I will grant that by some historic definitions you could consider many people mixed race as neighboring cultures combine. But there are still very large and distinctly separate ethnic groups like black, white, asian, etc.
(I am not mixed race by my wife and son are)
Here in Belgium my grandma was first to go work 2 municipalities away. Her parents were farmers. She cried when she came back and swore she would not go back the next day. Such a distant place was traveling to the end of the world to her i guess. Later they traveled to the south of france by bus and such but they never went beyond a neighbouring country. Still it's a thing her parents could only have dreamed of.
I think people have a bias by which they forget the massive technological advancements of recent years on one hand. And see the stories of travelers of the distant past on the norm on the other hand rather than things written about because they were so rare and interesting.
Most people stayed put untill you could pinpoint their location based on their genome and it influenced who you can get donor organs from. They repeatedly developed local cultures, languages and dialects in doing so.
>But there are still very large and distinctly separate ethnic groups like black, white, asian, etc.
Those are not ethnic groups. The Flemish, the Vilamovians, the Germans, the Basques, the irish are examples of ethnic groups.
Idk if it's intentional but there seems to be this progressive shift/push that pushed nation to mean state and now makes it so some start using ethnicity instead of racial categorisation (which is a vague often even more arbitrary thing)
By appearance admixture is the one that defines looks and that includes racial look and it is question of mere 3 generations for descendants to look like anyone else around them, as that is where admixture differences are washed out. USA has a lot of issues in this matter, like with "one blood drop rule" that is still used in definitions of races and also cultural war issue, which is affecting rest of the world in these matters not to mention taboo subject of races.
It feels like it for you because you are used to man-made definitions of "race". US is for some historical reason a very race-aware culture.
Skin color for example is mostly related to exposure to the sun. When you go south in Northern hemisphere people become darker. But you call them "black" or "brown" for some reason. Or Africa is a giant continent. You call all the different people on it "black". They are just darker because they've adapted to the sun through generations.
US historically has people that have migrated from different continents. I live in a country (Turkey) where everyone is historically "mixed". There are blonde people, dark people, people with small eyes and large eyes. But they are all the same group of people. We're practically blind to superficial differences you call "race" or even ethnicity.
Also "mixed" doesn't mean the average color between black and white. They can have a dominant phenotype.
[0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Principal_component_...
Not even. No 'races' as commonly understood are defined based on a snapshot of genetic clusters. The concept predates modern genetics or knowledge of DNA. Races are complex social constructions based on appearance, language, ethnicity, etc. etc.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/35749414-who-we-are-a...
What makes a "race" is basically just total nonsense. Arguably there should be many "races" in Africa given the genetic diversity.
> We all are the same species, but we also all are mixed races.
We're also all mixed-species.
The fact is - you are being racist here, because you seem them as looking the same...
>>>We're also all mixed-species.
No, Not by modern definition of what species are. Even those swamp frogs, that are mixing with pond frogs(or maybe vice versa - look just read about species yourself - I am not explaining to you what species are!) are different species, that just steal DNA, so no inter-species mixing.
Listen, I am definitely more bored than anyone else, but sadly theory about Atlantis civilization and their descendants mixing with people, or even Biblical races of giants, or even proposal of common boar-chimpanzee sexual intercourse from which humans evolved is just not true... I'm kinda disappointed and not about that it is illegal to have sex with other species - including animals, but that it is more boring in that we are nothing else than just one species. We are not mixed-species - nothing backs that. There also are issues with inter-species development possibilities, so impossible to get results naturally without some gene editing first. So, no kawaii girls with natural cat ears - they all are fake.
Isn't this exactly what you'd expect? Historically travel between the more obvious-by-skin-color-and-features ethnically-different groups has been slow and hard with some exceptions.
So you'd expect to see the lines get erased first among groups that started out closest together, and that seems to match with Europe some and especially the US where the English/Irish/Italian/German/Spanish/etc flavors of "white" all frequently ended up in the same cities. You also see more broader mixes in the US since it's historically been more open for, and attractive to, the sort of immigration that would produce it than the "home" countries for many of those ethnicities.
Even when you have a diverse total population like in the US, you only get a few shots per generation for a person of background A to have kids with one of background B, so it's gonna be really really slow, even before factoring in cultural/political factors that have generally actively discouraged it (or made it illegal in living memory!). Even the mixing of white-European ethnicities was often quite controversial. But as it became more common most Americans lost the ability to even recognize the differences, since they were more subtle than "skin color."
Give it 400 years of affordable air travel and it could look very different in countries with historical or future high levels of in-migration.
[1] https://ewanbirney.com/2019/10/race-genetics-and-pseudoscien...