Is the Statement "Marry Your Own Kind" Inherently Racist/Insensitive?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Perhaps “racist” is too strong of a word. If you feel it is, feel free to substitute it with whatever word is most applicable.

I, on the other hand, do think it smacks of an undercurrent of racism. Saying that you’ll only marry one “kind” (whatever it may be, religion, race, people of only one nose, whatever) is a statement that would be said on the road to racism.

By saying you’ll marry one certain culture because you want to keep yours going also says how you feel about “other” cultures.

What are your thoughts?

I don’t want to just say this down a bottomless pit and have a bunch of echoes reply to me in kind. Feel free to speak your mind. Because I’ve spoken mine, for the most part, if someone else has something they want to say contrary to what others are saying, I think it should be said too. Feel free to email me with whatever you want posted exactly as you want it posted so you can be heard, even if you don’t want it attributed to you.

This could end up in Great Debates. This could also end up in the Pit. Either way, I wanna learn something.

2

I think the saying is tacky and or racist. OTOH, I think that most cultures and probably even the majority of people feel that way to some degree.

There were plenty of Jewish girls in college that had no intention of dating let alone marrying a non-Jew and they were from wealthy, educated families. Black men get criticized for going off with a white girl. The Indian men I know all say they would never a non-Indian. The list goes on and on and extends over the whole planet.

I no very few (actually none) people that are 100% color, culture, and religion-blind when it comes to potential love interests in a general way.Some pley lip service to the idea and some have cross-over prefernces but it is pretty narrow for most people.

3

It depends. I can see someone wanting to marry within their religion, if it is very important to them, and it’s important that their children be raised in that religion. I could also see concerns about people from radically different cultures getting married, without spending a lot of time making sure they were on the same page first. There’s really no excuse when it comes to something like race in the majority of places in this day in age though. Although, I know some people who aren’t races, but believe that God frowns on racial mixing.

4

Call me prejudiced, but I’m really hoping to marry within my species.

5

I have always thought this, and similar sayings, express an accepted form of intolerance.

I do think that it would be easier to marry a middle class, black woman but I have never cared all that much. One of the best arguments that I have heard in support of “marrying your own kind” has been from people who focus on experience. These people feel that it makes the most sense to marry someone who comes from a similar background because they have had similar life experiences as you. Their main argument being that the relationship will face major strains if the two partners have not experienced similar societal prejudices. This is most clearly demonstrated with respect to the couple’s children.

Black women have best expressed another side against interracial marriage to me however, that is more complicated. I will wait for a more expert opinion on that position.

6

Don’t bring this up to Hal . He’s very touchy on inter-species bonding.

7

It seems that there’s also a “save our culture/keep our culture alive” vibe with some of the less radical strains of the original statement.

Saying you don’t want to marry outside your culture, in my humble opinion, closes the doors on vast quantities of the datable pool of talent. That’s not a door I want to close from myself.

It’s not that culture doesn’t matter to me. Hell, if my mother said I couldn’t marry a black girl, I’d tell her to not date black girls and to leave it to me. Oh yeah…that IS what I told her…

8

Yup.

“Provincial.”

9

To be fair, you could interpret it as a suggestion to help ensure a happy marriage, by making sure the couple has a common background. If you were raised in a Mexican family and really like Mexican food, Mexican holidays, Mexican traditions, etc., and then get married to someone who didn’t have those tastes and interests and whatnot, that could cause some friction there.

10

That is a good point. It isn’t just about race, religion, or arching cultural identity. It is that most people seek out others that are similar to them in general.

My wife is white and raised upper-middle class. There were some problems however. She is a Yankee, half Italian and half English and was Catholic. Even though her background is the same as mine in some ways, it wasn’t in others. She has since converted to be protestant and now I have the nice WASP-Y family that I always dreamed of but those small differences make we wonder what would it be like if I married a nice Southern girl that is even more like me. My family loves to throw out Yankee comments too.

11

Very true, but what is it exactly, in your estimation, that would cause the friction?

12

I see some people are attracted to the values and attractive qualities of their culture’s mores.
Perhaps my lack of being religious makes it easier to look past cultures and religions as a tool for weeding out the pool.
…although that may or may not be the case on her end of the bargain.

I’m sure there are many serious relationships that are under duress because of these exact elements. Anyone care to share what they think on the topic?

13

No argument here at all. I’d regard this on the liberal end of this statement (or idea).

14

All of these responses have been good ones, and thoughtful ones, but I wanted to address something specific in the OP. There was mention of people who only marry within their own race because they believe in the propagation of said race.

My grandmother was a black woman who grew up in the deep south and had fairly strong feelings about the mixing of races, despite (or perhaps, because of) the fact that her brother had married a white woman. She felt that we might eventually lose our identity as a people.

