What's the obsession with inter-racial relationships?

[Al B. Sure!]

sometimes i get the feeling that during the height of jim crow, nobody gave a damn if two people of different races were married but now people go on about how big a deal it is... talking about how its a good thing and how a lot of people dont approve and all that bull****...

The show I Love Lucy had a white woman married to a hispanic man... have the same arrangement on a sitcom today and you'd have episode after episode of culture clash, random characters not approving, etc. and have reviewers and watchers go on and on about how good (or bad) it is that two people of different races are shown together on television... but back in the racially incendiary 50's, it dont seem like the inter-racial relationship on I Love Lucy raised a single eye-brow... its like people didn't care back then...

and take the Shakespeare play of Othello which has been bastardized into a story about inter-racial relationships... now for anyone who actually read Othello, its clear the story is about an otherwise exemplory and loyal soldier being passed over for a promotion because he is only a commoner and his attempt at revenge... if shakespeare was trying to put social commentary into the play, it was about the plight of hard-working commoners who could never achieve what a bookish aristocrat could... yet somehow, Othello is perverted into a story of inter-racial marriage...

whats the oddest thing is Othello wouldn't even be black! The Arab or Berber Othello marrying the Italian Desdemona... that sure is a great difference! now you might say it's still two different ethnicities that hardly got along in Shakespeare's time... but Othello's ethnicity is only mentioned once or twice in the play, most notably in the line by a jealous character trying to incite Desdemona's father to break up the marriage (Which it should be noted he never does and soon embraces Othello), "The old black ram is topping your white ewe." Othello's darker skin is never mentioned again in the entire play...

and how Othello has been turned into a story of inter-racial marriage and the conflicts with society that that supposedly results in from such a story i just described i have no idea... its just the result of this odd obsession of inter-racial relationships that it really seemed like people took as everyday decades and centuries ago...

(Albert Speer's ex-girlfriend was black and he thanks god that no one ever mentioned anything about inter-racial **** or he would've gone crazy on someone hollering, "we're both humans!")


thanks

[Jon Miller]

a lot of epopel find it sexy as seen by all the interracial portn out ther

Jon Miller

[MrFun]

If I recall correctly, in the case of the Love couple in Virginia of the 1950's, a judge used the Bible in arguing that God intended the races to be separate or something along that line.

The Mr. Love was a white man, and Mrs. Love was a black woman.

[Traianvs]

If I recall correctly, in the case of the Love couple in Virginia of the 1950's, a judge used the Bible in arguing that God intended the races to be separate or something along that line.

Heheh, Americans never cease to amuse me

[Dinner]

Yes, the loves sued and their claim that anti-misegination (i.e. the white race legally cannot be "diluted" with inferior blood) laws violated the equal protection clause of the constitution ended the period where enterracial marriage was illegal.

AS: Othello is described as a Moor. Moors are black not Berber or Arab.

[Spiffor]

I am under the impression that the US goes further and further from the "metling pot" model towards the "salad bowl" model. This means, communities are more and more closed to each other for social / emotional or cultural relations (even though business relations continue as usual).

I can be wrong with this impression though. However, should it be true, it would explain why interracial relationships become increasingly "abnormal", and as such the interracial part gets more attention.

[Kuciwalker]

I haven't noticed anything like this.

Of course, if it happened more than seven or eight years ago, I wouldn't.

I know none of the kids at my school can really even conceive of racism. It's an alien concept. I think in the next generation, racism will mostly cease to exist, except for more backwards (socially) areas of the country.

[Al B. Sure!]

Oerdin:

Moors are black?! How the hell did black people get to Spain? Any historian will tell you that the muslims who invaded Spain in 711 were mostly berbers with some Arabs among the leaders... Spain at the time was a mixture of the original Celtic inhabitants mixed with some Phoenician and Roman blood from ancient times and most recently mixed with Visigothic and Vandal blood... therefore, Moors couldn't possibly be black in our understanding of the word... i mean how the hell would an entire black-skinned people ever get that far north in that time period?

if you notice other Shakespeare references or references from other northern european sources from the time to Arabs and Turks, they were also referred to with the word 'black'... just means darker not Negro

[Imran Siddiqui]

sometimes i get the feeling that during the height of jim crow, nobody gave a damn if two people of different races were married

What are you an utter moron?! The plethora of anti-miscegenation laws, which had to be struck down by the Supreme Court (Loving v. Virginia) should show how dumb that statement is.

