View image Sonja Sohn (left, with Dominic West as Detective McNulty, in "The Wire"): The future of America, I hope!
The wee bundle of joy who raises the US population to an even 300 million (for a fraction of second before we zoom past the milestone) may be a beautiful brown baby boy! We're a nation of ethnic mutts (and I'm of English-Irish-Italian-Cuban heritage -- proudly "mixed race"), but I wish I could live long enough to see the day (and it won't be that long) when most Americans will resemble Tiger Woods or Sonja Sohn or Bejamin Bratt or Halle Berry or Cameron Diaz or Jimmy Smits or Salma Hayek or... Well, OK, the beautiful ones, anyway. From Reuters:
A baby boy of Latino heritage, born in Los Angeles on Tuesday, might well be the 300 millionth American. The 200 millionth, a Chinese-American lawyer in Atlanta, says he'll be very relieved.What a country!!!U.S. population will top 300 million at about 7:46 a.m. EDT on Tuesday, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly 39 years after the 200 million mark was reached on November 20, 1967. [...]
It is possible to make an educated guess at who the 300 millionth American will be, said demographer William Frey of the Brookings Institution.
"I predict it's going to be a Latino baby boy, born in Los Angeles to a Mexican immigrant mother," Frey said by telephone.
This prediction makes sense, Frey said, because about half of U.S. population growth is due to Hispanics, the biggest gains in the Hispanic population are in Los Angeles, more boys are born than girls and the U.S. population is growing more due to natural increase than through immigration.
"In theory, it could be anybody who crosses a border, who comes off a plane as a new immigrant or is born anywhere in the United States but if you have to put the odds on high probability, I would say my guess is pretty good," Frey said.
"I wish I could live long enough to see the day (and it won't be that long) when most Americans will resemble Tiger Woods or Sonja Sohn or Bejamin Bratt or Halle Berry or Cameron Diaz or Jimmy Smits or Salma Hayek or... Well, OK, the beautiful ones, anyway."
This was one of my favorite setting details in The Fifth Element, actually -- just about everyone walking around in that movie seems to be sporting the skin tone and facial/hair features of two or more different races. I thought this was quite observational and, frankly, it's a future that can't get here soon enough.
i for one will be really depressed the day everyone looks exactly like one another.
not as depressed when everyone is merely the same skin tone, but still depressed. part of what i like about the world in general is seeing so much difference in people, whether it's skin tone, height, weight, build, facial features, or what have you. i love the way people look with dark skin; i also love the way people look with light skin. the day everyone is simply a mix of everything without being any one of them will make me sad.
Not to worry, Zac. I imagine we'll see greater physical diversity rather than less. The more genes in the pool, the greater the possibilities! I mean, do the people I mentioned all look alike to you? Tiger Woods, Sonja Sohn, Bejamin Bratt, Halle Berry, Cameron Diaz, Jimmy Smits, Salma Hayek? Look 'em up on IMDb and you may be surprised to find out the backgrounds of their parents. One of my oldest friends is a second-generation Korean-American woman who married a Caucasian with the curly hair and broad facial features; in college, I always thought he looked like a white Dorsey Wright ("Hair"). They, of course, have the coolest looking kids (and those kids look very different from one another) -- but I see more and more young Eurasians who remind me of them, on the streets or on TV or in movies or especially in bands, and that makes me happy. We may get a little darker (but global warming may make that necessary, anyway), but there's still going to be plenty of diversity...
Here's to hoping American can continue to find ways to incorporate other cultures into our own in a way that honors us all . . . alas our track record here has not always been so great.