I want a life exactly like Scott Hanselman's. He has 13 years of software development experience, and he is the among the most popular and most respected writers on ASP.net. He is a primary contributor to “newtelligence DasBlog Community Edition”, the most popular open-source ASP.NET blogging software hosted on SourceForge. And he recently became father to a baby boy. I remember an instance in early December when my parents happened to glance at his website soon after the birth of Zenzo Quincy while I was showing them color corrected versions of a few pictures we had taken recently. My parents are what people have traditionally called a mixed couple. My Dad is a Protestant Bengali while my Mom is a Roman Catholic Malayali… both very rich but fairly distinct cultures, besides the obvious difference of languages. When they saw pictures of Hanselman with his wife and newly born baby on a open tab in my browser. They said that it's nice that more Americans are getting married outside their race/culture. I was a bit surprised as to why such a thing would still surprise my parents as I thought it was a non-issue in a liberal society like that of the United States especially not in the new millennia.
So while I saw this post by Scott this week I was wondering what warranted a need to mention things like… "More and more on TV there are interracial couples that aren't called out as The Mixed Couple." But as I educated myself a little more on the topic I discovered a couple of nuggets on acceptance of interracial couples by the general American population.
»On Star Trek, when Lt. Uhura and Capt. Kirk kissed (against their will) in 1968, it was heralded as the first interracial smooch on television.
»And when Norman Lear featured a black woman and a white man as married neighbors to 1975's The Jeffersons, it was considered groundbreaking.
The article on USA TODAY went on saying… "In real life, the gap slowly is narrowing. According to the most recent Census, interracial marriages grew from less than 1% in 1970 to nearly 6% in 2000."
But is it really such a big difference? I don't think so. Even after more than 30 years this percentage is nowhere close to 2 digits. I've never shared the overtly utopian vision of mankind as envisioned by Gene Roddenberry. But am I expecting too much? Seems to me the majority of United States is still living in Black & White.