Love has no race

ASAD LATIF

An Indian man and his Chinese girlfriend were accosted in Singapore recently by a Chinese man who berated them for having dared to date someone from outside their own race.

I do not know why the accosted man saw it fit to argue that both he and his girlfriend are of mixed parentage.

That argument merely would have added to the twisted reasoning of the accoster, to whom the idea of mixed races itself is anathema.

That the children of two such mixed races should come together intimately would have rationalised his revulsion at interracial marriage and even romance per se.

The Indian could have stood his ground firmly as a human who has every right to court his Chinese girlfriend in multiracial Singapore or anywhere else in the world.

I shall not comment on this particular case further since I am not aware of the individual circumstances that could have made the accoster behave in the way he did.

I hope that he mends his ways.

Here, let me turn to the deep fear of miscegenation that fills the insecure biological recesses of febrile human minds. It is a global perversion.

Miscegenation, or the inter-breeding of people considered to be of different racial types, is heir to a long typological heritage that celebrates biological difference as the defining principle of personal authenticity and social identity.

Miscegenation answers to three revolting principles, those of racial superiority, patriarchal power and the genetic ordering of the world.

The sordid concept of racial purity was furthered in Europe by the work of intellectual impresarios such as Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, who popularised the theory of the Aryan master race in the mid-19th century.

He claimed in his pseudo-scientific An Essay On The Inequality Of The Human Races that aristocrats were superior to commoners since the former possessed more Aryan genetic traits because of less inter-breeding with inferior races.

In the 20th century, the Nazis claimed that the Nordic race was the most important subset of the Aryan race.

In extremis, the fear of the biological Other led to the Nazi preoccupation with racial purity that caused the genocidal extermination of six million innocent Jews to cleanse Germany of racial difference.

The Nazis lost Hitler's German state: The Jews went on to found one of their own.

The birth of Israel proclaimed the death of Nazi genetics. Yet, even today, racial superiority continues to be associated with demographic endangerment, both global and national.

White supremacists in the Western hemisphere claim that their majority status is being undermined by the worldwide proliferation of inferior races, which breed more rapidly than superior races and have invaded their countries peacefully through massive immigration.

Obviously, the marriage of the superior races to the inferior races would sap the former's remaining demographic vitality incrementally and surely.

This is where gender enters the racist picture.

It is rare to come across a racist condemning a man of his own race for having married a woman of another race.

It happens certainly, but what is more common is that a woman is condemned for having chosen someone outside her race.

The difference in racist treatment attests to the foolish belief that a woman somehow is owned by a man (and his race) once she decides to marry him.

She "converts" to his race biologically, to bear sons and daughters who are consigned thereafter to their father's race and increase its numbers (particularly when they marry someone from the father's race).

Gendering is one of the most insidious aspects of racism. Miscegenation would not exist without it.

Nor would the idea that the world can be ordered genetically. Genes do exist.

Children look like their parents. Diseases can be inherited. Intelligence (and stupidity) might be and might not.

But world orders cannot be inherited.

World disorders cannot be eradicated by racial cleansing. No race has a monopoly of global destiny.

All in all, miscegenation is an idle worry.

Climate change, global warming, the fear of drought and of water wars, the endemic threat from the coronavirus pandemic and the ever-present danger of ethnic hatred spilling over into genocide should occupy minds.

Whom people decide to marry is their personal choice.

How their children will look, what they will eat and how they will behave at home is no one else's business.

How humans will last in the global community is everyone's business.

Forgetting that will lead to a race to the bottom for all.

Which superior race, fastest in the world, wants to go first?

tabla@sph.com.sg

Asad Latif is an editorial writer for The Straits Times.

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