What vision of the future has academics and scholars pinned on Hawaii’s high-rate of intermarriage? On what facts and hopes have they based this vision? In Olson’s view, how likely is their vision of a racially-mixed future to be accurate?
In the essay The End of Race: Hawaii and The Mixing of People by Steve Olson it talks about the growing high level of intermarriage and racial mixing within Hawaii and the USA at large. The hope is that this leads to the steaded erosion of race as a divider within society, but the paper is cautious to say that this will definitively end to racism. On this note, Steve says “Despite the high rate of intermarriage here, ethnic and racial tensions haven’t really disappeared. They have changed into something else. Something less threatening, perhaps, but still divisive. Hawaii may well be a harbinger of a racially mixed future. But it won’t be the future many people expect.” Pra11
What are the implications for “ethnic thinking” of recent genetic research showing that “every group is a mixture of many previous groups, a fleeting collection of genetic variants drawn from a shared genetic legacy” (253)?
Ethnic Thinking is a type of thinking that forms, when groups of share geographical area develop a, hated between each other. These people are not very genetical different. “The antagonists in these conflicts have different ethnicities, but they have been so closely linked biologically throughout history that they have not developed marked physical differences.” Pra12.
