Entry tags:

identity issues, marriage, race/ethnicity/culture

Some thoughts on interracial dating
This is a response to Hugo Schwyzer's post Dating to disappoint and the Bulworth solution. In this post, Hugo writes:

I get very, very angry when I hear of parents forbidding their children to date someone because they didn't meet the right ethnic profile. As far as I'm concerned, it's pure unadulterated racism. Real tolerance must be about more than being willing to share public space with folks of other ethnicities, it must also be about the willingness to welcome them into one's family and rejoice when they become the spouses of one's children and the parents of the grandkids. I'm convinced that that's true, and I admit I see interracial/interethnic marriage as a fundamental social good. How else can we fully eradicate racial and ethnic prejudice save through mixed marriages?

I encourage you to read the entire post before reading my reaction; I'm sure the above quote and the quotes that follow can't give a complete sense of what the post says.

I was shocked by my own viscerally negative response to Hugo's post. After all, when I've had friends whose parents have objected to my friends dating and/or marrying outside their own race or ethnic group, my sympathies have been entirely with the children. (Heck, most of my friends predict that if I marry it won't be to another Korean American, which means I may very well find myself on the receiving end of parental disapproval someday. My brother already has.) Shouldn't I have been cheering at Hugo's post? Yet I wasn't; in fact, I could have almost categorized my response as offended. So I refrained from commenting and took some time to work through what I was thinking.

And after sorting through my reactions, I came to the following conclusion: what I found problematic about Hugo's post was the way he described interracial dating and marriage as a "fundamental social good." To me, interracial dating and marriage is a morally neutral choice, no better and no worse than dating within one's race or ethnic group. To me, dating someone outside one's race or ethnic group is no more a morally-loaded choice than dating someone who sings well or dating someone who likes baseball. Certainly there are greater social implications to interracial dating than there are to baseball fan dating, but social implications do not by themselves give the choice to date within or without one's race or ethnic group a moral value.

Now Hugo sees interracial dating marriage as a "fundamental social good" because it is part of what he calls the Bulworth solution. In that movie, the title character says, "Everybody just got to keep fucking everybody till we're all the same color." In other words, Bulworth's and Hugo's solution to racism is the melting pot: eliminate those distinctions, and we'll all just get along by default.

To me, that sounds an awful lot like, "Hey, Rilina, those racists can't deal with the fact that you're Korean American, that you're different from them. So you'll have to become more like them, and they'll have to become more like you, just so we can have a world they can cope with." Or, "Hey, Rilina, if you choose to marry another Korean American, you're being unenlightened. It's so close-minded of you to cling to your ethnic and racial identity by doing that. Don't you know that you'd be making the world a better place by having beautiful mixed babies? I'm sorry if you actually decided that you love that Korean guy; you really need to just get with the program." The Bulworth solution essentially appears to be an accommodation of racism. God forbid the racists actually have to be the people who change. God forbid they learn to cope with my being entirely yellow. God forbid my kids turn out to be entirely yellow too; why there'd be a whole extra generation of those yellow people for those racists to deal with.

To say interracial dating and marriage is a "fundamental social good" inevitably implies, however unintentionally, that non-interracial dating is somehow a less valid choice.

I don't think for one minute, of course, that those things are what Hugo intended to say with his post. I'm very much aware that my reactions are a product of the baggage I brought to reading that post. But I don't think that baggage is all that uncommon among people of color, especially women of color. Assimilation doesn't look nearly as appealing from the minority's point of view. We minorities have lots of reasons to fear that word; we lose more, sometimes all. So at the end of the day, the fantasy of complete homogeneity is always going to look better to the majority culture than the minority cultures.

It's certainly not that I think that Asian and Asian American (and those are two separate things, don't make any mistake about that) cultures are perfect creations that needed to be protected against all encroachment. Far from it. I am certainly well aware of the problematic aspects of Asian and Asian American culture. But I don't think replacing flawed Asian cultural values with flawed Western cultural values is an improvement. That's just replacing one idol with another.

So as I said, when tensions over interracial dating and marriage have arisen in the families of my friends, my sympathies are with the children. But I refuse to just dismiss the parents' attitudes as "pure unadulterated racism." I know too much to feel so superior. The parents' attitude goes beyond fear and bigotry. Thus the Bulworth solution, at the end of the day, just strikes me as impossibly simple, impossibly naive.

And one last thought, though I've probably provided enough fuel for a thousand flame wars already. (Be nice in the comments; I'm not afraid to delete anything offensive.) Hugo does bring in a religious perspective to his posts, which is one reason I read his blog. In this post, he writes:

The historian in me and the Christian in me regard ethnic distinctives (other than food and innocuous holiday customs) with suspicion. How can we form religious and political unity when we still hold historic allegiances to our own ethnic group, I wonder?

I'll certainly acknowledge there's a whole lot of validity to that suspicion. Christianity does challenge the supremacy of ethnic traditions and cultures, just as it challenges the ultimate supremacy of the family unit. For believers, the first loyalty is to God, not our race or ethnicity. But the images of unity that we find in the Bible are not based on everyone being the same color. Rather, they are visions of unity in Christ in which differences are transcended but not eliminated. The temple is a "house of prayer for all peoples" (Isaiah 56.5); the nations come together, but they are not homogeneous. And consider the miracle of Pentecost. It is not a matter of everyone suddenly learning one master tongue, a pidgin of all their native languages combined. Rather, the Holy Spirit bestows upon the apostles the ability to speak in the many other languages of the crowd. Instead of the reversal of Babel, we have the redemption of what happened there. The Bulworth solution is a cheap shortcut, a way to avoid actually learning to talk to and live with and love people who are different from us in culture/race/ethnicity/class/whatever.

Various disclaimers and things I don't have time to cover here:

1. The issue of inter-religious relationships are raised in Hugo's post as well. I don't have the energy to touch that here, other than to say that I see that as an entirely separate issue.

2. I know race is a social construct that has no basis in science, but for the purposes of this sort of discussion, the fact that most people have accepted that construct makes it real enough to discuss.

3. I still want to respond to oyceter and yhlee's posts (see link roundup here), but I also need to sleep tonight. As a sorta third culture kid, my identification of myself as Asian, Asian American, and/or American gets very complicated. For the purposes of this discussion, Asian American is the simplest way to put it. But more on that anon.