I am a proud flag waving pure Englishman

I know that I'm not (well, we all aren't) mixed enough, so I married a girl from the other end of the world and made some more mixed kids. Anyway, for some reason inter-racial people usually look better and are more interesting than one-sided ones.

The appearance of mixed Indonesian/white kids is big stuff out here, with TV soap operas full of 'indo' actors. Their talent (or total lack of it) doesn't seem to much matter as long as they look like they're mixed race.
A really weird form of inverse racism that never ceases to amuse me, especially when I look back at how mixed race kids are so often seen in the UK.
I think the second prettiest girl (My wife is number one - or she's hit me) was a 3 way between Indian (Singapore) man and a Chinese (Sing)/white dude mum.
She was amazingly beautiful, exceptionally clever, and had a temper no one wanted to be on the wrong side of.

We have been very lucky to find ourselves in a small community (50,000 people on the Island) that has almost zero racial intolerance. Plenty of ethnic intolerance, mind, but not racial or colour. Our son was aged two when we arrived, and he grew up rubbing shoulders with a great variety of colours and nationalities. Among our residents we have around 100 nationalities, and every major religion. The native Caymanians (about 20,000 of them) are mostly a mixture of African and European, with some Indian (from India). When slavery was abolished in this isolated island of a few thousand, there seems to have been a sexual free-for-all.

We don't have the North American hang-up, where everybody with a trace of African blood is called black. We take our colours literally. When I first got here, and was feeling my way, I asked a young woman in my firm would she consider herself black. No, no, not at all. How would she describe herself, then? "Hmm. Dark chocolate, I think." And I could see the difference. Of course we approximate, and equivocate: a black person with European features would usually be called "that Indian-looking fella": a pure-blood African would be described as "black-black".

Nor do we have any great hang-ups about racially loaded words, even the bad ones. Well, up to a point! Here's a blog-post of mine from a few years ago that illustrates the situation. The first half of the post features a famous Australian footballer of the 1920s, the second half tells of the only time I have ever used the infamous n-word in any other context. It was amusing, looking back.
http://barlowscayman.blogspot.com/2013/ … wn_21.html

^ I want to 'like' that post twice.

I loved the bit about colours and how they're taken as colours, not identities.

I really love to take that DNA test to know if I carry more nationalities in me than I know.
As a mix culture product of myself and I produced even more mixed  kids, I wonder how much it would be. But at the same time very curious how they search in our genes.

In Jordan there is a lot of (hidden) racism but on a other level It's more on the culture towards Palestinians and Syrians. Which is to me very strange as it was one country before the creating of Jordan about sixty years ago.

I think I might have found a place in Jakarta.
I'll investigate when I get a moment.

Fred wrote:

I loved the bit about colours and how they're taken as colours, not identities.

It's confusing sometimes. I was at a pool party not long ago where a Black American (sic), a visitor to the Island, was present. A cheerful and personable chap, with no racial hangups, but at some point the topic of US racial problems came up, and he used the expression "we blacks" several times. The host and I let it pass, but we were dying to shout, "You're not black, mate, you're medium-brown, verging on light brown, and not much darker than brown-ish!" We knew he was speaking the US idiom, but all the same it seemed a bit forced, to us pedants.

Primadonna wrote:

In Jordan there is a lot of (hidden) racism but on a other level It's more on the culture towards Palestinians and Syrians. Which is to me very strange as it was one country before the creating of Jordan about sixty years ago.

Yes, it would be more a cultural prejudice than a racial one. As for Jordan being "one country"... it was surely only ever an artificial country as late as 1967, when Israel invaded and occupied the Palestinian territories. Until 1919 or 1921 it was part of the Ottoman Empire's province of Syria, and according to Wikipedia there was a social and perhaps a cultural division between the north and the south of what is now Jordan. Then for a time Palestine was annexed. When my wife and I backpacked in the area in 1965, it was Jordan that we visited; there was no such political entity as Palestine any more. Jordan's present boundaries have prevailed since 60 or so years ago - you're right - but it wasn't really a single country before then.

Just got round to seeing that YouTube in #1.

Boy, you guys are really gullible if you think that set-up performance is genuine. Never seen such a bunch of horse hockey for a long while. 
Let's all go hug a tree and sing "Kumbaya, my Lord". 

You know that song too  ?

Well sort of !!
I was usually more concerned to see that my bangers (sausages) were grilled to perfection without burning. 

El_Jost wrote:

Just got round to seeing that YouTube in #1.

Boy, you guys are really gullible if you think that set-up performance is genuine.

It's reality TV so rubbish by nature, but the point is still valid.

For me it was more than that. To me I had a strong impression that they were reciting leant script. You know it is possible to tell the same story more than one time, each time with a different setting; that is the impression I had. I wasn't impressed.

BTW Did you take up their offer and apply for the test?

El_Jost wrote:

For me it was more than that. To me I had a strong impression that they were reciting leant script. You know it is possible to tell the same story more than one time, each time with a different setting; that is the impression I had. I wasn't impressed.

BTW Did you take up their offer and apply for the test?

Of course they were, it's just a soap opera presented a demiscience, but the point of the post holds regardless of their pathetic acting.

As for the test, my kid is moving school, I'm extremely tired and I've been busy with other stuff so I haven't had chance yet. A few more things to do then I'm going to contact them.

El_Jost wrote:

BTW Did you take up their offer and apply for the test?

I would like to take the general-DNA test, and will do so one day. One of my English ancestors was married in India, and it's possible that the girl was Anglo-English. I hope so. All my family-history research has given me is English and Irish, and those lines came together in Australia just two generations ago. My wife's ancestry is English and Scottish only - as far as we know, of course. Embarrassingly boring, to have nothing exotic from recent centuries!

I once had high hopes of my son's Mexican girlfriend, but nothing came of that relationship; all he brought into the line, eventually, was some Norwegian, which isn't much help. However, he, his mother and I all tan easily, which I don't think is natural to "pure English". Not from what I've seen on the beaches of Bournemouth, anyway!