Happy family photo of Heidi Klum, with her son Henry, and husband Seal with daughter Leni.
Former Victoria's Secret model Heidi Klum's family unit is famously colorful: her daughter, Helene "Leni" Klum, was a product of an affair with the notorious Italian Flavio Briatore, currently the managing director of the Renault F1 Team; her husband, Seal, is a Brit with African roots, and with whom she has two sons: Henry and Johan. Klum herself is a native of Germany.
Klum and Co. is representative of the rising trend of intermarriages between individuals of different races, which is symptomatic of globalization. Within the last hundred years or so, a flurry of movement of groups of people across the globe for various reasons, voluntarily or not, let to a certain amalgamation of different races. For example, the African slave trade, which led to the displacement of millions across the globe, brought many North Africans to U.S. etc. The mixing of races, while bringing forth much vitriol in the form of racism and prejudice, also brought along happiness, in the form of unions, matrimonial or otherwise.
The products of the abovementioned matrimonial unions, like Klum’s offspring, were and always will be oddities. Being a melting pot where two or more cultures meet and fuse, the offspring of such unions are an epitome of globalization: the haphazard putting together of cultures, races etcetera would form exciting and novel possibilities, as we see in the world today, such as in New Orleans, U.S., where Jazz was born from the fusion of African and European musical influences.
Indeed, such unions fructifying in such possibilities can be expected to increase in frequency as time progresses, due to the ever increasing mobility of the world population made possible by technology. Heidi Klum herself was transplanted from Germany to U.S, and Seal was transplanted from U.K. to U.S. If anything, the world should expect a lot more offspring of mixed origins.
Which of course brings a very interesting question to mind: what if the whole population of the world mated with someone else across the globe, and brought forth offspring so genetically and culturally mixed that the formation of a homogenized race and culture is born? Would globalization result in a generic race of people?
An utterly homogenized race of people would effectively wipe out racism, for one. Everyone would be truly equal in a sense that there would be no more ethnocentrism, no more delusions of supremacy based on race, ethnicity or culture, since everyone is effectively identical in that aspect. Furthermore, the mixture of the variety of cultures present in the world today would give rise to even more fresh, unusual and exciting possibilities in the “global culture”. And of course, everyone would like to see how the offspring of such a social engineering project turn out.
It sounds too good to be true, really. Of course, even if racism is effectively wiped out, there would always be other aspects for bigots to pick on, i.e. age, gender etc. In addition, the ideal of a generic race and culture of people would mean that individualism would be compromised, and, in our current culture of individualistic expression, it may very well mean that this ideal would never be realized.
Oh, shucks.
By Ee Lyn,
Cultural Expert
Labels: Globalisation and Culture
