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

In My Humble Opinion
21

I would distinguish between the expression as a personal preference and one directed at someone else.

As a personal preference, it may be rooted in a number of different things, some of which may have some form of bigotry involved. It may be that someone with such a preference may be cutting themselves off from all kinds of wonderful potential relationships, but if that’s the case, the only person hurt is themselves. And if what they’re looking for is a partner who shares certain sorts of background experience, religious beliefs, cultural mores, or whatever else, then that’s something that’s important to what will make a happy relationship for them.

I feel much more negative about it as a statement intended to torpedo or denigrate someone else’s relationship or potential relationship. I can see where such statements come from in places that are not necessarily bigoted, but the preservation of culture through generations, as valuable as it is in the abstract, just won’t happen if the people in each generation don’t value it.

22

It raises my hackles. Like you, I would suspect racism, intentional or otherwise.
I’ve actually had this conversation with someone:

Her: “You’re better off dating your own kind.”

Me: “My own kind? You mean because he’s black? What does his skin color have to do with anything?”

Her: “Oh, don’t get me wrong, I love black people. I’m not prejudiced or anything. I just think that you two won’t have enough in common, what with all the cultural differences.”

And then I hit her in the head with a large rock.

[sub]Ok, I made that last part up.[/sub]

23

I think it’s racist/classist whatever.

Then again, I had a jewish boyfriend for 5 years. His parents didn’t know about me for 3 of them. You would have thought they would have been relieved to know he wasn’t gay, but nope, his mothers first words to me were “You almost killed my husband.”

I ended up marrying a man from the “good” side of town. He is nice, but is family is a buncha snobs. He ended up having a drug addiction that about ruined us. He started going to NA meetings. His mothers biggest concern? “You don’t know what kind of families those people are from.” I told her families just like hers.

Now, I sobered him up while having just given birth to our newborn child. His family did as little as possible to help. Meanwhile, my white-trash (in their eyes) family, helped me save our home, sober him up and keep the lights on. Guess who his mother isn’t very happy with? Me? You guess it.

For the record, we have been together 11 years. We have a great relationship, but I know darn good and well, if I was black/asian/hispanic/etc, he would have never dated me. When we got married, his grandfather (from Spain) asked me what color I wanted the waiters to be. I asked for swatches.

Yes, there may be reasons behind it. That don’t make it right. Also, the jewish religion/race/culture/whatever, is passed through the mother, so no matter HOW jewish the father is, the kids are not considered “true” jews unless the mother is.

Oh, my nice jewish boyfriend, who swore it didn’t matter that I wasn’t jewish, married a nice israeli girl, had the wedding in Israel and lives there now. Yes, the father died, however not at my hand, and the mother is living blissfully in Israel. In the end, when it came to marriage, it did matter.

24

A lot (or at least some) of the problems you list are communication problems at their core. Perhaps marrying outside your kind lends itself to poor communication?
I don’t want to put words in your mouth, of course.

25

I also like and celebrate differences between/amongst people/cultures, but do you think it’s possible to have a union and have two separate cultures coincide? My guy instinct tells me no; that someone in one side of the family is going to make it difficult for the couple, which is a damned shame.
I remember when i was dating an ex, her parents were pretty well off. My mother told me “guys like you don’t get girls like her.”

That prompted a quick “what in the FUCK does that mean?” out of me.

26

If you are young, and up to the challenge, you might not mind having to continually explain to each other the nuances of every other word and action and idea you express. Cute at first. Behind our words, just 15% of how we truly communicate, are all the days of our lives, all the things that were learned and were imprinted upon us, silent ideas that we don’t even know are there. So, marrying someone who is outside your race and culture is very stressful and can be the cause of a great deal of misunderstnding. It’s entirely possible I suppose to be happy, but just very, very tiring, and especially when the children come. They end up to be this mixed-up combination that has a hard time being in one world or the other. Just basic things about what a man and woman expect of each other become an issue. Watch Wife Swap and see the anger that comes out when even people raised in different states and/or parts of the country come in conflict over these expectations. Some of the men are ready to actually physically attack the New Wife because she refuses to cook and clean up to his expectations. And the anger over religious differences! Karumba! These good Christian people are not so Christian once they step outside of their own little circles where they share common beliefs. When I was young I fell in love with a man from the Netherlands and the next thing I knew I was washing his socks in the sink. Ha. But, despite all these differences people continue to hope and think that they are different; and sometimes they are and sometimes it works. I think if it’s not a KluKlux Clansman making the remark, it might just be a little truism learned from experience.

