Race

So, I don't know why race is such an issue. It really shouldn't be. This is something that has bothered me for most of my life. I've been thinking about it more recently as I hear of interracial adoptions. Some parents have experienced criticism for adopting a child of another race. This is crazy to me. Tom Cruise has adopted children of a different race and he made a statement saying that we are all part of the HUMAN race. Okay, I know he is a little crazy now, but I wish more people would look at it that way. People often take issue with interracial couples too. They give you some bull about how it's because there are often cultural differences. There may be a small amount of truth to that, but if you are in a relationship and you discover that the cultural differences are too much for you, you won't date that person anymore. People work out all sorts of issues when dating. Society doesn't seem to think anything of a white American marrying a white Swede or a black American marrying a black Kenyan. I guess people just like to see what they are used to seeing, which usually is people of the same color together. I married someone from a different social class and culture. Nobody was protesting our marriage. We are both white with German and English ancestry, so we must be a good match. Trust me, the culture of Sandy Utah is quite different from my South Whitley Indiana upbringing. I grew up driving down dirt roads and Chad couldn't believe that people had unpaved driveways. He has since become accustomed to our strange Indiana ways-especially since we now live on a gravel road.
People try to make things about race when they aren't. I was watching Oprah once, which I rarely do because I usually end up angry with her comments, and they had interracial couples talking about the differences in their family backgrounds. Most of the things they said weren't race related, they were just differences in personalities. One couple was a black man and white woman. He was talking about how when they get together with her family it's laid back and quiet and when they are with his family everybody is loud and laughing. That's not a black or white thing. I have two white parents and he just described my family- The Staller's are pretty laid back and the Gradeless's, well, we get kind of loud when we are all together. I wish things would stop being about race and start being about people.