December 09, 2003

• If you're bored, you can play a cool game of "guess the ethnicity" of the people in the images flashing on the left side of the page.
• I had to pause here awhile, because I wanted to say something less than glib. I wonder if that may explain the lack of posts to this thread. It's not that MoFi will never be a place for spirited and even impassioned discussion. Perhaps, in all the threads posted that December 9th, people were not in the mood for this, which is not quirky or wacky or funny per se. But I was wondering what monkeys thought about an increasingly mult-racial world and the attitudes towards it. I know about seven interracial couples just personally off the top of my head--whoops, just thought of another: make that eight. And I think to how, in the States, just fifteen years ago, this would have been deemed very unusual. Hell, I remember being in a small town in Maine and someone asking what this Cha-noo-kah (Channukah) stuff was all about. And I remember ten years ago talking with some Australians who, comparing national histories, said that they were just then dealing with aboriginal issues in a way that their society hadn't before--and what they were trying to learn from the US, both good and bad, from the 50s and 60s. So I wondered what other monkeys thought of the current cultural climates around the globe. Are people more accepting. Are the folks who get upset by interracial marriage finally dying off because of all the aneurysms they get at the thought it's on the rise? Just curious.
• I don't know. I think that interracial relationships are still more rare than random would make them. Toronto is about 1/2 non white, many different ethnicities, but interracial couples and biracial people are still somewhat unusual. There is a lot of self-segregation that sets in about highschool, which I witnessed and experienced (though my school was predominantly white, being an unusual program), but never understood.
• In my little corner of the US, Caucasians are third in numbers behind Hispanics and Asians. From several years of surfing the grocery store aisles, here are my observations. For the most part, people connect with other people who share their ethnic/cultural backgrounds. Most of those Hispanics who are new immigrants brought partners with them, or find partners who speak Spanish, but even the children of third or fourth generation families marry other Hispanics, to a large extent. The Asian communties are fairly self contained. The oldest Asian community here is Filipino. Early immigrants were men, many of whom were in the US military during WWII. They weren't allowed to bring their women into the US, so there were some Filipino/Causian couples, but those partnerships were looked down on. That was a racial attitude thing that lasted for years. Once the doors were opened to their women, there was less mixing. I think that was partially because of the discrimination they had faced, and partially because the men who had been lonely for so many years were happy to have the food and culture they'd been denied for so long. The next largest Asian population is from India. The first wave was Sikhs, but other groups are here. They look so much like the rest of us that I can't parse them out, unless they stick to their national/sectarian dress. Among the Caucasians, many are children of rich farmers, mostly Slavonians and Italians, and they've tended to marry into their cultural/econonic groups. But, another large group is descendents of the folks who fled the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. There are still some red-necks among them, but mostly their chances of hitching up require that they get what they need. And, there are relatively few blacks here. As a percentage of their population, I think I see more interractional couples with a black member than any other.