Is ethnicity something merely external to our real nature? Are we essentially creatures who have the capacity to choose our own identity and our own affiliations?

This is the liberal outlook. I believe that this view is mistaken and that ethnicity runs more deeply in our nature than liberals imagine.

I’d like to illustrate this with two small pieces of evidence I’ve come across in recent days. The first is a small item from the Melbourne Herald Sun (11/9/2000) which caught my eye when going through my files.

The Herald Sun article is a report on rates of marriage and divorce in Australia for 1999, as released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Predictably the divorce rate had risen yet again to 46%.

The really interesting information, though, was briefly mentioned in the final paragraph which stated,

“Mixed marriages, where partners were born in different countries, had nearly double the divorce rate of couples who were born in the same country.”

Nearly double the rate! Given how high the general rate of divorce is, imagine how high the divorce rate is for people not sharing the same ethnicity. No absolute figure is given, but it must be a very large majority.

Doesn’t this suggest that ethnicity plays a significant role in human relationships?

I came across the second piece of evidence in my wife’s Who magazine (Aug 1, 2005). A film has been made about Vietnamese babies who were airlifted to Australia and America at the end of the Vietnam War.

The article mentions the concerns of authorities back in 1975 about the babies being removed from their own ethnic culture. According to the film’s director, Dai Le, herself one of these babies, “Australian social workers were questioning whether it was right to uproot a child from its culture.”

The other side in the conflict was equally concerned: General Mai Chi Tho noted that “By taking them away they’ve lost their cultural roots.”

Was this unease justified? The answer appears to be yes. Although Dai Le herself is happy with the outcome, she admits that “Some of these orphans feel like they have fallen from the sky, having no history, no identity.”

Fallen from the sky. As if you came from nowhere and had no roots within a tradition.

There is something within our nature which feels this free-floating state to be a loss rather than a liberation of our true selves.