Eurasians in the Sportlight "混"出名堂

Can an ethnic mix be trendy? At the moment, Eurasians are enjoying an unprecedented high profile in the news, in advertising, and in the entertainment industry. People of numerous cultures have embraced Eurasians like actresses Karen Mok and Maggie Q, not to mention superstar golf player Tiger Woods. Modeling agencies are scrambling for women with mixed blood, while Eurasians are becoming the darlings of music stations MTV and Channel V.

Eurasians have not always basked in the warm glow of public attention. Historically, there has been a lot of deep-seated prejudice against ethnically mixed people. In countries such as the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam, such offspring were seen as negative reminders of Western male colonizers and Eastern female war victims and opportunists. For decades, Eurasian children have had to challenge negative stereotypes and fight for their rights.

Does this current prominence of Eurasians represent a new acceptance, or is it merely a marketing twist on old racial biases? Many of the VJs on Channel V and MTV look racially mixed only because they have had plastic surgery to change their features. They say they feel pressured to look mixed because Western beauty is still the ideal to many people. Hopefully, in the future, this admiration and acceptance of those with multicultural heritages will deepen, and people will appreciate others, and themselves, regardless of their ethnic background.

Race has always had a huge impact on history, society, and culture. But according to many scientists, the concept of race has no biological basis; it is merely a social construct.

The American Anthropological Association has stated that race simply cannot be tested or proven scientifically. Because humans have been around for a relatively short time by evolutionary standards, scientists say that there is not enough genetic diversity in humans to allow us to be divided into neat, racial cubbyholes or subspecies. . It is generally believed that humans originated in Africa about two hundred thousand years ago and migrated to other continents one hundred thousand years later. Although environmental variations have produced the physical differences in hair and skin we see today, underneath the surface there has been little change.

Systems of racial categorization, first developed in the eighteenth century, have divided people into three, nine, twenty-six, and as many as three hundred races. Scientists reject such thinking as myth. They say that geographic patterns of sets of genes show that people have been migrating and merging from the start; race may be heavily tied to culture and how people see one another, but it is something we have created.

Scientists know this may be difficult for some people to accept. As summed up by Jonathan Marks, a University of California at Berkeley anthropologist, "Teaching that racial categories lack biological validity can be as much of a challenge as teaching in the seventeenth century that the earth goes around the sun."

種族混血也可成為時尚嗎？此時此刻，新聞、廣告和娛樂圈對歐亞混血兒都有空前廣泛的介紹。許多源自不同文化的人都相當欣賞混血兒，諸如莫文蔚、瑪吉Q等等，更不要說超級高爾夫明星泰格·伍茲了。模特兒經紀公司競相爭奪混血美女，歐亞混血兒儼然成為音樂頻道MTV及Channel V的寵兒。

歐亞混血兒并非生來就沐浴于公眾關心的溫煦的光輝之中。歷史上，對種族混雜的人有許多根深蒂固的種族偏見。在菲律賓、泰國、越南等國家，混血后裔勾起人痛苦的回憶，使人們想起當年的西方男性殖民者和東方女性戰爭受害者，以及投機分子。數十年來，歐亞混血的孩子們不得不與人們對他們抱有的負面偏見抗爭，為自己的權利而斗爭。

現今歐亞混血的聲望，是否代表一種新的包容，或僅是在舊的種族偏見基礎上的市場手段？Channel V和MTV的很多主持人看上去好像是混血兒，這是因為他們通過外科美容手術改變了面容。他們說由于他們看起來像混血兒而感到有壓力，因為西方美人還是許多人心中的理想。但愿對多元文化的贊賞與接納，在未來可望與日俱增，人們會欣賞別人，也會欣賞自己，無論源于哪一個種族，哪一種背景。

種族問題一直對歷史、社會和文化有巨大影響。但是根據許多科學家的觀點，種族概念沒有生物學上的立論根據，純粹僅是社會建構出來的產物。

美國人類學協會指出，種族基本上無法用科學方法加以測試及驗證。因為就進化的標準來說，人類的存在相對較短，因此科學家認為，人類的基因不夠的多樣化，還不足以劃為純粹的種族分支或亞種。一般認為，人類在二十萬年前源于非洲，十萬年后陸續遷徙到其它大陸。雖然各地的環境差異使人們在外觀如膚色、發色上大相逕庭，但是骨子里不同之處極少。

首先在18世紀發展起來的種族分類體系，將人分為3支、9支、26支，甚至多達300個支系種族。科學家斥之為神話。他們認為，各地域基因組合的規律顯示，人類從一開始 就在遷棲、在結合；種族可能與文化及人們怎樣相互看待有緊密的聯系，但這些不過是我們自行建構出來的產物而已。

科學家也知道這種理論很難為一些人所接受。正如加州大學伯克利分校的人類學家喬納森·馬克斯所概括的，“宣揚種族分類缺乏生物學依據所具有的挑戰性，絕不遜于在17 世紀宣揚地球是繞著太陽運行的”。