The NYT has an interesting article on the increasing demand for, and prominence of, people of mixed racial backgrounds. This is a welcome and interesting trend in my opinion – a hope that this may be evidence of the fact that racial barriers are beginning to break down.
More thoughts on this after I grab some food…
Generation E.A.: Ethnically Ambiguous
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Apparently blonds don’t have more fun
I read “this”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/28/fashion/28ETHN.html?th
in the New York Times.com. It discusses the trend to use ethnically ambiguous actors and models. Immediately I thought “What will Barbie do?”
When I was growing up in the 1980′s…
First of all, I didn’t read the article. The New York Times no longer really prints news, and distorts the truth even more than Washington beltway spin control artists. In fact, I’m boycotting it until they clean up their act. I don’t need right wing news, but I certainly also don’t need to be lied to by something purporting to be a major news organ.
That being said, in general, while mixing races isn’t necessarily a bad thing, there is some value to racial and ethnic diversity in terms of the propogation and survival of the species. Ethnic diversity exists, at least in part, due to selective breeding for survival traits that are reasonable for different parts of the world. While this is not overly relevant for developed countries, it is elsewhere. Furthermore, monotyping is horrificly bad from a selection perspective. It effectively increases the probability that one thing can kill off everything. So if you were to average the human genome across the entire species, and everyone was effectively the same, subject to mutation and general combinatoric differences, you’d have a pretty poor species.
In fact, so-called ethnic diversity is good for the species. So while “color blind” is nice from a social interaction perspective, and a certain amount of inter-ethnic breeding is desirable, on a grand scale it’s actually quite undesirable. For example, if all humankind had the cycle-cell gene that is predominately found in West Africans, that would be bad. Or the predominately Asian gene that prevented the proper metabolization of alcohol. Whatever.
My point is that you shouldn’t read the Times and immediately believe that their social utopian nonsense, proved wrong time and again by the unstoppable march of history and the very nature of human behavior, however dressed up it might be with idealistic academic ideas, is always right. Like all good propagandists, they usually include an element of truth (ethnic interaction is good), but then extrapolate into something that is absurd.
cdg