What do I mean by a super race?
For years now mixed race people have been the forgotten race, or the ones no one really knew what to do with, because they were half of one and half of another, then they became the race people liked to joke about, that they were half breeds or couldn't take part or truly represent because they weren't "full blooded".
But no one has really taken the time to think about how deep being mixed raced can go.
Science has concluded that being mixed race is actually better than being one, why? Because they are less likely to suffer from genetic disorders that arise in single race mating.
I am not implying that being mixed race is the god of all races and that we should shun anything else,
but in the world we live in, is anyone really "one race" yes you can say this group are from the Caribbean, this group are from Europe etc, but ever since the beginning of time, species have been moving, changing, evolving and mixing.
You hear people say I'm Nigerian, but such and such is from Brazil, and these people used to live in China and I have this and that in me too", so in a sense are we not all part of this growing/evolving super race?
It is predicted that in 2020, most of the American population will be mixed race, so what does this mean for our life span?
The innocent smoothie company say that scientists have predicted that the person/people who will live to be 150 years of age has already been born.
If you think about it, "pure bred" dogs have a shorter life span than "mutts" why? Because in a sense, mutts are mixed race, therefore not being prone to specific one-race diseases, there is a lesser likelihood of recessive (inbred) diseases, such as sickle cell common in black people or Tay Sachs common in Jewish people.
I see your eyebrows raising, I don't mean inbred in the sense that your mother and her brother are creating children together, but in the sense that the same "race" has made a child, so anyone who has both their parents from the same race, that child is more likely to have the dominate genes for a inherited disease more so than someone who has come from two different races.
I can only imagine what the world will look like in a few years time
This is the link to the mixed race project, just portraits of multicultural families
This is the link to the documentary Channel 4 did awhile ago about mixed race being a super race, I'm not too sure if the videos are still there but the information around it will give you an idea as to what they looked at
Hey Carina,
ReplyDeleteWhat your saying does make a lot of sense and no reason to not agree with the genetic side to being mixed race and how overall we're improving as a human race.
But what is your view on the culture side to mixed race children? Do they really have one? Do they have to choose one side or the other? Or do you feel that culture is lost entirely?
For example black and white parented children, often seem to sway to one side or the other, but it seems from people I've spoken to that they are not educated in Black culture and where their from.
Just wanted to know your opinion on this?
Thankss
The cultural side to mixed race children can is relative, it can even be applied to mixed cultures, both my parents are Black but they're not both from the same country, therefore having a lot of cultural differences, I say I'm black, but that's no difference to saying I'm mixed race, you grow up with two cultures, so you learn to take what you need from both, or you subconsciously adopt things from both,
Deletethey still have a culture,
I have found that these days culture isn't just about the race of the person anymore, I've lived in various places, take Cambridge and Kingston for example, they have many races in both places, but I have found their cultures differ, Kingston is closer to London and therefore has a similar culture that I can identify with, whereas Cambridge is a little further out (still very easy to get to) and their culture differs completely, the Blacks, Asians and Caucasians that have grown up there or lived there for a long period of time or have come from it's surrounding areas, live life a lot differently to how I do and therefore I found it hard to identify and adapted to their culture
So what I'm getting at is, I still think mixed race children do have a culture, just because their parents have two different ones, usually they have come together because they can both identify and share the same cultural values from the place they live in, it brings it back to the nature vs nurture argument, they're not lost entirely, they will in a sense have three cultures they bounce from, the one they have grown up in, and the two their parents have and will use in their upbringing,
However with your example with the Black and Caucasian mix, I have noticed a trend, if the children's mum is black, they tend to adopt more of a "black" sense of being, and if their mum is white then they adopt that, more so if the children's parents are divorced and they live with their mum or dad who is one or the other,
saying that again looking at a culture in terms of the area, those who live in london for example, it doesn't neccesarily always matter if their mum is Black or White, if they have a lot of Black friends or other raced friends who have grown up in a dominate Black community, you'll find they'll grow up to have a black culture regardless, same as if they were to grow up in a Caucasian dominate area
So you'll see my opinion is mainly, the world has changed too much for it to be so black and white as to whether mixed race children have a culture or not
Thank you for you comment =]
Hello Flo,
DeleteI know it isn't my opinion you are asking for but as a mixed bag o' treats I feel compelled to chime in.
