It is better to be Mixed Race...

[Visas]

Recently on British Television there have been documentaries which are effectively brainwashing people to say that there is no race gap in terms of intelligence and that intelligence is purely environmental.

 

Then they have gone further with documentaries saying that it is genetically and physically beneficial to be Mixed Race. And that the more different your parents are, the more likely you are to be physically, mentally and aesthetically superior.

 

While these documentaries haven't been quite as blunt as I've made out, they still do the job in a more subtle way.

 

I think these documentaries have been made as a consequence to counter the recent growth of right wing groups. I think that they want us to make different races a thing of the past.

[jonathan7]

Recently on British Television there have been documentaries which are effectively brainwashing people to say that there is no race gap in terms of intelligence and that intelligence is purely environmental.

 

It's impossible to tell if the difference is environmental or genetic; sure environment has a great effect on things, but how do you seperate the two? Age old problem.

 

Then they have gone further with documentaries saying that it is genetically and physically beneficial to be Mixed Race. And that the more different your parents are, the more likely you are to be physically, mentally and aesthetically superior.

 

From an immune system perspective having mixed race parents, from different continents should make an individual resistant to a more varied number of environmental pressures. However the "natives" resident in a country, will generally be more suited to the environmental pressures prevalent there. That said as the world has got smaller and smaller, diversifying is a good move.

 

While these documentaries haven't been quite as blunt as I've made out, they still do the job in a more subtle way.

 

I think these documentaries have been made as a consequence to counter the recent growth of right wing groups. I think that they want us to make different races a thing of the past.

 

It's just scientific data, while scientists may or may not have agenda's scientific data cannot have an agenda. That it doesn't sit comfortably with some doesn't change the fact it is true.

 

Psychology was what I studied at University, and the stat's don't lie (though this is only related to IQ's); Statistically mixed race children have a higher IQ, than non-mixed race children; more over mixed race children who's parents mother tongue is different (e.g. French and English) have a significantly higher IQ than non-mixed race parents who both speak the same language.

 

This, I think is a matter of common sense, as well as genetic diversity; if you have a child brought up in a home where two languages are regularly spoken as well as two different cultures, means they come into contact with different ways of thinking and as such broadens there horizons.

 

Finally, and anecdotally; a friend of mine is a tree surgeon, I remember him tutting because a council had planted all the same tree's in a row. This is because if one tree got a disease they would all be susceptible to it because they are all the same. He said it would have been better to have 3 or 4 different tree's in the row, one after the other, as then they would all be resistant from different diseases.

 

My shiny 2 cents...

[Trench]

I'm mixed (black and white) so I think I might be able to answer your question.

 

I think intelligence has nothing to do with race, and plenty to do with environment. Example: I know plenty of smart, non-ghetto black, white and hispanic kids at my church. These kids have been raised in a good home environment, with their families pushing them to do the right things in their lives.

I also know plenty of ghetto black, white, and hispanic kids. Nuff said.

 

Not to brag or anything (), but my sister and I seem to show the positives of being bi-racial.

I'm good at remembering words, images, what-happened-when-and-who-did-it, etc...

She's good at remembering numbers, dates, addresses, etc...

I've got a high metabolism, but an average immune system.

She's got an average metabolism but a strong immune system (she laughs at the swine-flu).

We both tend to grow and learn faster than our peers.

We are both developing slightly faster than our peers. (I've already got a goatee)

We both are naturally strong physically.

 

Overall, being mixed does have its benefits. I wouldn't say mixed people are "superior" to non mixed people. But we do get the best of both worlds.

[adamqd]

^^^You seem to be the Ultimate Male, Vod ^^^

 

I watched the show, and it kinda spiraled into the "Whiter Mixed race people are rich and Racist, and the Blacker mixed raced people are oppressed yet Proud" region, towards the end, It's kinda hard to listen to something that pins your race as the mother of all that is wrong in the Galaxy, also, I'm not a geneticist or from a mixed race family, so I'm kinda Homer Simpson on this subject.

[ForeverNight]

Well to expound upon what Jon brought up, children of two parents from different regions would likely create a stronger immune system, however the child doesn't have to be mixed race.

 

Example: A german man falls in love with a S. African woman, they have kids. Those kids are going to have some of the advantages of the german immune system and then the South African immune system. However, they're both white, so the kid is thus white and not mixed race.

 

Better to be mixed race, like hell, not in itself, but to have two national backgrounds together would create a 'stronger' immune background.

[jonathan7]

Well to expound upon what Jon brought up, children of two parents from different regions would likely create a stronger immune system, however the child doesn't have to be mixed race.

 

Example: A german man falls in love with a S. African woman, they have kids. Those kids are going to have some of the advantages of the german immune system and then the South African immune system. However, they're both white, so the kid is thus white and not mixed race.

 

Better to be mixed race, like hell, not in itself, but to have two national backgrounds together would create a 'stronger' immune background.

