This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Thoughts. I'll note first, to give my standpoint and biases, that my marriage of years could be classified as interracial in some cases but not in others. I look like an SS corporal out of central casting, my wife is Persian and even paler than me. On the census, some Persians pick white and some pick Asian and some pick other, normally depending on what they think is most advantageous to them personally. In public we read as a white couple, some of my bigoted relatives say we're not, some of her uncles say it's all Aryans.
The use of categories like "Hispanic" and "Asian" probably introduces a lot of noise into the data. If David Ortiz marries Meghan Markle, in what ways is that counted as interracial in the stats? Is it a Black man marrying a Black woman, an Hispanic man marrying a Black woman, a Black man marrying a (mostly) white woman, a Hispanic man marrying a white woman? If I saw them in the street without context, I'd call that a white woman and a Black dude. But God forbid we start talking about the same scenario with Sammy Sosa. Hispanic really just means your family lived south of the Rio Grande at any point in history, I've dated Mexican girls who were Lebanese and Mexican girls who were Polish and Mexican girls who were, well, native Mexicans. Some of them were happy to bring me home to their parents but wouldn't dream of bringing a "fellow-Hispanic" with darker skin home. I kind of want the data by where you fall on a foundation pallet. Or with Asians other than East Asians and all Hispanics eliminated from the data, as they confuse things with vague categorization.
Approving of it if you want to do it doesn't mean you think it's a good idea. People might approve in concept, but may not like it themselves or may see it mostly in reality play out poorly. I approve of people being allowed to listen to Polka, that doesn't mean I like Polka. That doesn't mean I think polka has a positive social effect (what with all the drinking). I'm in a favor of a great many things being allowed or existing that I don't want to do, that doesn't make me a hypocrite.
Fetishization is probably a big part of the story. People of all races reduce people of other races to flat cheap characters in romance novels or pornography, and imagine dating that flat character when you ask them about interracial dating. They don't imagine dating real life people of other races, what with the friction and the reality and all. A lot of girls I've dated (Asians, Hispanics, Black girls) had this fantasy of me as this super preppy white guy with a sweater wrapped around my shoulders*; and hey at 19 I'll play the country club minstrel show if it got me laid. But do I want to keep that up? Do they like me as I really exist? Idk.
Local color: One of the four or five richest families I know, practically speaking local feudal lords. One of their sons married a black girl he met in college, gorgeous girl and a really sharp CPA. One of my old PA dutch uncles asks me what I think of it, he knew his grandfather and he wouldn't have stood for it. I said Uncle, you got it all wrong. That kid is Ticketed for the governor's office in 2056. The halfrican scion of a wealthy Republican farming family? The idpol folks would vote for him right now in the cradle! Teach him Spanish, he's golden. This is ethnogenesis in action: URM status has advantages, people are going to identify into it if practical, marry into it if necessary. Look at Bill DiBlasio, he ran on his Black gay wife and Black son, and won despite total incompetence. Idk how that fits in but it feels relevant.
Cross cutting versus coinciding identities. How many interracial marriages are also cross-class marriages? How many marriages at all? Because race often coincides with economic class, it will show up in the raw stats as racial bias, but it's really class bias. They have no objection in theory to meeting a nice girl from their alma mater who happens to be Black, in reality there are very few Black girls who meet that description.
P.S. Shouldn't a Christian reactionary refuse any woman's advances in a bar? Story sort of confused me on that point, race seems irrelevant to whether you're going home with a rando if you're a Christian.
*The weirdest wasn't even a girl I dated, I had a Nigerian study partner in Econ who, in conversation, starts telling me that she wants to marry a blonde guy with blue eyes so she'll have children with pretty eyes and pretty hair, staring at me the whole time. I got just a hint there of what Asians must feel whenever they meet an anime fan.
I think its worth making explicit that Asian women are also the thinnest grouping in 'racial group broadly defined'.
Asian women are vastly less obese than the non-asian population of the United States.
There is this idea that white people (and weebs in particular) think of Asian women as this old practically Victorian Era submissive 3 steps behind the husband trope but I contend that that's not the primary appeal of Asian women to White guys.
