A god like entity (think Q from Star Trek) has come to Earth. This creature has got a real pet peeve against racism. He doesn’t like what he sees on Earth. So in an order to fix it, he does the following: Henceforth, any couples having a baby, will not have a baby of either race of the parent. The given race of the baby will be random, and will not be able to be determined until after the baby is born.
So basically, if two white folks have a baby, it could come out black, it could be Asian, etc…The only thing we DO know, is it won’t be white. The same is true for black couples, or Asian couples and so on. If the couple is of mixed race, the resulting baby will not be of either race of the parent.
Maybe some. There would be a whole lot more integration, so most racial stereotypes would lose currency. But I don’t think racism would go away completely.
Because lookism is a thing. People discriminate against the ugly, the overweight, the too-short, etc. These unattractive traits don’t exactly happen randomly, but they might as well. Two attractive people can create an “ugly” person at any time. Doesn’t stop people from being prejudiced against the ugly (or prejudiced in favor of the attractive).
I don’t think this is a good example since parents are unlikely to be objective about their own child’s looks, and most (or at least the most meaningful) prejudice against the ugly manifests in adult life rather than childhood. But I agree with your larger point. Still, the more we can narrow down the list of reasons to hate or fear someone, the better. It’s not as though the reduction in anti-gay prejudice has been offset by a corresponding rise in some other form of prejudice (current attitudes towards Muslims notwithstanding).
The OP is limiting “race” to the “physical features/genetic ancestry” definition, but “race” and “cultural group” used to be equivalent and sometimes still are, some “races” are “cultural groups”. A Jew is a Jew or a Hispanic a Hispanic regardless of color.
Also, racial divisions vary by culture. In the US, a black person is African-American. Someone with a black parent and one of another color is African-American. The Dumas, père et fils, would both have been considered African-American if they’d been American instead of French. Being Hispanic isn’t what you’d call a big deal in quite a few countries, nor is it particularly exotic to be Han in China. Telling a Roma from any other white person pretty much requires asking him; there’s certain looks (more to do with clothing and hair than with facial and body features) which are associated with one group or the other, but you can’t be sure just based on them. So… what definitions would His Q-ness apply?
Mind you, there might still be quite a few cases of “that ain’t my kid!”: some people manage to watch tons of TV without ever hearing a bit of news of the type that would occupy a normal newspaper’s front page. But it would also require the three people to be different-looking enough for such a jump while still leaving the motherhood believable: blonde, blue-eyed kid born of 100%-black parents might lead more to “heads exploding” than to “kid ain’t mine!”.
Why wouldn’t Q simply make everyone the same race? IIRC that was what happened in The Lathe of Heaven, when the central character’s dreams were made true retroactively after he had dreamed them. When he woke up after his dream to end racism, everyone was the same gray color. If making everyone the same race wouldn’t cure racism, I give up. Although it wouldn’t quite be the same as ending racism; it would merely remove the ability to discriminate by race.
Exactly. What we have isn’t racism. It’s UsVsThem-ism. Skin color & face shape are just real easy us/them discriminators.
If those distinguishing features disappeared, either gradually or instantly, we’d find something else. Recall the song “Short people (got no reason to live)”.
Probably the best way to overcome human UsVsThem-ism is a scenario like this movie District 9 - Wikipedia . Once we have readily identifiable intelligent non-human aliens roaming the earth it’ll be much easier for all humans to accept our collective Us-ism against the new and even more different Them.
I always loved the bit in Godfather where the guy who despises the mafia consigliere starts ranting about those dago guinea wop greaseball goombahs until Don Corleone’s adopted son politely interrupts to patiently explain that he’s German-Irish.
Just as angrily: “Well, let me tell YOU something, my KRAUT-MICK friend…”
He doesn’t actually care what Tom is; he just hates Tom.
The idea that racisim is based purely on the physical differnces is a myth. Racism persists because a sufficient number of stereotypical representatives of said races persist and continue to reinforce racist attitudes. Individual of any race will usually fit right in with most social or proffessional groups but often find themselves in a position where they have to prove themselves first. Contempt before investigation seems to be pervasive in society.
God is having a look around Earth, incognito, some time in the 1950s. He ends up spending some time in the Deep South of the US and, well, he is not particularly happy with how race relations are going over there…
In any case, God boards a bus somewhere in Alabama and when sees that the blacks are left standing in the back while the whites are sitting in the front, he finally explodes, reveals himself in all of his glory, and shouts: “You miserable bastards!! I created you all equal, and you go around treating other humans like shit because of the color of their skin?!?!? ENOUGH!! From now on, EVERYBODY WILL BE GREEN!!”
POOF – Everybody has got green skin! Everybody everywhere is green…!
And then the driver of the bus turns around, unperturbed, and calmly says:
“OK, folks; dark green at the back, light green to the front!”