 

Personally I'd say the German and Afrikaans woman would been mixed race despite both being white, but that depends on your definition of "race".

[Web Rider]

While there is some logic to the argument that the more diverse your genetic makeup, the more likely you are to avoid genetic abnormalities that tend to hold to one bloodline, however, it also makes you prone to a wider variety of conditions. You may not end up with a Spanish Chin, but you may end up with sickle-cell anemia. What's scariest about this argument is not so much that it's advocating a blending of races, but that it is actually making them stronger. I mean, how can two people expect to make a mixed race child if it isn't obvious that Man A is white and Woman B is black?

 

That, and this is essentially pro-eugenics. And for the last time for anyone who thinks otherwise, eugenics is not "breeding the best white man", it's about breeding the best human. Which is what this documentary is advocating, breeding the best person. While I'm certain that this is a backlash to the BNP, it demonstrates that even though Britons are attempting to look "not racist", there is still a very heavy presence of the very idea of "race" as something that is not a social construct that needs to be overcome.

[jonathan7]

While there is some logic to the argument that the more diverse your genetic makeup, the more likely you are to avoid genetic abnormalities that tend to hold to one bloodline, however, it also makes you prone to a wider variety of conditions. You may not end up with a Spanish Chin, but you may end up with sickle-cell anemia. What's scariest about this argument is not so much that it's advocating a blending of races, but that it is actually making them stronger. I mean, how can two people expect to make a mixed race child if it isn't obvious that Man A is white and Woman B is black?

 

That, and this is essentially pro-eugenics. And for the last time for anyone who thinks otherwise, eugenics is not "breeding the best white man", it's about breeding the best human. Which is what this documentary is advocating, breeding the best person. While I'm certain that this is a backlash to the BNP, it demonstrates that even though Britons are attempting to look "not racist", there is still a very heavy presence of the very idea of "race" as something that is not a social construct that needs to be overcome.

 

I haven't seen the documentary so I can't comment on it.

 

For my posts; I wasn't arguing for "the best person" in terms of diversity you still want "pure" whites and "pure" Asians for the genetic diversity. The further complication from the matter is I was speaking purely statistically, where as there will always be stupid mixed-race children, and very intelligent "single" race children. The IQ, also only significantly goes up when the parents both have different mother tongues (by on average 10 IQ points), where as IIRC "mixed" race parents with the same language only had children who's IQ's were 1-2 points higher. One could therefore argue it was more the environment than genetics, etc etc.

[ForeverNight]

Personally I'd say the German and Afrikaans woman would been mixed race despite both being white, but that depends on your definition of "race".

 

I'm going by what the legal forms require, white, hispanic, et cetera as that's what I think most people think of when the word race is thrown about.

 

As for the thing with the separate languages, I'd be surprised if they were on average 'dumber' than average, if only because speaking two languages natively is going to stimulate the person's mind and make them more 'mentally agile' so I'm going to say it's environment as opposed to genetics there.

[Ping]

I'm half-Chinese myself, and I don't think being mixed has anything to do with intelligence (even though everyone tells me that I'm smart ). There are the obvious pros and cons of being mixed, but I don't think it affects intelligence.

[jonathan7]

I'm half-Chinese myself, and I don't think being mixed has anything to do with intelligence (even though everyone tells me that I'm smart ). There are the obvious pros and cons of being mixed, but I don't think it affects intelligence.

 

Scientific studies say otherwise, which was the whole gist of my post; so it doesn't matter what you think, the studies still show that on average mixed race children score 1 to 2 IQ points higher... Or at least that was the case when I was studying intelligence in 2nd year at university.

[Arcesious]

Any differences in 'intelligence' are probably too small to be important. Besides, how do we determine, past the rough estimate of an IQ test, how intelligent people of one race are compared to another?

 

It seems to me that how smart you are depends on how much you use your brain.

[Qui-Gon Glenn]

Khan Noonian Singh was the prime example of the Eugenics movement, and was brilliant, but limited to two-dimensional thinking. [/star trek buffoonery]

 

It is a mixed bag, and you can get the best from both, the worst from both, or a mix. As for the article, what author at this point really sees people as being wholly one race? This is a viewpoint that I think must be limited to people's that are isolated from a mixed race community. In the U.S., I know very few "pure" whites, blacks, asians, latins, or South Americans. We are all simply a little mixed up.... lots of Native American blood in any of those "American" "pure" races.

 

As for the OP's first post, are you implying that you do believe that different races are superior in a mental or physical aspect than another, based purely on the genetic makeup and nothing to do whatsoever with environment? My follow up to that (if yes is the answer) is, is your last name Darwin? He thought that stuff once, you can see it in his World's Fair exposition on evolution. Scary.

 

Of course, the US is the smartest country in the world, so the documentaries must be right. [/sarcasm]

[Darth Avlectus]

I am, if only somewhat, tri-racial. My mother's side has Sefardaic Jew throughout it; my father's side has its most recent bloodline additive of Native American Qua-Pah tribe. Otherwise I just appear to be your average white American male.

