Should interracial marriages be promoted?

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I don't get the point of this topic, what the hell does skin pigmentation have to do with a human being's intrinsic value. Who the hell cares what color skin someone has, it's stupid.

Really? I seem to recall how civil rights legislation from the mid twentieth century on has been championed by the left. Those southern Democrats who had opposed civil rights in good time became Republicans - much with the encouragement of Nixon's southern strategy. Since then, the right has used racially charged code words like "welfare queen," and scapegoated those on public assistance - black, brown, and white - for somehow being responsible for all this country's financial and social woes.
So how is the left guilty of misusing race?

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

I don't get the point of this topic, what the hell does skin pigmentation have to do with a human being's intrinsic value. Who the hell cares what color skin someone has, it's stupid.

People who say that in itself are racist, have a valid point, imo.

Actually it's more of the fact that I personally have been called a racist repeatedly online because I'm a conservative, as have many other conservatives.

Kraichgauer it isn't an excuse the right makes up, the left commonly tries to use the race card as a way to intimidate people instead of trying to actually point out racism.

Also to be quite blunt, I've seen more racism spewed from the left than I have from the right.

I don't get the point of this topic, what the hell does skin pigmentation have to do with a human being's intrinsic value. Who the hell cares what color skin someone has, it's stupid.

I remember reading a while back that some thinkers in Brazil encouraged mixed race marriages in order to lessen the impact of racism and I think in some cases for eugenic reasons.

It would be a shame to make races completely extinct.

If a person really thinks it so important to rid the world of racism, making the races completely extinct would be the obvious way to go about it. Then you would simply end up with a situation where every individual in the world belonged to a race of one, and the problem of racism would shift from how to prevent people from acting in their group's self-interest to how to prevent people from acting in their individual self-interest.

Alternatively, people might view the pursuance of self-interest as intrinsic to life, and understand that if it were not for subgroups within species separating and acting remaining separate (ie, acting as groups with group interests), there would be no biodiversity on this planet at all. A group such as a race is a biological unit - much like an individual organism is - and without discriminating between self and non-self (ie, being racist) it will not survive.

Racism is not a good thing, that's why.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

The thread isn't about people's intrinsic value. It was just about whether it would be ethically ok to promote marriage between ethnic groups for sociological and genetic reasons, or whether than in itself would be racist.

People who say that in itself are racist, have a valid point, imo.

8. Ignoring race is racist

There are a few groups of people, such as in the Andaman Islands, who are culturally and genetically isolated.

http://www.survivalinternational.org/tribes/jarawa#main

and of which only a few handfuls of people remain.

Should missionaries go and convert them to one of the world's major religions? Should people from the Indian mainland go and intermarry with them? Or, should they be kept in primitive conditions, to be preserved as human oddities?

Although India’s Supreme Court in 2002 ordered that the highway through the Jarawa’s reserve should be closed, it remains open – and tourists use it for ‘human safaris’ to the Jarawa. Poachers also enter the reserve.
In 1999 and 2006, the Jarawa suffered outbreaks of measles – a disease that has wiped out many tribes worldwide following contact with outsiders.

What problems do they face?

The principal threat to the Jarawa’s existence comes from encroachment onto their land, which was sparked by the building of a highway through their forest in the 1970s. The road brings settlers, poachers and loggers into the heart of their land.
This encroachment risks exposing the Jarawa to diseases to which they have no immunity, and creating a dependency on outsiders. Poachers steal the game the Jarawa rely on, and there are reports of sexual exploitation of Jarawa women.

I have just had a Road to Damascus moment and have become an anti-racist. .

....More than two out of every three black women are unmarried, and they are more than twice as likely as white women never to marry. The racial gap in marriage extends beyond the poor. Affluent and college educated African Americans are also less likely to marry or stay married than their white counterparts. That harms black children and adults, and imperils the growth and stability of the black middle class.

One reason that marriage has declined is that as black women have advanced economically and educationally, black men have fallen behind. Nearly twice as many black women as black men graduate from college each year.Thus, not only are many college-educated black women unmarried, they are more likely than any other group of women to marry less educated and lower earning men. Half of college-educated black wives are more educated than their husbands.

