EDITORIAL
Mixed couples are bound to dilute racism

What we need is a great big melting pot. Big enough to take the world and all it's got. Keep it stirring for a hundred years or more. Turning out coffee-coloured people by the score.

As some might recall, that's the chorus of a 1969 hit by the band Blue Mink. And while we may not have achieved the racial harmony advocated in "Melting Pot," racial lines have more than blurred in America, with Hawai'i and California very much at the forefront of this trend.

The latest Census Bureau data shows that 15 percent of the 4.9 million unmarried heterosexual couples across the nation are racially or ethnically mixed. The numbers suggest that the younger generation is more receptive to live-in relationships and has fewer racial hangups when it comes to choosing a mate.

Mixed marriages, of course, are nothing new in Hawai'i, where more than one-third of married couples are interracial, according to the Census. The numbers are even higher according to the state.

Of course, the tradition has less to do with Hawai'i being an interracial utopia than plantation era demographics, which threw together immigrants from Japan, China, Korea, the Philippines, Scotland, Puerto Rico and Portugal, among other countries.

Yet despite all the blending, Hawai'i is by no means a racism-free zone. No one racial group has a monopoly on bigotry.

But a new generation is coming up. And if its members don't see race as a barrier to love — as the Census suggests — then more power to them.