Today I was thinking of resident expert John Hodgman's discussion of ethnology on The Daily Show (find it, watch it). He foresaw a day when the melting pot of modern civilization would reach a point when there would be no racial divisions and everyone would be the same skin color. That color would be soft pumpkin. I was an unsettling thought, losing our traditional ethnic/racial distinctions and the associated cultural associations. Not that racial distinctions should be considered particularly stable - the divergence resulted from selective pressures on relatively small hunter-gatherer groups then stabilized as civilization developed (I just made that up but it sounds about right). But can't we already see this blending taking place and even accelerating - like there's some sort of Murphy's Law for miscegenation in a shrinking world. What will this soft pumpkin world be like? Will there be no stuffy button-down names for white elites? (Muffy and Biff?) No creative neo-appellations for minorities? (D'Brickashaw?) No cool stuff for white folks? No R and B? Will we all listen to the same mashed-up music and eat the same fusion cuisine? Will we watch NASCAR or NBA or Futbol? Or will we just look the same and still be different inside? Maybe that's it.
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Seriously, I think we'll always have divergent tastes but it would be nice to do away with most of the visually-caused sterotypes.
Interesting post, thanks for pointing it out to me.
I don't think we have to worry about diversity in the world for a very long time to come. People are all so different, all the time. Perhaps culture would come to mean something very different, but still very interesting and meaningful, in a world like that.
I can't imagine it'll be Nascar though. I have to confess, I betray my people here. Not only do I not like okra (I know! But it's hairy!) but I don't like Nascar. Too loud.
And I hate to break it to you, but there are orange people already. They are the folks who overuse the self-tanner. There are a lot of them. It's kind of scary. And they have their own culture, involving very white teeth and showing lots of orange skin. ;)
No NASCAR for me either. Unless it's Ricky Bobby. :D
For the record, I like okra. And my old stuffy white guy name has been taken over by the hispanics already. The only other "Edgar's" I know that are near my age happen to be Latin Americans.