Mixed Races

        In class we spoke about how Tannenbaum believed that in order for slavery to truly end in the United States the white population had to stop associating dark skin with slavery.  The Anglo-American of the time had the notion that if you had dark skin you were a slave and vice versa, if you were a slave you had dark skin. Even after the civil war and the end of slavery this state of mind continued through out the United States. In the last pages of Slave and Citizen we discovered that Tannenbaum believed that in order for whites to accept blacks people needed to start mixing races. He believed that if races mixed it would create a “new biological type” (a new race). He believed that this new biological type would create “new values and human beauty” (pg120 Slave and Citizen).
Perhaps he envisioned a future where people where no longer either black or white but one mixed race. Back in his time a person of mixed race might have not been so common but in our present time its more of a reality.

        It might be the fact that I grew up in Queens, one of the most diverse communities in the world, but I come across people of different and mixed races quite often. For example one of my teachers in middle school was black and Korean, one of my sister-in-laws in married to a Korean man and have a beautiful Korean-Dominican daughter, I also met plenty of people mixed with black and Hispanic blood or Asian and Hispanic blood or Asian and American blood. Maybe Tannenbaum would have been pleased to know that all these races are now mixing together but this mixing of races doesn't exactly mean that there is eventually going to be one uniform race. However, I like to think that this mixing of races does signify a future where people are more tolerant of other races simply because they themselves are multi-cultural. 

         You don’t necessarily  have to be biologically  a mixture of races to feel that you are multi-cultural you just simply have had to be exposed in one way or another to different races. I believe that Tannenbaum’s notion that slavery will never truely end unless there is mixing of the races is wrong. I think that white Americans will learn to accept other races as a part of the United States if they are simply exposed to other races as children in a positive way. The only way to truly end slavery is to educate our children about other cultures besides our own and teach them to be open minded and accepting of them.