parts of humanity will all disappear. We will all be the same.
Race is not the only thing that makes people diverse. There will always be diversity.
I find people who celebrate “diversity” as a goal in itself to be annoying. This is the sort of attitude that “mourns the loss” of aboriginal cultures when the aborigines themselves are dying to get their hands on modern technology and leave their neolithic subsistence lifestyles far behind.
As cultures blend, new cultures are created - adapting the best parts and tossing out the worst. I hardly mourn the loss of colonial american “cuisine” when I’ve gained access to great chinese, indian, thai, mexican, french and italian food! (Dammit, now I’m hungry!)
While I don’t have a problem with interracial dating and marriage per se, I do have concerns about inter-religion or inter-cultural dating. Example:
A Jewish friend of mine has a daughter who is “into” Hispanic guys. If she were to continue in this trend, she may end up someday having a relationship with an Hispanic (most likely Catholic, in my region) man. Imagine all of the “cultural” clashes that could derail any good intentions they may have…
How would you instruct the children born of this union in religion with these two diametrically opposed views?
When would you ever be able to get both families together for a holiday?
I tend to think that the cultures of each distinct race or ethnicity play more of a significant role in the viability of a mixed relationship than do the respective colors of the people involved.
Diversity has nothing to do with races, but everything to do with culture. If one wants to protect diversity, then one should want to ban black americans marrying black africans, not black americans marrying white americans.
Anyway, this diversity will probably dissapear for the most part in the long run, with or without marriages. If you wanted to prevent it, you would have to ban or at least limit communication, trade and travel between different cultures. Marriages aren’t playing a big part in the great scheme of things. They’re just a by-product of this cultural mixing.
And yes, diversity is great, and is slowy dissapearing. But diversity has also some unwanted consequences, like for instance wars…
hmmm, interesting. PhD’s like Edwino or Darwin’s Finch could answer this better than I, but I’ll take a stab anyway and say I don’t think so.
It is to be expected that racial lines will blur due to the ease of air travel between seperate geographical populations, but I would expect that this would stabilize over time and regional differences in appearance would reassert themselves. These may not take the exact form of white/black/brown/yellow/red of today, but the little I know of population mechanics tells me that there will be still be some difference in regional “plumage” (I know the word relates to feathers, but I like to use it in these types of discussions because it denotes differences that are almost completely superficial) . Basically, what I see is new “racial” divisions arising millenia from now, rather than a homogenization into one phenotype. The divisions probably won’t be radically different, but who knows? Maybe there will be a group of blonde, blue-eyed black people dominating the population of the Caribean.
What we have to keep in mind is that the gene pool is a living breathing thing that changes over time and evolves, even in us supposedly superior humans. It is almost impossible to extrapolate where exactly we are going as a species and the changes in plumage that will occur. We know that in other animals differences still abound in overlaping populations, and humans aren’t any different. Not all stray cats are black. Some are, but some are white, orange, striped, or whatever even though they are free to breed. Again, admitedly not a great comparison due to the genes involved but I think the general point holds.