this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2026
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That's weird. Don't be racist.
Well browner than me. See you don't understand. Usually, in Latin America and I assume other places too, people who are white are seen as somehow better. So the tendency is to "marry up". Well but then that means that those who are darker skinned don't get to marry. It's an overly simplified explanation for the context of several history classes I took during my university life a few decades ago. So I had this thought...I could marry up by finding a woman who is whiter than me. I should instead find a woman who is browner than I am. There's no reason to marry up, to whiten up my kids skin color. And I sure as hell don't want to marry within "my kind" because I don't believe anything about being born at a particular place makes you some how of that place specifically. So I don't believe in nationalisms or ethnicity pride... I'll be proud of something I earned and not randomly chosen things like being born at a particular place or being of a particular height or having a particular shade of pink for skin color. But I do believe in how painful racism was to me and how I would want less pain brought to the world. So my kids will be like me hopefully and see racism as a bad thing. Hey if A white woman had given me the opportunity to marry her I wouldn't have said no. But destiny had plans and I had plans to screw destiny and marry the way I wanted. Life is experimenting and I experimented. I think ๐ค Hmm it was a good experiment and experience. I proved that you can pick anyone you choose to marry and it will work just fine. You can be of any race or creed and it work just fine. You can "marry down" and it works just fine. Love overcomes.
I don't think you said anything racist, and I'm white. I get where you're coming from and I think making the world browner probably would lead to more empathy for racial issues and that's a good thing. Pretending to be color blind doesn't help anything when the world isn't a color blind place.
You're very right on that. It is striking how local racism can be. In Sandiego it is very common to hear the n word or for somebody to call someone else a wetback or a gringo. But holy smokes moving to the pnw, here things are way different, like night and day. Yeah, everything is like twice as expensive but everyone loves minorities and those who don't are pretty much not welcome. It's great here that way. In other countries or localities racism is played differently.
I recall looking for a job once and the place I applied at had a long line of applicants. I got the "unfortunately we are not looking for engineers of your kind here". Damn! That makes me boil. But this morning someone at my kids school called another kid "chocolate". And I just got a notification from the teacher expression her concern for our community and how she teaches everyone in the classroom about the origins of skin color and how everyone might look different but we are the same. That gives me hope that it will one day be more true than today. Hopefully everywhere.
You can read more about the complexity of socioeconomic constructs that women in Latin America had to overcome:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/women-of-colonial-latin-america/women-marriage-and-family/3526388D7D4D213A05371EDD6105BCE7
And the similar history of women in the Philippines: https://www.scribd.com/document/245991318/Hi185-Abot-a-Historical-and-Cultural-Survey-of-Marriage-in-the-Philippines-Law-Custom-and-Religion-libre
It's a history marked by men moving up in socioeconomic status by choosing to marry up and controlling who their kids married to be able to control their family wealth.
It's a problem of the past. There's nobody in my societal level planning on marrying a series of generations of descendants to end up as an heir to Elon Musk. People don't do that anymore. But what I did was to just find someone browner than me to love. It's no different than finding someone specifically taller or smarter than you are. I'm just swinging against the flow.
People of the future are going to be saying shit like this about their genetically-engineered test tube babies. Maybe they'll have rainbow colors by then too.