Yet black women rarely marry men of other races. They are less than half as likely as black men, and only a third as likely as Latinos or Asian Americans, to wed across group lines. Is Marriage for White People? traces the far-reaching consequences of the African American marriage decline. It also explains why black women marry down rather than out. Its provocative conclusion is that black women would benefit both themselves and the black race if they crossed class lines less and race lines more.....

AT SOME events on his book tour, black men have accused Ralph Richard Banks of advocating genocide. In fact, the Stanford professor of family law has merely written a book called “Is Marriage for White People? How the African-American Marriage Decline Affects Everyone”. But abuse is what you get for suggesting, as Mr Banks does, that black women—not only the “most unmarried” group in American society but also the one that least intermarries with other races—should look to white, Latino or Asian men as potential mates. After all, the alternative is often no marriage or relationship at all.

The collapse of marriage among blacks is well documented.....but not the sexual, psychological, emotional and social toll this has taken on black women. Seven out of ten are single. Of the others, many are forced into “man-sharing”.

This crisis in the black “relationship market”, as Mr Banks calls it, starts with a “man shortage”. About one in ten black men in their early thirties are in prison. As a group, black men have also fallen behind in education and income, just as black women have surged ahead. Two black women graduate from college for every black man. As these women rise into the middle class, the men stay in the lower class, becoming less compatible.

Many black women respond by “marrying down, but not out,” as Mr Banks puts it. But that makes bad marriages. Two out of every three black marriages fail, about twice the rate of white marriages.

The real problem is the behaviour of those few black men who are considered good catches. They often stay unmarried for the opposite reason: they have too many options. As one man told Mr Banks: “If you have four quality women you're dating and they're in a rotation, who's going to rush into a marriage?” Even black men who nominally commit to one woman are five times as likely as their white counterparts to have others on the side.

One way or another, many black women thus become, or stay, single (as two of Mr Banks's three sisters are). As one woman tells him: “We focus on our careers, our friends, go back to school, whatever. We fill our lives with other things.” But in the hundreds of interviews Mr Banks conducted, he found pervasive sadness.

The most obvious solution, he discovered, also runs into the greatest taboo: intermarriage. This is ironic, because black men are statistically very open to marrying outside their race—more than one in five does. But fewer than one in ten black women intermarries.

For some black women, a white husband brings bad memories of slavery and Jim Crow. Others have conditioned themselves to find non-black men unattractive (lacking “swag”, in the argot). Still others fear that men of other races find black women unattractive, or that their children might be “not black enough”. But by far the most common reason seems to be that black women still regard intermarriage as tantamount to betraying the race. “My black heart,” says one black woman as she contemplates marrying out, “I would need to turn it in.” “We know it's a struggle,” says another, “but we women got to stand by the black man. If we don't, who will?”

Race is just a social construct. Therefore it makes no sense to speak about the "Jarawa people" or "their land". There are no lands for specific people. People should be free to go wherever they want. Any "Jarawa person" who objects and starts talking about the survival of "their people" is obviously a racist who wants to preserve their Jarawa privilege. After all, nobody is stopping the so-called "Jarawa people" from reproducing.
Also, since variation within groups is greater than variation between groups, it makes no sense to speak about a disease wiping out a group, only of diseases wiping out unrelated individuals.
I think the reports of sexual exploitation are just racist Jarawa propaganda. Sexual exploitation happens everywhere, but it is racist to make a racial issue out of it.

How about you explain your views in more detail.
Saying that encouraging people to date within their race can be construed as racist is not saying much. Ideas can be construed in various different ways depending on who's doing the construing.
How about you explain to us why you think the idea of encouraging people to date within their race is racist. In addition (in fact, beforehand) you might like to explain to us what racism is and why it is bad.



Interesting. Maybe we could conduct a separate poll. It might go something like this. For each of the following statements select Agree or Disagree.

1. Promoting racial intermarriage is racist and discouraging racial intermarriage is racist
2. Promoting racial intermarriage is racist and discouraging racial intermarriage is not racist
3. Promoting racial intermarriage is not racist and discouraging racial intermarriage is racist
4. Promoting racial intermarriage is not racist and discouraging racial intermarriage is not racist
5. Bringing race into any discussion of marriage is racist
6. Not bringing race into any discussion of marriage is racist
7. Focusing on race is racist
8. Ignoring race is racist