Pigments of our imagination

Whenever we give our young daughter some water paints to play with, she ends up taking the small containers – with their separate blue, yellow and red tints – and mixing them all together, resulting in a concoction that brings her instant joy. To us, and perhaps to the rest of the world, the resulting hue – black, indigo, swampy green – is not a color at all, but perhaps the absence of a color. We find it hard not to correct her: to tell her that colors should remain separate. To her young eyes, the experiment is aesthetically pleasing, the pleasure that comes from mixing things.

Something like this must happen in nature. Rather than sticking to a wide range of separate hues, the human race keeps changing, mixing, intermingling – resulting in entirely new combinations. The world is definitely changing its look – or rather, new looks are changing the face of the world.

Take a look around: in the fields of entertainment, music and sports, mixed offspring are everywhere. Eurasians and Amerasians are hot commodities. Thanks to cultural mixing and intermarriage between races, it’s no longer easy to say who’s who. Soon, it may even no longer be possible to define races.

There used to be an ugly word for it. "Miscegenation" referred to sexual relations or marriage between people of different races, and was coined during Civil War times by American racists who decried the coupling of whites and blacks. But in the context of beauty and talent, at least, miscegenation seems to work wonders.

They say we’ll soon be able to select physical traits in advance for our children – blue eyes, brown skin –from a genetic checklist. But it doesn’t take a genetic designer to develop new ways to take our breath away. It just takes the right couple.

Look at Tiger Woods, a self-described "Cablinasian" (Caucasian-black-Indian-Asian) who once found social acceptance to be as out-of-reach as winning the Masters tournament – a goal he’s now bagged four times. His marriage to a longtime European sweetheart suggests further mingling of the world’s pigments.

In the entertainment world, too, miscegenation rules. Beauty has blossomed into some amazing new standards. Actresses like Halle Berry (African-American and white), Rosario Dawson (of Cuban, Puerto Rican, Irish, African-American and Native-American descent) and Salma Hayek (Mexican and Lebanese) prove that looks can be blended in astonishing new ways. Beauty isn’t trapped by limits.

Closer to home, look at Donita Rose or Sarah Meier, two Fil-Ams whose looks turn heads; singer Norah Jones (Indian and Caucasian) and Michelle Branch (a mix of Indonesian, Dutch, French and Irish); or Elite model and Channel V veejay Sarah Tan (Chinese and English).

Then there are the male combinations that have captivated audiences: Keanu Reeves (Chinese/Hawaiian/English, born in Lebanon), Dean Cain (Japanese/French/Welsh) and Brandon Lee (Chinese-American). Hell, even Kate Beckinsale is one-eighth Burmese.

When I wrote about this trend for PEOPLE Asia a while back, I noted that Oliver Stone’s epic Alexander was a big expensive flop, but it did raise some interesting points about the globe-straddling Macedonian: he really wanted the world to become one huge melting pot, with all nations and races intermingling until there was only one race.

Whether Alexander’s quest was for world domination or out of some Benetton sense of racial harmony is debatable. But the world does seem to be moving in that direction. Even TIME magazine was up on the trend a few years back with its cover story, "Eurasian Invasion."

"The media has created a new beauty standard," the April 2001 article noted. "East and West have met, and the simple boxes we use for human compartmentalization are overflowing, mixing, blending." Europe is perhaps the hottest melting pot for interracial couples at the moment, where Eurasian models are still fetching high fashion fees.

Of course, the trend goes much deeper than skin level. Mixed marriages and offspring have always been a double-edged sword: progressive and natural to some, shunned as taboo by others. Take the case of the bui doi (or "dust of life") of modern Vietnamese culture, historically the product of bar girls and GI servicemen decades ago. Despite the fashion industry’s ready acceptance of inter-racial models, the half-and-half look is still not highly prized in Vietnamese culture – proving that racial roots go back a lot further than fashion.

The downside to this, of course, is that it makes it harder for pure Asians to feel accepted as they are. We hear about Thais spending fortunes on cosmetic surgery to enlarge their breasts, make their eyes rounder, their noses flatter. Everyone wants to change his or her look, to become someone else’s idea of "perfect." Facial creams are typically marketed as "whiteners." Hair colors change with the day of the week.

Fitting in always feels like a struggle; what is acceptance for one group feels like marginalization to another. And it may be the Eurasian crowd still feels most comfortable among its own kind, creating a new sense of segregation and difference. Alas, the world may always be this way.

But let’s look again to nature at work, with its various containers of color. When people of different cultures and races meet, social conventions don’t really play into the choices they make. If they fall in love, the world – for a while, at least – ceases to exist. Since God created us, mustn’t there be a purpose behind this color blindness? Sure, the interracial couple will eventually have to confront the world – racism will surface, in various forms, whether in one’s homeland or the other’s. The world is like that. But the couple, let us hope, has developed an unexpected bonus from choosing one another: greater understanding. Maybe even an understanding that transcends race. And maybe this new perspective is the purpose behind all this co-mingling of races.

A quick look around the globe with all its furious mixing and matching of races should tell us something else: nothing stays one shade forever. People will always be attracted to new pigments, new combinations. And life sometimes lies in that moment of discovery. Maybe God had a plan there, too.