Marrying Other Species?

UPDATE:
Kilmeade apologizes for his comments.

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I know my internal filter can go offline sometimes, but not nearly to this extent. Fox News host Brian Kilmeade critiques a study reinforcing the idea that couples involved in long-term marriage receive positive health benefits, specifically in this case an increased protection against Alzheimer's disease.



Kilmeade specified,

The problem is the Swedes have pure genes. They marry other Swedes; that's the rule. Finns marry other Finns; they have a pure society. In America we marry everybody. We will marry Italians and Irish.

Okay, let's try to regain our bearings. Gary Crester, chair of behavioral sciences at CSU Pomona, counters with the following abstract in a 1999 article called "Cross National Marriage in Sweden: Immigration and Assimilation 1971-1993." He writes,

Sweden is often thought of as a country with relatively little diversity in terms of ethnicity, religion and even social class. In Sweden today, however, with over 12% of the population foreign born or the children of immigrants, the emphasis is on multiculturalism. The official policy is to allow and even encourage immigrant groups to sustain important elements of their culture, including their language, and to realize a multicultural society (Runblom, 1996).

Now let's look at assimilation a little closer. Assimilation refers to the attempts of an incoming immigrant group to adopt the cultural distinctions, manners, values, and philosophies of a local group. Assimilation, of course, is one step down from amalgamation: that is, the efforts to promote a blended racial and ethnic society through intermarriage and having children. However, these social tendencies need not be mutually exclusive of one another. They simply depict broad trends exhibited when two or more ethnically, culturally, or racially distinct groups encounter one another and share living and occupational space on a wide scale. It makes anecdotal sense, at the very least, to consider that in the process of attaining a new citizenship, that an immigrant would marry someone of the domestic culture and have children in order to establish "new roots." It is pleasing to know that Sweden finds an encouragement of incoming immigration, an increase in ethnic diversity, and a retention of old roots and customs all compatible with one another.

America has not been so fortunate. If Kilmeade were intellectually serious about his dispute, he would not forget so easily the fact that those who settled and colonized the New World had to do so by forcing the original Native Americans off of their soils and crowding them out by any means necessary. I think we all heard the Pocahontas fairytale in which a white settler, John Smith, entrusts her to navigating the new terrain and to settle down with her eventually. That is where such blending stops, I imagine.

In this country, we do not have the luxury of arguing from a "pure race" standpoint because it has been built up over 200 years through cycles of immigration. Anglo-Saxons and those escaping persecution for Anglican faith first, the forced removal and reintroduction of the slave trade, and the European immigrants who wanted a better life and to bask in the glow of prosperity. Pre-existing world powers wanted to stake claims on new soil and brought their people in to do just that.

To be ignorant of immigration facts is one thing, but Kilmeade uses the word "species." Last I checked, color, creed, or ethnic identity does not factor into taxonomy. We're all Homo sapiens sapiens.

Darwin resolved the issue back in 1859 with the publication of The Origin of Species, in which he concluded after analytic study that race was but one rather arbitrary difference in a given set of members sharing the same species. To be fair, scientists at the turn on the nineteenth century argued for a polygenic approach -- that, literally, there were enough phenotypical differences to distinguish races as separate species. Berel Lang notes wisely in Race and Racism in Theory and Practice that scientific taxonomies in the eighteenth century "were evaluative hierarchies as well as descriptive categorizations, that is, they were also ranking systems." Polygenics became intimately wrapped up within a legitimacy scheme for racism for the next one hundred years. Some members of the scientific community demanded -- nay, created -- proof to legitimize the second-class status of blacks. From the infamous Tuskegee experiments to sideshow circus attractions at World's Fair expositions, let's just say that this wasn't the first time people likened African-Americans to monkeys. Probably not the last either.

I struggle to understand where such mentalities come from, and I can only chalk it up to irrational fear. Over one million individuals immigrated into the United States last year, setting a new record. While some racial groups have stalled as a percentage of population, others are growing significantly. The Census predicts that people of white, non-Hispanic descent will eventually become an ethnic minority before 2050, and that taps into a real sense of visceral threat for some members of the population. You heard such antagonism in the prior presidential election, again this sort of artificial designation of the "real" American from the "Commie Pinko." Pardon my brashness here, but we cannot continue to laud these visions of patriotism and freedom and equality without having some recognition that our values have not been so pristine in their execution. To embrace one's legacy is to understand it at even its most deprave moments, to acknowledge those shadows, and to resolve to do differently in the future.

Until then, Kilmeade will probably keep shooting off his mouth.