Gori Girl » society http://gorigirl.com intercultural relationship stories and advice Sun, 07 Nov 2010 09:10:53 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.3 Interracial or Intercultural Relationship? http://gorigirl.com/interracial-or-intercultural-relationship http://gorigirl.com/interracial-or-intercultural-relationship#comments Wed, 29 Jul 2009 06:55:26 +0000 Gori Girl http://gorigirl.com/?p=899 What do you use: intercultural, interracial, or something else? I generally refer to my marriage - and speak of other relationships on this blog - in terms of cultural similarities or differences - mainly because cultural differences are where my interests lie. Thus, Aditya and I have an inter-cultural marriage, I write about the positives and negatives of intercultural relationships, and explore the values and beliefs of Aditya's and my cultures. And yet, culture alone does not tell the whole story. Race does matter in our relationship - at least in how the rest of society views our marriage.]]> What do you use: intercultural, interracial, or something else?
I generally refer to my marriage – and speak of other relationships on this blog – in terms of cultural similarities or differences – mainly because cultural differences are where my interests lie. Thus, Aditya and I have an inter-cultural marriage, I write about the positives and negatives of intercultural relationships, and explore the values and beliefs of Aditya’s and my cultures. And yet, culture alone does not tell the whole story. Race does matter in our relationship – at least in how the rest of society views our marriage.

Let’s be clear: race as a brightline, biologically-determined distinct set of physical features does not exist. Yes, humans certainly vary genetically – and different populations display different physical traits such as skin tone – but there is no genetic basis for the common historical understanding of four or five distinct racial types. The lack of a modern genetic basis of “blackness” or “whiteness”, however, does not keep us modern people from categorizing others – typically without even thinking about the matter – into distinct groups based on physical appearance.

As I’ve discussed previously, this tendency to place things – including people – into simple, sharply delineated categories is a perfectly normal part of human nature. How we categorize others has changed over time, of course – ancient Greeks and Romans saw the fundamental categorization of humans by citizenship and political organization, for instance. In contrast, following strands of thought developed during the Western Age of Discovery, Americans today typically look first to race – or perhaps ethnicity – as a fundamental way to differentiate the people around us.

The concept of race, despite (or perhaps because of) its use in everyday speech and thought, is not well-defined or agreed upon. Indeed, I think one of the only things reasonably intelligent Americans can agree upon regarding race is that America is far from being a “post-racial” society. As Dr. Alan Goodman puts it:

Americans and much of the world’s population have been conditioned to think of race as a fuzzy jumble of behavior, culture, and biology: a deep and primordial mix of a bit of culture and a lot of nature. Thus, to say that race is not real in one way (as a shorthand for human biological variation) and is real in another way (as a way to group and track lived experience) is indeed confusing. Isn’t race simply real or not? …

The idea that race is a social construct derives in part from natural scientists … who maintain that race is a myth, or more precisely that the concept does not capture human diversity. It also derives in part from a misunderstanding of the notion of historical or social construction. Even though race was invented and made to seem real by social humans, and even though race makes little sense on the genetic level, this does not mean that it is not real in other ways. [It is a] mistake of thinking that because race is a social construct, race cannot have real effects. To the contrary, processes of racing, racializing, and practicing racism have enormous and powerful consequence for human wealth and health.

Thus, when Aditya and I walk down the street, clothed in our cool American hipster threads, there is nothing that marks us out as belonging to different cultures – but we still occasionally attract attention because others see us as being an interracial couple. Of course, they may also (correctly) assume that we are an intercultural or international couple as well – but those are not distinctions that are immediately obvious from a glance our way.

I’ve been doing a fair amount of thinking (and reading) about interracial versus intercultural over the past few days. But before I continue in my mustings, I’d like to open it up to you all: do you think of your relationship primarily as an intercultural one? As an interracial one? International? Interethinc? Just a plain old relationship? How do you think society – family, friends, aquintences, strangers – view your relationship or marriage?

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