Personally, I have mixed (sorry!) feelings about an attitude like this. When you’re talking about a people who have historically struggled a great deal, you can understand why there might be some fear of losing an identity. But I also think it smacks of separatism. To me, it is like saying, “This past misery is ours, and no one else sould have a right to claim any part of it.” Wouldn’t all people benefit by the sharing of culture and history in all manners, including interracial mixing? The problem, in my eyes, is that people who hold such a view think that interracial mixing is a subtraction of, rather than an addition to, their own culture.

I will never forget talking with a close friend of mine who is Jewish during our late teen years. I was teasing her about the fact that she’d never dated me. Now, one side of her family is quite wealthy, and she told me that there was once a young black man that she had been interested in, but that when her grandparents found out, she was told in no uncertain terms that she would lose any inheritance and be disowned from the family should she ever go “that route.” Now, I’ve met her family, and they’re all very nice, friendly people. None of them have ever had a problem with me. But apparently, that’s because they’ve never seen me as a threat to their bloodline.

Is it racist? I think maybe that’s too harsh a term to assign to it. But I think it is definitely a stepping stone in that direction. I’m hopeful that this sort of attitude wanes as new generations step onto the scene. I think it is tragic to suggest that you should not love another human being because their culture might somehow taint your own. Even if the intention is not to promote an attitude of superiority, it certainly devalues the merits of the other race(s) involved and any potential union of the two.

I apologize for the ramble – those are my $0.02, sans any conclusion, for all to pick apart.

15

Your stance is pretty much mine as well. Thanks much for your input.

16

It really depends on who “your own kind” are.

I married a college-educated woman from a middle-class, suburban, immigrant grandparents background. Just like me. She happened to be Asian-American while I was white.

My father, who could score pretty high on any bigotry scale when he felt like it, realized pretty quickly that my wife fit right into the “kind” of people we were.

But yeah, some people only see their “own kind” in one way.

17

Different expectations. We all have a LOT of expecations for how spouses should treat each other that are formed from all the relationships we see up close and personal–the relationships we see in our families. We don’t even realize we have these expectations and they don’t really raise their heards when we are dating–people don’t have to fufill the “spousal” expectations until they are our spouse.

The thing is, when someone does not fufill our expectations–be it making a big deal out of our birthday, defering to our grandmother no matter how crazy she is, or pampering us when we are sick–it’s really, really hard to 1) articulate the expectation that has been violated–we just feel angry and let down and 2) to not see the other person’s actions as somehow a sign that they don’t really love us/aren’t commited to the relationship/are stupid.

This is a problem even when you have more or less the same background, as families vary enourmously. It took me YEARS to get over being uncomfortable when my husband drinks coffee, since in my family, for whatever reason, only the women drink coffee. My husband thinks it’s disrespectful for me to leave the door open when I pee: I feel like he’s shutting me out when he locks the door while he showers. The more distance there is between your backgrouds, the more of these different expectations there will be, and unless you are very good talkers (which most people are not), this friction is hard to overcome, and it’s hard to talk these thinkgs over in advance because you don’t even know the expectation is not universally understood until you are standing there, startled to realize that the other person thinks it’s odd that your mother is going to come visit for six weeks.

18

It’s kind of a weird balance. My dad is just about the first person to get upset when he sees someone being discriminated against. Yet, oddly enough, I remember an incident where I idly said that a (very, very attractive) black man was hot, and he displayed uncharacteristic anger at the idea of me going out with or marrying said man (who, as he was a random person in a Best Buy ad, was someone I’d never even met). I found it especially ironic, as my maternal grandfather didn’t want my mom to marry my dad because he was divorced. It’s a very strange issue for a lot of people.

19

I guess that I think of it in the same way that I think about statistics: statistics can say something true about a population as a whole, but they don’t mean jack when it comes down to the individual.

Similarly, I do think that it would be a shame if everyone intermarried and we ended up having one culture in the world. I like it that people are seriously different from place to place, and I would like it to stay that way. So, on the grand scale, I guess that means that I support people marrying their own “kind.” On the individual scale, though, I can’t say that two different people who love each other in spite of the differences should choose not to marry, simply to “preserve cultural diversity.”

The last thing I have to say about this is that I have been in cross-cultural relationships, and it can be extremely difficult. Sometimes you really have to love the other person a whole lot, in order to make what seem to you to be major sacrifices. It sure would be easier to be married to someone who you both love and share a culture with.

20

What about instances when a person of a different race has the same culture as you, and you still “want marry your own kind”?

Is this a more reliable sign that a person may have prejudices?