The other night over dinner, I ended a sentence with “…and that’s what happens when you let brown people into your country.”  Taken out of context, one could assume any number of things about my character, as did the bus boy who was refilling my water and happened to be brown himself.  I turned in time to see him grimace and shake his head.  Part of me wanted to say “Wait, I didn’t mean what you thought I meant...

I didn’t even mean Mexicans, even though you might not even be Mexican at all but perhaps Bolivian or Guatemalan!”  But I stopped myself before my mouth fully encompassed my foot.  You see, what I was talking about wasn’t immigration reform or anything of the sort.  I was simply explaining how in a few generations, everybody in America is going to be brown.

I’ve never quite been able to understand Americans’ preoccupation with their racial makeup.  Maybe because my own is so muddled and has been obscured through space and time that it’s really quite insignificant at the end of the day.  People have long lists of what they are: English-Cherokee-French-Scottish-Blah-Blah-Blah.  Looking forward, your grandchildren, if not your children already, will be even more mixed up than you, and the length of the racial nametag will just be too cumbersome.  How about just American?

Out of my four best girlfriends in college that have gotten married, all of them have married outside of their race.  All four have also produced mixed children.  It is unlikely that those children will marry their exact racial match and therefore will produce even more racially diverse children themselves.  Those kids are going to define “All American” - their appearance more akin to modern Brazilians than the blonde hair, blue eyed look that has long been the standard.

I acknowledge that living in an urban environment skews my perspective as urban environments are naturally diverse, but seeing as I myself came from a rural environment I’m going to take a wild guess and say that this change has been happening for some time.   It’s just that now, we’re on the brink of this country’s inflection point in terms of racial makeup:  That unassuming snowflake is turning into a giant avalanche and we’re all about to be buried in brown.

Personally, this makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside, but I know that there are still people out there who just don’t get how you could fall in love and procreate with someone outside of your race. I mean, I don’t especially want to bring up John Mayer and his “David Duke cock” (Playboy, February 2010), but there you have it. John Mayer is single-handedly ruining the future of our country. He should be forced to play out the remainder of his career at the Pechanga Resort and Casino for not involving some brown people in his promiscuous sex like any rock star worth his guitar should.

For centuries, interracial sex, co-habitation and marriage have been documented in literature and art because societies have long been intermixing. Trade routes, wars and slavery since ancient history means that most countries in this world have mixed race populations. Though rape of women by slaveholders or invading armies accounts for some of the mixing, much of it is the result, of proximity. When British workers brought Indian men to East Africa to build the Uganda Railway for instance, they took East African wives.

Here in the United States, since we’re still under the long shadow of our past yet culturally progressing at lightening speed, it’s sometimes difficult to reconcile our old thought patterns with our modern world. Where our grandparents might have a stroke if we bring home a person of a different color, our peers are no longer signaling to us that it’s wrong. In fact, you’ll probably have a lot more street cred if you do.

Of course this doesn’t always work both ways. If you’re a black man dating a white woman, the very sight of you together may make some black woman livid. And if you’re a black woman dating a white man, black men will shift uncomfortably when you walk by. If you’re a white or black guy dating an Asian girl, big ups to you, except from the Asian guys – they hate the competition. If you’re a white or black girl dating an Asian guy, your friends may say something as brilliant as “I could never date an Asian guy.”