[Shi Huangdi]

Originally posted by Spiffor
I am under the impression that the US goes further and further from the "metling pot" model towards the "salad bowl" model. This means, communities are more and more closed to each other for social / emotional or cultural relations (even though business relations continue as usual).

I can be wrong with this impression though. However, should it be true, it would explain why interracial relationships become increasingly "abnormal", and as such the interracial part gets more attention.

Well, inside the races themselves, that is mostly true. The Italians, Anglos, Irish, Germans, etc. have pretty much melded into one big "White". The Dominicans, Mexicans, Central Americans, etc. also tend to be grouped together as "Hispanic". However the races themselves hardly seem to be assimilating that well.

If I am not mistaken is a little similar in France, where the traditional "French" ethnic groups such as Bretons, Auverenge, etc. meld into a "French identity" where as the Arabs are not assimilating as well?

[Al B. Sure!]

and more importantly, even if the moors were black, where the hell did all the black people that should be in Morroco and Algeria go?

you may be confusing Moors with the new Moors who are black americans of a sect of Islam and call themselves the moors.

[MrFun]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui

sometimes i get the feeling that during the height of jim crow, nobody gave a damn if two people of different races were married

What are you an utter moron?! The plethora of anti-miscegenation laws, which had to be struck down by the Supreme Court (Loving v. Virginia) should show how dumb that statement is.

Yes -- AS did make a serious mistake there.

But, on the other hand, when white men raped and banged black women, there was no such outcry in that time period.

[Al B. Sure!]

Imran:

I was exaggerating to make a point... yes, obviously they was lynching black males for fooling around with white women so inter-racial **** wasn't being seen too highly... but that still don't explain why I Love Lucy's inter-racial relationship didn't seem to get no attention and how Othello has been recently turned into an inter-racial story.

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by Albert Speer
Moors are black?!

Yes. The Berbers had many contacts with southern populations of the Sahara, which were black. Moors often participated in mediterranean business alongside Arabs, including piracy.

[Buck Birdseed]

I'm not sure you're right about marriages or about Othello (isn't he meant to be a Moor?) but one trend that I was thinking about last week is how you rarely see mixed-race bands in the US any more. I mean, in the early 1960s white and black performers were hardly allowed on stage together but nevertheless you had lots of bands with white and black members working together in the studios, writing songs together, producing each other, running each others record companies. Look at Booker T and the MGs- two white members, two black members, all equally a part of the songwriting process, all writing some of the songs. Where are all the great white Hip-Hop producers? Where are all the black rock guitarists? I'm not averse to a lot of Black people entering R&B and Hip-Hop (it is the greatest genre on earth after all) but why is it so non-mixed?

One theory of course is that it's got something to do with politics, with black people wanting to do their own thing, be black and proud. In that way I can understand it, but it seems to have spilled over into crass marketing. When garage muppet Craig David toured the United States the record company wanted him to fire his white guitarist, because they thought US audiences would respond negatively. Why?

I'm ardently leftist politically yet I, too, don't think creative acts and politics should be excessively mixed. Disco, whatever else you may think of it, at least was a high-point in integration, with white people, black people, gays, lesbians and straights working together to create simple party music, no-one denying the cultural contribution each party could bring yet no-one excessively emphasising it either.

I love multi-culturalism, and acknowledge groups' differences from each other, whether they're sexual, cultural, gendered or whatever. However, in order to create a stable, just society where we're respectful of each other we need to work together, in solidarity, and allow the borders to float should the members so chose. It's vital to keep the balance between one extreme of capitulating to certain strong groups and the other to deny the existence of any groups at all, both of which lead to opression and the voiceless unfreedom of large parts of society.