What the ‘Mixed Kids Are Always So Beautiful’ Meme Really Means |
What the ‘Mixed Kids Are Always So Beautiful’ Meme Really Means
The Huffington Post
2013-08-22
Marcia Dawkins, Clinical Assistant Professor of Communications
University of Southern California, Annenberg
The New York Times’ Motherlode blog recently posted a thought-provoking article called, “Mixed Kids Are Always So Beautiful.” The author’s experiences as a parent to a racially-ambiguous mixed child are proof that beauty and race are concepts societies create that may not actually exist in nature. As a result, beauty and race are associated with and impacted by our experiences and perceptions related to class, immigration, gender, sexuality and marketing. Case in point: Since the Time magazine “New Eve” cover in the 1990s, multiracial individuals are more and more said to be the face of 21st century America and its evolved standard of beauty. But what’s less known is that even this image was altered to look less “Hispanic/Latino” (read: brown) and more “European” (read: white) after focus group testing.
The “mixed race faces are prettier” meme is related directly to hybrid vigor, the biological phenomenon that predicts that crossbreeding leads to offspring that are genetically fitter than their parents. Hybrid vigor makes mixed race people somehow biologically different and prettier than non-mixed (non-white) people by nature. Equally dangerous is the added effect that focusing on mixed-race offspring continues to make interracial relationships about sex and heterosexuality and to marginalize those who do not identify as heterosexuals and/or come from same-sex interracial families…
…My parents reminded us that real beauty is measured more accurately by intelligence, interests and healthy relationships rather than by a racially ambiguous appearance and others’ reactions to it. They also taught me not to “believe the (racist) hype” that mixed kids are more beautiful than anyone else…
Read the entire article here.
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