In an American context Asian women are far more likely to be
Japanese, Korean, or Chinese descendent
roughly speaking are thinner than white women by 30 pounds, hispanics by 40 pounds, and black women by 50 pounds
more likely to be intelligent as well as college educated
less likely to come from a family that's undergoing social breakdown from fentanyl/drugs.
match speech patterns/accent to the local White population if they grew up in a predominately White area instead of adopting a distinct dialect of opposition.
If the Hispanic population in the US was small, distinct, and had the same level of thinness and educational attainment I maintain that Hispanic girls would have a similar highly desired status as Asian women today. Imagine a situation where the US was 4% Chilean, Argentinian, and Uruguayan with the same traits as expressed above. I guarantee if you talked to a random white guy he'd go 'oh yeah. hispanics are cute. I love hispanic girls'. But hes just using physical features as shorthand in order to estimate an what is overwhelmingly an expression of body type & compatibility. It's not a desire to obtain a lifestyle of tropes from old media and/or pornography about what "foreign women" are like.
That would all make sense if all the aspects of fetishizing Asian women that you glide glibly past, and the fetishization off Asian women, didn't predate the broad American obesity epidemic and the high educational attainments of Asian women by several decades.
I also simply refuse to pretend that there isn't a huge childhood anime obsession to adult Asian fetish pipeline. Your materialism is nothing to observed reality.
Anyway the much more likely material element is that taking white Americans as your base group, Asian features tend to read as more feminine. Hence the inverse effect on Asian men, who would otherwise benefit from most of those elements.
But my point had less to do with Asians in particular and more to do with all races in all contexts. Foreign girls fetishize white American boys, suburban white girls fetishize black men and black men fetishize them right back, Indian exchange students fetishize hooking up with white classmates before their in-caste marriage kicks in, so on and so forth. It goes on between every racial group combination you will ever see, and I've seen most of them already. I'm sure someone out there has a fantasy involving aboriginal Australians for whatever godawful reason.
ETA: which to get back to OP, might lead to a gap between theoretically approving of an interracial relationship and actually engaging in an interracial marriage. When you ask me if I'd marry/date/fuck an X I picture an attractive X, not an ugly X. If attractive Xs are thin on the ground then I will not actually marry one, while still being totally willing to.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
"Ethnogenesis" created entirely by government discrimination against an ethnic group, incentivizing its members to marry out of it, is not a good thing.
As Jeff Foxworthy used to say, Booing it doesn't make it less true.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This part confused me quite a bit, too. I mean, let's add to it that Christian sects which condemn interracial marriage almost universally take a hard line on fornication.
More options
Context Copy link
To be fair, she's an actual real life Aryan. Not so much white guys like you and I though.
Man, I just always write down prefer not to say anyway. No government or pollster should have that information, and who knows anyway? My recent ancestors all spoke German or Magyar, but the last name is Turkish, so odds are there's some steppe-slaveholder somewhere in there?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Have you noticed that most people don't have a particularly strong grasp of genetics? I'm sorry, Nigerian woman, no matter who you marry, your kids will have brown eyes and dark hair.
Now, grandkids are another story, but nobody is going to be thinking that far in advance.
Eh, I think the hair thing is more complicated. Her kids will likely end up moving down the curl spectrum, from a solid 4 to a 3b or even a 2c. Which is a significant "improvement" on balance, if that's what you're looking for.
Though I suspect the various ways that Black women in American media make themselves up confuses the issue considerably for a Black woman from abroad.
Also see the grandmother in the painting "Redemption of Ham"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanqueamiento?wprov=sfti1
There's, um, interracial porn where the actors' skin tones are close enough that you wouldn't be able to tell from a close-up shot that it's not just regular porn. I doubt it's full-body make-up. American Blacks are on average significantly lighter than West Africans.
But yeah, getting blue-eyed first-generation descendants would be quite improbable.
I was thinking more of hair relaxing, wigs, extensions, contacts. All fairly common among Black celebrities (of the non porn variety). I can personally say that prior to dating a girl who would leave my Ford explorer smelling like a nice ethnic hair care product, I did not realize how much effort American Black women put into making their hair look vaguely straight. So one might reasonably form unrealistic expectations for what a little mixing will do for hair, and to a lesser extent eyes and skin, from that exposure and lack of context.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link