Am I the only one who wouldn’t give a shit if all the polar bears and brown bears disappeared overnight and were replaced by beige bears? It’s possible I’m missing some essential part of the metaphor that explains why having separate white bears and brown bears is so valuable to humankind.
Polar bear cubs are so much cuter than brown bear cubs.
As a citizen of a rather homogeneous country, I can say that clinging to the idea that races should be separate and distinct leads to a lot of narrow-mindedness and hatred. If beige colored people are the price we have to pay for a more accepting society, so be it.
The idea that there is such a thing as purity of the races is so laughable, it’s not even worth weighing, let alone mourning.
I owe my existence to an interracial couple so I’m decidedly pro.
I haven’t seen your old man, but he would have to be pretty damn ugly for you to have an ugly kid.
I don’t get warm fuzzies for any animal that looks at me and thinks ‘lunch’.
purity != distinctiveness
+1
I dealt with the whole “will our kids be attractive” question by just not having kids. We have a cousin who is absoutely beautiful, and who married a fairly handsome man. They had one girl. Everyone thought the girl would be beautiful, but she got daddy’s looks and not mommy’s. Sigh. So there is really no guarantee.
I don’t care about preserving the polar bears either. Seems to me if they can’t find a way to maintain themselves then it’s no skin off my back. Hybrid vigor is a thing, you know.
But really in the end, we will all be beige and I will be perfectly happy with it. Maybe it’ll solve at least some of the problems we have (to be replaced with more, of course).
When I was in India the first time I about died from all the staring. The second time I about died when a complete stranger reached over a “stand here” barrier outside the airport and all the way across my body to pinch my year old son’s cheek. After that, normal staring couldn’t phase me anymore. 
Anyway, I’m a generic white American and my husband is Indian. Here at home I rarely-to-never notice anyone looking at us oddly, but then I’m usually pretty wrapped up in my own world. My husband says he’s noticed it a few times. I voted “yay” because more interracial couples means a greater feeling of “this is normal and common and accepted” for us and especially for the kidlet. It’s nice living where we do: my best friend is Puerto Rican and married to a Filipino; the neighbor kid’s best friend is biracial; there are a couple of biracial or multiracial kids in my son’s first grade class, and so on. It’s not particularly common, but it’s not really rare either.
Oh, it’s you.
Just popped in to add that I saw a cookie commercial last night that actually made me think, “yea, progress!”
A white mom, and two kids who looked clearly like the offspring of a black/white coupling, were making cookies together. No dad in the commercial. But a white mom, and two mixed kids, doing something decidedly mundane and oh so American. Loved it!!!
The increasing visibility and media acceptance of interracial families brings me great joy- not just because of my own family, but because of the fury and misery I imagine it brings on in all the old racist dinosaurs.
It’s not considered appropriate in Indian culture to smile at strangers. It’s kind of weird. I don’t notice it until they really go all pop-eyed.
No one ever says anything, though.
Go to your long time-travel vendor and pop back in time about 1000 years, Start from the westernmost point of the Iberian peninsula and travel by horse to what is now Korea. Doing this will disabuse of of the absurd notion of racial distinctions. They’re illusions. Trying to pin them down is only slightly less fruitless than chasing rainbows.
So your view is that any time it’s difficult to draw a clear line between two groups or entities, any distinction between those two groups or entities is an illusion?
Does the same reasoning apply to distinctions between neighborhoods in a city?
Between different dialects of languages?
Between different species?
I was going to comment on this before. I can think of two commercials ( one, I think is for a car where two biracial kidlets wash it, and another I can’t bring to mind at the moment).Anyway, my first thought was with the marketing part of my brain; they obviously chose to cast biracial; what’s the strategy behind that? Then the less cynical part of me thought "maybe it’s just a reflection of the times we live in, and I do like the thought of that.
Thanks.
brazil84 - I think what Skald is trying to say is that any distinctions we try to draw between cultures are arbitrary and ephemeral. If you go back far enough, China, Korea, and Japan stem from the same ancestors who at the time shared a common culture. Korea was once made up of several kingdoms, each with their own distinctive culture, all of which eventually blended together to became what we think of now as one common culture. There are no hard and fast lines that can be drawn for any meaningful period of time.
Sure, and why should this matter? Aren’t most distinctions arbitrary and ephemeral in the same way?
Are there any cultures, languages, religions, species, subspecies, neighborhoods, or genres of art or music, which you would prefer to last? Which you would be sad to see disappear?
I would be sad to see anything unique disappear, but as I’ve stated before, I don’t see the point of preserving these things if it means fostering a close-minded attitude towards people that are not of your culture.
Korea did this for a long part of its history, earning ourselves the nickname “The Hermit Kingdom.” I don’t think this did us any favors. It’s made us xenophobic and narrow-minded. After the Korean War, there were countless numbers of mixed-race children that were abandoned because so many Koreans abhorred the idea of “tainted” offspring. Korean women who married foreigners were shunned and branded traitors to their culture.
Anyway, I don’t see how interracial marriages are a threat to cultures in general. I don’t deny that cultural imperialism exists, and countries like Ireland are struggling to preserve parts of their culture (in particular, their language) that are in danger of disappearing because they have been subsumed by a more dominant culture. But that has nothing to do with people marrying outside of their own race.
Do you have a specific example of a culture that was wiped out or is in danger of being wiped out as a result of their members marrying people of other races?
If you’re serious about preserving traditional cultures, ethnicities, languages, the US is the wrong place for you.
Almost nobody in Wisconsin speaks German anymore, and there are no longer German newspapers with large circulation as there were before the wars. And German-Americans routinely intermarry with Irish and Poles and Italians. These are all good things for America. Holding yourself apart from the mainstream is bad. Mixing and assimilating are good. It’s a big part of what makes us who we are. We abandon the ethnic divisions that in other countries lead to civil war and general dysfunction.
Iraq, Afghanistan, India, and Northern Ireland, to name but four, are nightmares of multiculturalism, where intermarriage between groups is largely forbidden. What’s routine in America, inter ethnic dating, in these countries is cause for ostracism and even death.
What does this have to do with marriage? Alot, because ultimately there’s no way to separate the personal and the political.