27

If you are young, and up to the challenge, you might not mind having to continually explain to each other the nuances of every other word and action and idea you express. Cute at first. Behind our words, just 15% of how we truly communicate, are all the days of our lives, all the things that were learned and were imprinted upon us, silent ideas that we don’t even know are there. So, marrying someone who is outside your race and culture is very stressful and can be the cause of a great deal of misunderstnding. It’s entirely possible I suppose to be happy, but just very, very tiring, and especially when the children come. They end up to be this mixed-up combination that has a hard time being in one world or the other. Just basic things about what a man and woman expect of each other become an issue. Watch Wife Swap and see the anger that comes out when even people raised in different states and/or parts of the country come in conflict over these expectations. Some of the men are ready to actually physically attack the New Wife because she refuses to cook and clean up to his expectations. And the anger over religious differences! Karumba! These good Christian people are not so Christian once they step outside of their own little circles where they share common beliefs. When I was young I fell in love with a man from the Netherlands and the next thing I knew I was washing his socks in the sink. Ha. But, despite all these differences people continue to hope and think that they are different; and sometimes they are and sometimes it works. I think if it’s not a KluKlux Clansman making the remark, it might just be a little truism learned from experience.

28

No, I think that most people are poor communicators, but that you can get along despite that if you are more or less on the same page regarding expectations. It’s when expectations differ widely that the inability to communicate effectivly is highlighted. My grandparents had such solid, similar expectatins of the roles each would play in their relationships that they never had to actually talk to each other. Not true for really any relationship anymore, but especially not a cross-cultural one.

29

Hm. Kinda interesting. Would you say that a large ingredient of “love” is also to have similar expectations?

My only problem with that is they’re (expectations) are closely tied to emotions. Emotions aren’t quantifiable things, much like love. In a relationship, and it becomes much more apparent if/when the relationship fails, it means that one person loves the other person more than the other does.

Yes, this takes us slightly away from the topic at hand.

30

Ha, you’re a guy? I thought you were female.

The fact is that inter-cultural relationships are usually more difficult. Since marriage is pretty hard work anyway, it might be a good idea to think about this fact beforehand. For example, my BIL is married to a woman from another country. He has gone to live there permanently. Now, I love my SIL dearly, and they have a happy marriage, which is great. I am in no way complaining about it. But the fact is that they have had a harder time with certain issues, particularly money. Money is already one of the biggest sources of difficulty in a marriage, and the completely different expectations these two brought to the marriage made it a tough issue from the start. They have been married for nearly 10 years now and are very happy, and I’m thrilled about that–but they didn’t choose the easy way. So, that is something worth thinking about, that inter-cultural marriages are often more work and more fraught with issues. If a marriage is to be taken seriously, then it’s something that has to be faced.

For myself, race is certainly not an issue, but religion is. I wanted to marry a guy who shared my faith and my vision of how our family should work. I did in fact date outside that, but what it mainly did was show me that it would be better to stick to guys of my religion. My husband and I share a common ground to build on; we see the world and how it works in much the same way, and we have similar goals for our family. Sure, I could have married someone else, but then I wouldn’t have this whole underlying dimension to our lives that gives us a common understanding and meaning.

Expectations: The thing is, that love is not enough to hold a marriage together. Love can be killed if it takes enough of a beating. A lot of marriage is just getting though the day, the year together; it’s not always sparkly and romantic, and it has to have more than that to hold it up. It’s teamwork and compromise and sticking together through the really hard times that always come. All that together is what makes up married love. And if your expectations are different enough, then that will wear away at your relationship unless you do something about it. And a lot of our expectations are so assumed and unconscious that we don’t even know we have them! It often takes someone to point it out, or a lot of work, to figure out what they are. So it’s not so easy to just explain yourself, because you don’t always know what it is you’re thinking.