 

Recently on British Television there have been documentaries which are effectively brainwashing people to say that there is no race gap in terms of intelligence and that intelligence is purely environmental.

 

Then they have gone further with documentaries saying that it is genetically and physically beneficial to be Mixed Race. And that the more different your parents are, the more likely you are to be physically, mentally and aesthetically superior.

 

While these documentaries haven't been quite as blunt as I've made out, they still do the job in a more subtle way.

 

Well, beneficial...yes AND no. It cuts both ways because it also increases the likelihood of susceptibility to the flaws in the two or more races. Plus this is still "a shot in the dark" as it were, because there is still no absolute gaurantee to inherit certain traits or benefits. Unless we're talking about cherry picking out the impurities...which is known as eugenics which I personally find it repulsive.

 

I think these documentaries have been made as a consequence to counter the recent growth of right wing groups. I think that they want us to make different races a thing of the past.

 

While I recognize the nobility of what it proposes in the social sense, it's short sighted. This is only the bait to cover the truth of that they're after: Eugenics.

 

On the outside it's is calling out to a socio-political issue of intolerance for diversity. My personal debunk:

 

I am not anti diversity nor denying racism exists. There will always be those idiots. I just don't talk about tolerance: I *do* it. However I don't allow myself to become a doormat. For example,

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Morgan Freeman sums it all up quite nicely: it's a problem, but it's also half as bad as it is because we feed into it.

 

Here in America, the talk of celebrating diversity and what people are is from the liberal side; conservatives make ambiguous arguments that may or may not stray into distaste here. While it could be argued against the alleged "ignorant purity" mindset of conservatives, the acknowledgments and pointing-out being done by the liberals in its own right is stirring up the racism thing just as badly.

 

I wonder sometimes if people aren't reading more into stuff than is actually there. People need to (pardon me) just STFU.

 

It's impossible to tell if the difference is environmental or genetic; sure environment has a great effect on things, but how do you seperate the two? Age old problem.

Uhh.....Case by case hairsplitting?

From an immune system perspective having mixed race parents, from different continents should make an individual resistant to a more varied number of environmental pressures. However the "natives" resident in a country, will generally be more suited to the environmental pressures prevalent there.

True enough. One might be more adept at labor in the hot, where another is more adept at labor in the cold; some for living deserted terrain, another is adept at living in the rugged. However each has downfalls as well as the benefits. I wonder if this is a natural balance that occurs.

 

It's just scientific data, while scientists may or may not have agenda's scientific data cannot have an agenda. That it doesn't sit comfortably with some doesn't change the fact it is true.

To put this another way: facts are facts whether or not you agree with them; but where the documentary is going while using those facts may be entirely fallacious.

 

While there is some logic to the argument that the more diverse your genetic makeup, the more likely you are to avoid genetic abnormalities that tend to hold to one bloodline, however, it also makes you prone to a wider variety of conditions.

Exactly. That's what I was getting at with each having their downfalls. You never know what can of worms you are opening up by broadening to two bloodlines like this. Sure it is well intended but as the chances of benefit increase so do risks of disadvantages.

 

You may not end up with a Spanish Chin, but you may end up with sickle-cell anemia. What's scariest about this argument is not so much that it's advocating a blending of races, but that it is actually making them stronger. I mean, how can two people expect to make a mixed race child if it isn't obvious that Man A is white and Woman B is black?

Quoted for emphasis. Looking at this, I can't help but frown at it when it is masked as something else.

 

That, and this is essentially pro-eugenics. And for the last time for anyone who thinks otherwise, eugenics is not "breeding the best white man", it's about breeding the best human. Which is what this documentary is advocating, breeding the best person.

To me, Eugenics smacks of these:

1) Has a superiority complex with contempt for "inferiority"

2) An nihlistic motive

3) Obsession with status and "superiority" which brings me to

4) Vanity

5) Possibly power hungry

 

While I'm certain that this is a backlash to the BNP, it demonstrates that even though Britons are attempting to look "not racist", there is still a very heavy presence of the very idea of "race" as something that is not a social construct that needs to be overcome.

I agree.

[mur'phon]

My follow up to that (if yes is the answer) is, is your last name Darwin? He thought that stuff once, you can see it in his World's Fair exposition on evolution. Scary.

 

AFAIK Darwin himself didn't think so, his theory only alows for it to happen. Like how your average whitey is more resistant to many diseases than for instance American natives, due to having a long history of living close together (and close to animals).

[Qui-Gon Glenn]

^^^ There was a progression chart, in pictures, of how the races were part of the evolutionary chain. Let us say it was not too kind and reflected rather poorly on non-crackers... and yes, it was Darwin's work. Whether he believed in his own work or not I cannot answer for.

 

(I am white, mixed with Native American, FTR)