I think you are more talking about heredity and tradition than culture, when you talk about mixed children really having a culture or losing culture. The differences between these terms are key as well. Heredity referring to your genetic ancestry, tradition being customs and beliefs and culture being the ideas, social behaviours and social beliefs or a group of people. I believe they all play a part in each other but they are not all dependant on each other.
Heritage is made from heredity and tradition and influence your culture, but don't are not necessarily needed for culture. There is also social culture to consider, the local culture of the place you life. If you're in a big city like London the social culture is a melting pot of sub-cultures and each one influences the other and the individuals in it.
Every social being on the planet has a culture. The best explanation of culture I have ever heard is "shared knowledge" and I it works at the genetic and social levels. I find that most people tend to call cultural knowledge, common sense as well.
We see this in modern life all the time with media, fashion and music sub-cultures for example. Each one will have a expectation of how a person should generally be and each person is expected to know a certain mount of common knowledge about it. Eventually, if the culture lasts long enough it develops heredity and tradition, born from the activity of when the culture first started.
However culture can't be dependant on heritage in order to exist. For example:
I vaguely know my heredity, and know of traditions from my mothers side of the family due to exposure to that side of the family and teachings from my mother, aunt and nana. (not really spent much time round the men of my family come to think of it...) This knowledge in incorporated into my culture, and is my heritage.
If I was adopted, or had one or more parents who refuted their heritage for whatever reason to the point I didn't know anything about it, I wouldn't know where the genes that created me came from, and I wouldn't know the traditions of my heredity either. However I would still know what my parents taught me regardless of where it came from. This would be the basis of my known new heritage, and this knowledge would be my culture.
You may not know your heredity or your ancestors traditions, but you still have culture each time, because you _know_ things that the people around you know.
As for choosing one side or the other, well, I would argue that depends on the upbringing and the individual. Cultures can be self regulating, either through pride or pressure. A serious enough culture will try and make you conform. I know some people are pressed to act in a cultural way from their relatives and sometimes there is a serious price to pay for not doing so. Sometimes you want to fit in a group and you bow to the social pressure and conform to their fashions and actions for example. If both these pressures don't exist however I think you stand the change to take what you want from those cultures and forge your own.
DeleteI have felt small cultural pressures from both sides of my family at times. Sometimes the differences are not down to heredity differences but more down to social culture.
I lived just outside London most my life to being in London was easily a culture shock. My cousins being in East London mean they were and are naturally different. (The real kicker is that now I am in the North, people think I am from London, but a Londoner might know instantly I am not!)
Either way there have been a lot of different cultures in my life so far due to where I have lived and been around (London, Northumberland, Hertfordshire, Staffordshire, Yorkshire). Some of the places and peoples play a part of my heritage and each has a noticeably different set of sub-cultures, but you always know you are in the UK ( our global culture). I haven't chosen one however, I have chosen to take the best of each culture and move forwards, adding to my heritage and taking it in new directions.
To rephrase your question: "Do you feel that heritage is lost entirely?"
Not by default, but it can happen. It takes a disinterested individual to ignore their heritage. But if you are interested:
Why should have to conform entirely to every part of your heritage? Why can't you add or remove form your heritage to reflect a new time?
It is also worth considering heritage as an evolving set of ideas rather than a set one. With each generation heritage changes, until it is unrecognisable to an earlier version of itself. You are always bound to lose an iteration of a culture over time. It is the responsibility of those who truly love it to make sure it lives on and has a place in the modern world.
Frankly, without the ability to do that, as a society we are doomed to stagnate as there won't be progress or a vast mixing of ideology.
These are just my opinion though, stated so factually but really just my personal musings and observations over the years. Feel free to call me out of any parts. Hopefully my fragile ideas will be replaced with stronger ones!
Paul
I am going to leave your blog alone now Carina! Promise!)
Hi Paul & Carina,
DeleteThank you both for a reply and better explanation of what I was referring to. I guess mixed race children or people in general do learn and keep what they choose to keep.
