“It never occurred to me that I would fall in love with a Negro, but I have, and nothing’s going to change that.” — Joanna Drayton (Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner)

“Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner is a 1967 American comedy-drama film produced and directed by Stanley Kramer and written by William Rose. It stars Spencer Tracy, Sidney Poitier and Katharine Hepburn, and featuring Hepburn’s niece, Katharine Houghton. The film contains a (then rare) positive representation of the controversial subject of interracial marriage” — Wikipedia.com

Some 50 years ago it was indeed rare and, in some places, illegal for blacks and whites to date or, even worse, to think about getting married. In the film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Academy Award winner Sydney Poitier played the character of John, a widowed, black physician, who had plans to marry a young white bachelorette, Joanna. Needless to say, because of societal stigmas, this brought great internal stress to both his family and her family.

Ancestry.com

Here in Bermuda, with so many of us having multiple strains of DNA, it would be near impossible to find a black person with no traces of European DNA. St David’s Islanders can proudly boast of having Native American, African and European DNA.

So in that respect, it is clear that many of us are of mixed race. Many of us have a white parent, grandparent or great-grandparent. Some of us even have white DNA stretching back to the days of slavery.

If you yourself are light-skinned, aka “yella”, then you can be sure there is someone white in your family tree, even if you did not know about them. Likewise, if you are white and your hair is a bit on the curly side, you can be pretty sure there is some African in your family tree, even if you did not know.

Swirled society

In the year 2015, we now live in a society where interracial relationships are on the rise. Whether it simply be high school sweethearts or full-blown marriages, the taboo of mixed marriages is becoming, well, less and less taboo. Inevitably, this is leading to more children with multiethnic backgrounds.

This takes us back to this inescapable fact.

No one chooses which race they are born into. There is no menu for an embryo to pick from at the time of conception.

However, with a menu of who to date or flirt with, people have a choice of who they are romantically involved with. Sometimes it works out and sometimes it does not. However, when someone knows what they have found is real, they are in love and pigmentation does not dampen those desires.

As the lady Joanna Drayton stated, it never occurred to her she would fall in love with a black man. Yet she did and nothing was going to change that. The realistic fact is that we live in a pluralistic society, with more and more of our children attending both private and public schools with persons of different races. Or they are in university, where they are meeting and befriending persons from all around the world.

With white children now attending Berkeley or CedarBridge in increasing numbers and black children now attending BHS, Mount Saint Agnes, Warwick Academy and Saltus in increasing numbers, it is inevitable that they will form friendships and, yes, have relationships across racial boundaries.

Furthermore, many Bermudian adults, both black and white, male and female, are now romantically involved with persons of Asian or Latin ethnicity. We can no longer define interracial relationships through a simplified black-and-white lens.

Does this equate to racism ending in Bermuda?

Unfortunately not.

However, it does mean that fewer and fewer parents of any race will feel shocked or ashamed that their child is dating or marrying outside of their ethnic group.

Family dinner is about to get a whole lot more multicultural.