Interracial marriages and the concept of the "melting pot".

In spite of the bad image the US has abroad as the land of racism and segregation, the truth is that interracial marriages are far more widespread than most people —including many Americans— think:

Recent immigrants from Latin America and East Asia are intermarrying with the post-European white majority at a remarkable rate -one in two Asian-Americans, one in three Latinos. The younger Americans are, the more likely they are to be in transracial marriages. In 1990, for example, only 53 percent of married black Americans under the age of twenty-five were in black-black marriages —compared to 84 percent of blacks over the age of sixty-five. Nothing short of a complete reversal of today's high intermarriage rates can prevent the formation, at different rates in different regions of the country, of a mixed-race majority in the United States in the long run. The golfer Tiger Woods —who jokingly describes himself as "Cablinasian", by which he means a fusion of Caucasian, black, Indian, and Asian— may well be a forerunner of the "average American" in the centuries to come.

(Halstead & Lind: p. 173).

There are a couple of issues to consider here. First of all, contrary to the myth many Americans like to believe, the US is not the first society that has managed to build a sense of community from people with different ethnic origins. Far from it, this has been the norm throughout history. As a matter of fact, the concept of nation-state, firmly linked to that of a single language or ethnic identity, is quite recent. It doesn't go further back than a few centuries. Regardless, the only reason why we consider the French, the Germans or the Italians to have some sort of ethnic homogeneity is because they started their own particular melting pot hundreds of years ago. Other than that, genetically speaking, they are far from homogeneous. In other words, countries like China, Italy or Turkey are what the US may be like in a couple of centuries, the result of all these interracial marriages and the peaceful —and not so peaceful— coexistence of many different ethnicities on the same soil.

The second issue to consider is how this trend will affect racial policies, in special affirmative action. In this regard, one has to agree with Halstead and Lind that such policies will make less and less sense as we move towards a society where the different races are mixed. The idea is pretty much anathema to today's liberals, but it's difficult to think how else the racial policies we have been implementing so far —clearly based on a static sense of identity— can be applied to a fluid society like the one that's to come. Simply put, a policy such affirmative action that assumes that each individual will be identified with a single ethnicity has little future in a global world, it seems.