I recently made a comment in an email thread that I decided to respond to here. While I did feel that I personally think this is a great idea, I don’t think that it is a perfect idea.
I think that biracial babies are a great idea. However, I think that they are a flawed idea. I do not think that race should be the determining factor in who is born to a family. I think that the fact that a person is biracial simply means that they happen to be from a certain area, which itself is only determined by the mother’s parents. So, in my opinion, it is better to have a biracial family than a non-biracial family.
Race isn’t the only reason for the existence of a family, of course. But race is more of a factor than you would think. For instance, the US census asks only race and ethnicity, but in reality it is far more than that. So, race is only one part of the equation, and it is by no means the most important part.
So, what are the other factors that make one race more worthy of love and attention than another? It’s not just a matter of a child being a mix of both races. It is also a matter of the child’s ability to adapt to his surroundings. It is better for the child to be from a non-diverse area, where he has a better chance to adapt to his surroundings, than to have a child who is from a diverse area.
For the most part, race is only a factor in what we call “diversity”. Race does not automatically make a person, or a family, or a community, or a person’s community, more or less diverse. It is only the result of numerous factors that make it possible for a person to be “diverse”, as it is usually defined.
If we are truly trying to define diversity, then we must be able to separate the various reasons that different people have diverse race, ethnicity, religion, language, etc. into their own separate categories. Otherwise, we would soon lose our minds.
I used to work in a diverse community, now I don’t. I know that there are people who are black, and white, and Asian, yet they are still not being considered as part of the same group. As far as I know, there is no single race or ethnicity that is universally accepted, so we lose that as a way to define diversity. The same way we also lose other ways of defining diversity, like age, gender, sexual orientation, etc.
That’s why we have to start by defining our own categories, and then building bridges to those categories. At the end of the day, we are all the same, regardless of what we look like.
As a team, we make sure that we have our own language, feel good, and build great stories. We also make sure that we don’t become the “we’re from another race” that we seem to have always been and that’s why we build bridges that can make us all feel good. But we also make sure that we have a wide array of fun ways to do these things.
Some stories can be fun, but most stories are more complex, and not all of them are as fun as they look. At the end of the day, we are all the same. The process of building a bridge is a little bit easier than building a website.