Personally I was concerned that Caribbean heritage from people with those roots were being lost. As you mentioned people are making a new Heritage for themselves due to the traditions and culture their exposed to, but being Caribbean myself a lot of mixed race friends don't seem to have the same or even close to the same traditions and culture I have or some friends that are full Caribbean.
So back to my original question corrected is if Mixed race people are losing the traditions of their roots even if they are directly exposed to at least one Caribbean parent, possibly due to ignoring their heritage / traditions from that side of the family?
It is not a bad thing for people to make new heritage but if everyone is picking up what they want would that not mean in a few years not many will have a common set of heritage and traditions, and no longer will there be a Caribbean Heritage / Tradition but instead an unrecognisable set of traditions.
Sorry for only speaking on full / part Caribbean people I'm just going by the majority of my friends. Hopefully the above made more sense incorporating your explanations of culture, heritage and tradition.
Hey Carina!
ReplyDeleteYour post reminded me of some of the work I did at uni. I did a couple of courses in some new age artificial intelligence, using Neural Networks (NNs) and Genetic Algorithms (GAs). Skip the next couple of paragraphs if you know about it already. Apologies for the huge nerd out!
The general idea is that a NN mimics in a simple way how neurons work in the body and with enough of these connected in various ways, you can cause input to have outputs based on what the network "thinks" (That is very, very loose definition). You can train NNs by correcting and adjusting them as well. This is one of the pieces of tech you can use to make facial recognition in cameras and such, your phone probably does something similar. You teach this network of neurons the key pieces of a face, eyes, nose, mouth and when you present it with one it has never seen before, if trained correctly.
Conceptually, this is similar, but still a huge simplification on how our brains work.
The most amazing thing however, was learning you can now evolve your network by using GAs. Typically people use NNs to drive animal like behaviours and then breed and evolve them to see what happens. So imagine a creature with one of these NNs inside of it acting like a brain. It makes decisions such as should it move, should it eat. NNs learn and reinforce behaviour, so a creature might learn that it needs this food. Others might learn that it shouldn't touch something.
If you left it with an infinite amount of food, each creature would do a different thing eternally and reinforce it's behaviour. However the fun begins with breeding.
To do this you need something to act as the "genome" of the NN, then you could use different methods to "breed" your NNs and see how the resulting NNs react. The last thing you need is something to determine which genes stay in the pool and which die out. The survivors get to mate, add some random mutation (very important!) and the cycle continues.
Before you know it you have evolution happening right in front of your eyes, and given the right simulation (A simulation is what such a program becomes) you can witness some amazing behaviours, or entire lines of your creatures dying out (evolution doesn't always work for the best, some creatures might evolve forgetting they need to eat!). Eventually your population of creatures, by sharing their genomes, will share behaviours, or make up completely different ones.
Lets take the idea one step further, lets breed two sets of similar creatures in isolation, breed and evolve them separately. What you will see is two different *cultures* emerging, but at the same time you may notice problems that one groups does that doesn't. You can't breed certain characteristics out and mutation may just introduce something terrible to a population, you can't use sheer numbers to breed away.
The most exciting thing is letting two cultures integrate and see what happens, when breeding begins. What traits die, which ones are born, which problems go away.
All of this is done on a computer, and my description is grossly over simplified but after playing with, and making these tools you really see what a varied gene pool does and how evolution fits in to it. You see bits of the inbred problem, what culture is and how it works when cultures (at least on the genotype level) collide.
Phhhhhew! I guess I got something from my degree in the end, but here is a simple video showing the effects of NN and GA evolution if you wanted to see a simple example of what I am talking about. Also keep in mind, that there is so much simplification (and possibly misinformation) here =]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZ14la6zttM
(Sorry for the double post, Google is being a pain!)
Hi Paul,
DeleteThat is truly fascinating, I haven't heard about NNs and GAs before, I will definitely look at the link you posted, thank you so much for sharing this information with me, it made a good read for my bus ride home =]
I can definitely see why it would have reminded you of the work,
I've always found it interesting with how sharing genomes/breeding affects another species and how evolution is taking place because of it
=]
Hi Paul,
DeleteReally interesting post, I actually read up on NNs when looking to program Artificial Intelligence in C#, so thankfully I understood some parts of your post. I will definitely take a look at the video and may be something to look into further.