Race-Based Rom Com Ideas

Like most Americans, I like to write movies in my head. It’s too central a part of my development to not be doing this all the time. While some of these cultural touchstones now belong to the internet, my everyday conversational foundation is still television and movie based. If you don’t like that idea, one of my favorite movie references is, “you know that scene in Jurassic Park where they throw the stick at the electric fence and it just falls to the ground? That’s about how well the idea was received.”1

Feel free to be the stick.

I have another more unique set of references. I come from an oddly racially diverse family. My wife is a gypsy, my kid brother and sister are Micronesian, my nephews are Quinault Indians, one cousin is an handsome Italian dentist, and through sheer statistics I somehow have an identical Mexican firefighter cousin.2 The weird “terrified hostage filming a video while their captor points a gun at them off-screen when talking about other races” vibe a lot of caucasian people get when talking about other ethnic groups just doesn’t naturally happen to me. I’m sure I felt that way at some point, but I have close to ten billion cousins, so for me these racial tensions quickly devolve into something like familial bickering.

Being able to have fun with different racial and cultural backgrounds is vital for a healthy society. We have to continuously figure each other out. All that talking and hollering is how we keep the American ethnogenic miracle alive so that we can keep being one people.3 I wasn’t really a fan of that part of the “woke stuff” from a few years ago and it struck me as similar to when people give their kids a peanut allergy by keeping them away from peanuts. Not in the sense that people can’t be massively rude on the topic of race or that people can’t be allergic to peanuts, which of course they can, but in the sense you need a better plan for a bunch of people of different backgrounds to get along than “well, they just should get along because I am a wonderful decent person who can do it no problem, and everyone else should be a wonderful decent person like me.” Getting along with other people at scale is always messy.

We’re living through