31

My friend heard it from some of his relatives (he’s Scottish-American, his wife’s Japanese). He shut them up by responding, “if I wanted to do that I’d fuck my sister.” Apparently that hit a bit too close to home for a few of them.

If you’re only saying it about your own marriage prospects, then I may think it’s odd and needlessly limiting, but not necessarily racist. It could just be an honest assessment of your own ability to adapt to living with someone from a very different background.

OTOH, if you’re seriously telling someone else they should stick to their own kind, then yes, my first impression would be that you were a bigot.

Personally, I’ve dated a very eclectic selection of women and I’ve never had anyone tell me this (at least nobody in my family). I have, however, known several women who said they wouldn’t consider going out with me, or who kept our relationship a secret from her parents, precisely because I wasn’t her family’s ‘kind’.

32

Because of rjung’s interpretation, I’ll grant that these statements are not inherently bigoted. And that may be the sense in which they’re most often made - as well-meaning, familial advice. But they bother me a great deal because they are inherently very presumptuous, even when taken as charitably as possible. I’m not sure anybody has ever said anything like that to me. My grandparents may have said some things generally to that effect. My family being the way it is, I probably told them to fuck off.

33

When it comes to long term relationships, and marriage is typically thought of as one of the longest, compatibility is pretty darn important. If a Jew and a Lutheran want to marry they’re going to have to decide which holidays to celebrate, whether to go to church,temple, or both, and what religion they should raise their kids as. People from different cultural backgrounds might have radically different ideas of what roles men and women should play in a marriage and how children are to be raised properly.

In short I think it’s completely legitimate to rule out marriage if someone has a very different background then your own. I wouldn’t feel comfortable telling someone they should “marry their own kind” though. How the hell am I suppose to know who they should marry?

Marc

34

The statement is an abomination. Parents who advise their children so are not fit to raise children. This is how evil comes into the world, not through the front door, but softly, softly.

I raised this argument in a Great Debates thread a few months ago. Curiously, the distribution of opinons was the opposite of what it is here. I guess it is because most people reading the thread thought I was such an effective advocate all on my own. :dubious:

35

No, I don’t think that love is the problem: I think love is easy. Expectations don’t have anything to do with love. However, they have a lot to do with making someone feel unloved: if your mom, and every married woman you knew growing up, expressed her affection for her husband by having an elaborate dinner of things he liked on the table every night and you marry a woman from a family that really doesn’t cook, there will be a tendency to see the fact that she doesn’t cook, or that when she does, it’s indifferently, as a sign that she doesn’t love you like Mom loved Dad. And it doesn’t matter if you knew she didn’t cook when you married her–those expectations weren’t in play then. If you are from a family where Dad showed Mom he loved her through obnoxious public displays, and you marry someone from a reserved family, it’s hard not to read that reserve as proof they don’t love you to pieces, even if you understand it intellectually. Your instincts tell you otherwise, and that’s hard to overcome.

36

A good point. Hell, people have a hard enough time trying to figure out who they want to date/marry. Why should they take it upon themselves to tell others who/how to date/marry?

37

Apologies. I never checked to see if there was a thread to it, but I had assumed there was one.

I haven’t heard anything contrary to the overall concensus, and, even though that’s semi-comforting, that’s not necessarily true. I was really hoping to hear from someone who felt differently so I can at least try to understand why people would believe such things

38

I don’t see anything to apologise about. Here is the link

39

This is from way up at the top of the thread, but I was curious about it. Can you expound?

40

It’s ethnocentric in a pushy and imperialistic way to consider the desire to marry your own kind to be a bad thing. That one’s culture is unimportant and ultimately disposible, or at least moldable to one’s individual preference is a particularly American idea. Most people in the world take their folkways and mores seriously enough that it’d be necessary to find a spouse that shares them. Who are we to begrudge them of doing so?
That said, it does annoy me when immigrants get testy about their children marrying into the products of their adopted country. I mean (1) “tell us how you really feel” and (2) pick your battles.