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I'm a bit puzzled by your comment. I'm in an international and interracial marriage (my wife is Filipino) and have two mixed-race children, and I genuinely have no clue what you mean about "relating to their nature". Maybe an example would help?
There are obviously some cultural differences between my wife and these sometimes create interesting points of disagreement, but they're utterly dwarfed by the massive similarities in our values and life goals; I have far more of substance in common with her than any other woman I've met (e.g., we are both highly educated, nerdy, extremely open to new experiences, liberal with some a smattering of conservative/reactionary attitudes, education-focused, extremely practical in matters of love and romance, etc....).
A part of me is nervous about the off chance someone reads the examples I'm about to give and goes "Heeeeeeey, what a minute!" So I'm going to scramble and anonymize them to some degree. Hope you don't mind. Take them as illustrations instead of data points if that helps.
There is a guy who as a kid, had a stepdad constantly bitter towards him, because he was overachieving anything his step dad ever did in school. The step dad was utterly incapable of helping with homework after grade 9. The step dad vastly preferred his own children, and treated his stepson suspiciously because he was paranoid the stepson was trying to "trick" him.
I know a couple that is half black. Their kid has, to one parent, profound behavior issues that are totally "normal" to the other parent. Issues that are bad enough that he can't be in regular, achieving, upper middle class suburban school. Would fit right in at a DC school though. It's.... not a good situation. For anyone.
I know another couple where both parents are ostensibly very extroverted. However there is another kid from another relationship that is very introverted, because that partner was very introverted. Once again, it causes constant problems in the family, because not a one of them understands the needs of introverts, and the one that did is out of the picture. Every time we see them, that poor kid is so fucking depressed.
Sounds like things are working out great for you. Congrats. I don't really have a "Greater Theory of Why Racing Mixing Always Results in Broken Families". I've just seen enough to have a confident guess as to why not a lot of people jump at the chance.
I’m in a IR marriage with an East Asian. As I explained to my parents, the specifics here matter. It sounds like the examples you gave are specific to certain pairings. And the deficiencies relate to what are clear negative issues that are likely passed on genetically.
I’m sure there are pitfalls to white asian pairings as well. If my daughter is stereotypically Asian, I don’t personally see any obvious problems there. I think I prefer my wife’s attitudes to the generic western white woman who will put their daughter on hormone birth control at 13 and not think twice.
The obvious pitfalls with Asian men is trickier. If my son were stereotypically Asian it would certainly be a bit alien to me but I think the race specific stereotypes are not inherently negative. Anime and riced our cars may not be high status but neither are they serious negatives. My childhood experience wasn’t alpha jock so it probably not worlds apart either. Though there is a high potential for some disappointment here.
Perhaps I’m am blind to issues other would see as profoundly negative. That’s entirely possible. This was all considered when I married my wife and the altertive white women in my social circle all had significantly more negative issues. Not everyone can have it all.
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This is one of those areas where anecdotes can help illuminate statistics. My understanding (from a quick search) is that not all interracial couples are the same with regards to marital stability. I've seen lots of contradictory data, but it seems fairly clear that White/Black marriages are less stable than White/White (although possibly more stable than Black/Black), and White/Asian ones are about comparable (although far less stable than Asian/Asian)
If that's accurate, it's not so much that interracial marriages are inherently unstable, and more that they tend to default to the least stable demographic of the pairing... which would intuitively make sense. It takes two to make a marriage work, but only one to end it.
I have some personal experience in the area (as do many on this forum, I suspect). I'm happily interracially married (wife is Asian) for 18 years, with two kids. Interestingly enough, much of the initial opposition from my wife's family revolved around "He's white, and white people will divorce you". The familial opposition to interracial marriages faded pretty quickly after we got married; her brother married a white woman, and she has several female cousins who married white men. All of those marriages have been successful so far, but I'm sure that if any of them fail, the stereotype will return full force.
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To be fair this sounds like a culture thing more than a race thing per se. My wife is black, but if we were to have children neither of us would accept it if our kids started acting stereotypically black (which is what it sounds like you mean?). But that's because we both have similar cultural values about how to behave properly.
Well that is the $64,000 question, isn't it? Is it more of a culture thing than a race thing? We know intelligence is heritable, along with alcoholism, propensity for various mental illnesses or personality disorders, religiosity, and many, many more dimensions of temperament. You take it for granted that either these things are uncorrelated from race, or "culture" which is mutable. I'm unconvinced.
My pure Ulster Scots nephews have significantly more rambunctious and violent behavior than either my Ulster-Scots/Anglo-Saxon kids (with my first wife) or my Ulster Scots/Black kid (with my second wife) which is anecdotal, but illustrative.
We Ulster Scots are renowned for our problematic behaviors ( Borderers et al) but we are white. Given how pale we often are we may be some of the whitest whites in fact. Is that behavior genetic or cultural?
Would a more (historically) masculine cultured (if I can put it that way) Ulster Scots parent be ok with the more rambunctious behavior from the mixed kid (if this is what your example was saying?) than a WASP parent even though they are both from the same (white) race? Which of them is correct in any case?
