The headline said it all: in five hundred years we'll all be Black. According to the author of this article, which appeared in an Italian daily several years ago, international migration, widespread intermarriage, and falling birthrates in Europe and North America will ensure that by 2500 nearly everyone on the planet will have black skin. The piece ended with the line, "Guess who's coming to dinner?"

The author didn't seem particularly perturbed by this situation. In fact, the last sentence of the article could be taken as a warning to would-be bigots: be careful against whom you discriminate, for they could be your descendents. Other commentators have posited a similar outcome for humanity, one in which extensive interbreeding will eventually result in a single race, albeit beige- rather than black-toned.

Some observers are skeptical of such a scenario, however. For example, journalist Steve Sailer describes the probability of a worldwide racial melting pot as "highly dubious." He finds "little statistical evidence to suggest that there will be significantly greater racial admixture in either Asia or Africa anytime in the 21st century." Nor does he expect miscegenation to flourish anywhere in Eastern Europe. In the case of Asia and Africa, few outsiders will want to settle there, while Eastern European countries will try to keep out any potential immigrants. Most interracial marriage, says Sailer, will take place either in areas where it has already occurred on a large scale, such as Latin America and "some remote islands," or in "immigrant magnets" like Western Europe, North America and Australia. Indeed, Sailer suggests that DNA engineering and interstellar colonization may further increase genetic differences among people.

So whither miscegenation? Perhaps in order to see where it's going, we should look at where it's already gone. That Africa and Asia are probably not future hotbeds of intermarriage should surprise no one: while large parts of both continents came under European rule during the last five centuries, admixture with Whites did not occur to any significant degree in either. There were a few exceptions to this rule. As sociologist Pierre van den Berghe explains in his essay "Racialism and Assimilation in Africa and the Americas" (from his book Race and Ethnicity), a mixed population called the Coloreds developed in South Africa as a result of unions between the country's original inhabitants the Khoikhoi (formerly known as Hottentots), Dutch colonizers, and slaves brought to the region from Madagascar, eastern Africa and the Dutch East Indies. The Coloreds, though of mixed race, are largely Western in culture. For instance, most are Christian and speak Afrikaans, a form of Dutch, as their mother tongue. The only other parts of Africa that "Europeanized" were some of the islands off the coast such as Cape Verde in the Atlantic and the Seychelles and Reunion in the Indian Ocean, where White men interbred with female slaves transported there from the African mainland. Like the Coloreds of South Africa, the populations of these islands follow a basically Western lifestyle: almost all practise Catholicism and speak a variety of either French or Portuguese.

If the Europeanization of Africa was a disappointment with a few success stories (i.e. South Africa and some of the islands), that of Asia could be described as a colossal failure. Eurasian communities -- the Anglo-Indians of India, Spanish mestizos of the Philippines,¹ and "Indos" of Indonesia -- did emerge in some of the countries controlled by European powers. But even if these groups adopted their fathers' culture to a certain extent,² they were too small a percentage of their respective nations' population to exert much influence on the society around them either genetically or culturally.

And what about the traditional hotbeds of miscegenation like Latin America and the "remote islands" mentioned by Sailer? (He never specifies what these islands are, but I'll venture to say they probably include the Caribbean, some of the islands off Africa, and others in the South Pacific.) Intermarriage will undoubtedly continue in these places, even if in most cases it will involve individuals already of mixed race, such as mestizos marrying other mestizos in Latin America. Barring a massive influx of "new blood" from recent immigration, the racial make-up of such countries is unlikely to change substantially in the next while.

It's more difficult to predict the future of race mixing in "immigrant magnets" like North America and Western Europe. Intermarriage patterns for a particular racial community can change due to factors like the group's size (the larger the community, the more likely its members will find partners of their own race), its sex ratio (a higher number of men than women or vice versa will force members of the more numerous sex to seek mates outside the group)³ and other things. In some countries miscegenation appears to be proceeding fairly rapidly. According to one British survey, half of all heterosexually involved Afro-Caribbean men and 30% of women have a White partner. The high outmarriage rate for this group may be partially explained by the fact that Afro-Caribbeans from former British colonies are already quite culturally similar to White Britons (they speak English as their mother tongue, practise Christianity, and in some cases even have European ancestry themselves).

Though exogamy (a scientific term for outmarriage) has increased among Afro-Caribbeans in Britain in recent years, other communities have seen their outmarriage rates decline. Asian Americans, for instance, are often cited as a "melting pot" success story for blending into the American mainstream through intermarriage, mainly with Whites. However, data from the 1990s shows that marriages between Asians and Whites fell from 1980 to 1990 while those between Asians of different ethnicities -- Filipinos and Japanese, for example -- rose significantly. These patterns have led some commentators to theorize that a new "eastern marriage cluster," whereby Asians marry other Asians rather than outsiders, may be forming in the United States. So even in the so-called immigrant magnets minority groups may not necessarily miscegenate themselves out of existence.

The flip side of the "cosmic race" theory is that if everyone were racially mixed, racism would disappear. In such circumstances, according to theorists, there would be no one left to discriminate against or for that matter do the discriminating. But in reality it's doubtful whether a thoroughly miscegenated world would be a racism-free paradise. In some parts of Latin America where mixing between Europeans and American Indians is nearly complete in a genetic sense, the privileges given to White and White-appearing people still exist. Nor are mixed-race individuals themselves always open to intermarriage, even with members of their own ancestral groups. As an anecdotal aside, a French-Canadian friend of mine was almost disowned by his mother for dating a Latin American girl with strong Amerindian features. My friend's mother, as it happened, was a quarter American Indian herself. Though I'm tempted to ascribe this woman's seeming racism to ignorance rather than hypocrisy (being what we would now call borderline retarded, she may not have known about her Indian heritage), many racially mixed parents have consciously encouraged their children to "lighten the line."

So what's in store for race mixing in the upcoming centuries? I've come to the conclusion that it's impossible to prognosticate anything certain. (Then again, I'm sure before Columbus' "discovery" of America no one foresaw that his voyage would lead to one of the most massive waves of miscegenation in history.) History rarely consists of predictable and steady patterns. But just as those who fail to know history are doomed to repeat it, perhaps it's a good idea to see where miscegenation has taken us in the past in order to see where it's going in the future.

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