Is what you are seeing a racial dynamic or the result of more (historically) feminine behaviors and standards having become more common in middle class white American culture? My kids getting in a fist fight at school in the US is seen differently depending on if we are talking Blue Tribe or Red Tribe parents, let alone my Northern Irish relatives who would certainly see it as part of growing up, for boys at least.
I was in fights consistently in school, and it only escalated to parents getting involved very very rarely. The biggest differences I see across how kids are treated nowadays in my experiences in Northern Ireland/England and the US are not race based but generation and class based. My older Red Tribe neighbors are much closer culturally in that regard than the younger Blue Tribe academics I work with in the city, even though they are both primarily white.
Which makes me think that either you have to look at racial sub-groups or it is a matter of culture and upbringing, with Blue vs Red in the US sense being significant and the fact that Black culture (broadly) shares a lot of behavior in an honor/traditional masculinity sense with Red rather than Blue. My uncle praises his kids for taking a swing at another kid who insulted them and my dad did the same for me, despite the fact he was a teacher, but my Blue Tribe co-worker had to have a stern conversation with his son about words not being an excuse for violence and took them to a therapist for their anger issues when he did the same.
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African Americans are a pretty heterogeneous group, genetically- a mix of within-Hajnal Europeans, west Africans, East Africans, Irish, etc- and so my priors would be that behavioral differences which aren’t rooted in well-known genetic differences(like the IQ difference’s likely effects on time preference) are probably mutable through culture.
I assume that’s what your talking about, specifically, due to the context.
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My understanding is that "heritable" refers to both traits which are innate as well as those which are acquired from one's environment. So I don't think that your argument need be opposed to my observation.
More generally I think the HBD hypothesis is nonsense, so yeah of course I believe that this sort of thing isn't genetic. But even if we take it as a given the the HBD argument is true, surely you would not try to argue that there are literally zero behaviors which are learned rather than innate. So really we are talking about the degree to which race is a factor versus culture, not whether culture is a factor at all.
In biology, "heritable" specifically refers to differences due to genetic variation. Confusing name choice, right?
Nah that actually makes sense. The confusing part is that (again, to my understanding) there are many people using "heritable" to mean something other than that.
Can you blame them? It means something other than that, if you're using it in a legal sense rather than a biological sense. And the lawyers called dibs first, several hundred years ago; the biologists should have come up with a different word ... but they didn't, so here we are. When a scientist says something is heritable they generally mean "we found these genes" or "we did these twin studies" or something much stronger than just "we measured this correlation".
I must confess that I find it perplexing that this is a problem. My reflexive definition of “heritability” was something like “what proportion of a trait is inherited rather than due to chance or environment”.
Noting that my background is from biology/medicine, what other ways are people using “heritable” for? I really can’t imagine any other interpretation that remotely makes sense. Or say from @SubstantialFrivolity’s reply:
Is this a serious definition used by people? Is that the legal definition?? Doesn’t that just mean “traits” if we combine “traits that are innate plus traits that aren’t”? Is there no linkage or any association with words of similar etymology like inheritance or heredity or hereditary or heir?
Sorry if I sound angry or upset or anything, I am just extremely confused.
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Interesting examples! I'm happy to grant that (i) there are almost certainly important dimensions of variance X that are largely genetic, such that (ii) if you have children someone whose value of X is very different from yours, your children will in turn be very different from you, and (iii) this could potentially create parenting challenges.
The one relatively clear case here would be intelligence: I think if I married someone significantly less intelligent than myself, our children would be less intelligent, and speaking as someone whose identity is very much intellectually defined, that could be an issue. There are perhaps other traits like conscientiousness that could matter here.
I guess my main outstanding query is why think race-mixing correlates with cases like this? Maybe it's true in a very general ceteris paribus sense, but I'd imagine most race-mixing fits the usual patterns of assortative mating. For example, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, I'm sure, have far more X-type traits in common than Mark Zuckerberg and a random white American woman, e.g., intelligence, nerdiness, and conscientiousness (plus a host of other deep psychometric traits that we don't have convenient names for).
I'd argue this position would be appropriate for upper classes. There are rather limited ways to achieve high status. If you meet someone as high status as you, it's prefiltered out a lot of people, along with whatever temperament their genes may have imposed on them which blocked their way.
But imagine you are lower class, and the varied stereotypes about specific ethnicities specific lower class dysfunctions. To take a historic example, ancient civilizations like China and Rome regularly exploited steppe people's susceptibility to alcohol. At the bottom, or even the middle, race might serve as a better proxy for coarsely compatible genes than achievement. Because there isn't a lot of achievement to judge by.
The specific examples you gave reminded me of some of the (all white) parents on my mother's (lower middle class) side of the family.
I think there is much to be said about how the loss of "good" non-college jobs (especially in certain regions) in the US has led to a blending of the middle, working and underclass.
My cousins on that side had kids with people who, on paper, were very similar to them in terms of finances, education, race, religion, etc (often even meeting in their shared workplaces). But, if you went a generation or two back, the class differences would be apparent. And while they'd all fall under "red tribe", looking closer there would be clear cultural differences as well.
Obviously that still leaves open the % split between nature and nurture in terms of behavior, my point being the difficulty in distinguishing based on achievement may continue to become more difficult as automation marches on and class divides widen at the top and narrow near the middle and bottom.
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