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In the Future, Humans Will Be One Race: Difference between revisions
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A subtrope of [[All Genes Are Codominant]].
{{examples}}
== [[Comic Books]] ==
* In ''[[The Savage Dragon]]'', Kid Avenger comes from a future where everyone is [[Ambiguously Brown]].
== Film ==
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== Literature ==
* ''[[The Clone Republic]]''. Most people are of mixed ethnicity, though most of the main characters don't follow this trope. For example, Freeman is described as "[[Starbucks Skin Scale|coffee without a hint of cream]]." Also, Japan's
* In the ''[[Polity Series]]'', the protagonist, super-spy Ian Cormac, is described as having the golden-brown skin tone which dominates in the Polity. The Polity isn't quite a [[Utopia]] though, more like [[The Federation]] as a benevolent dictatorship. Even then the other characters in the series come in a rather wide variety of colors.
* Possibly intended with dark-skinned ambassador Genly Ai in ''The Left Hand of Darkness''. Possibly, in that while [[Ursula K. Le Guin]] later placed the novel within a universe where humanoid aliens colonized a number of planets including Earth, it fits the general idea of "future with [[The Federation]] and many dark-skinned people".
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** Implied to be the case in ''The Dispossessed'' by a Terran ambassador, if this troper remembers correctly.
* In one time travel story by ''[[Philip K. Dick]]'', the future was populated entirely by brown people. Part of this is due to the fact that they reproduce through a soft form of cloning, part of it is due to inferior members of families being pressured to kill themselves, and part of this is due to race wars.
* In Ira Levin's ''This Perfect Day'', the "Family" is genetically engineered for
* The 70s B-Grade sci-fi series, ''[[Space Ways]]'', which is set in the far future, has almost all humans with tan to dark skin and brown eyes where natural features like red hair or blonde and blue eyes only exist as rare genetic throwbacks.
* In ''[[The Forever War]]'', the hero leaves Earth to fight in an interstellar war using a starship drive that causes time dilation. When he returns to Earth its thousands of years after he left, and everyone on Earth is a nice even tan, with dark hair and eyes. Oh, and [[Het Is Ew|they're all gay]].
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** Though it's not mentioned in detail, it seems to mostly be the case in Luna City, where the main character lives. Hong Kong Luna, for instance, is noted for its ethnic Chinese community, among others.
* ''[[The Dragonriders of Pern]]''. It's never flat-out said in the series, but [[Its All There in the Manual|supplemental material]] notes that the humans living on Pern are more or less homogenous. Pernese are all somewhat tan in color, and the men have very little facial hair. Apparently, some extremes exist in eye and hair color. F'Lar is mentioned to have amber-colored eyes, while Lessa's are grey (which is something of a family trait in Ruatha Hold), and Kylara has blonde hair, to name three examples. This wasn't the case before they landed on Pern, though it seems that just about every major racial grouping was part of the Pern Expedition, and though there wasn't any kind of racism, people still tended to marry within their own nationality (Sallah Telgar and Tarvi Andiyar being a notable exception). Presumably that practice ended under the threat of Thread.
* Averted in ''[[Honor Harrington]]''.
** The royal family of Manticore is notably dark skinned. As they don't practice endogamy and in fact are required by law to marry commoners it is not explained how they preserve their complexion (which is apparently fairly rare on Manticore, otherwise it would not be associated with royalty). Of course they could marry foreigners to preserve the genetic trace but no mention of that is made. In fact no mention at all is made of any attempt to artificially preserve such genetic traits which would be inexplicable otherwise.
** Sphinxians tend to have a disproportionate number of humans bred for heavy gravity. Much of their lineage does in fact come from genetic manipulation (including that of the title character). As Sphinx has notably heavy gravity, those that can't stand it leave or die off or just stay and suffer.
** Graysons, who developed on an isolated planet have a disproportionate number of females. This has resulted in traditions of patriarchy (which range from the more or less benign to the tyrannical the latter being predominate in the Masadan sect), and polygamy that look somewhat odd to outsiders.
* In ''[[Podkayne of Mars]]'' by [[Robert A. Heinlein]], this trope is both averted, in that there are very obvious racial differences between individuals (Uncle Tom, for instance, is Maori where Poddy appears very Scandinavian), and expressed as an obvious future, at least for Mars (racists among the ship's passengers make unpleasant comments about the mixing of races on Mars, and Poddy describes herself as "colonial mongrel in ancestry").
== Live Action TV ==
* It's not quite this trope, but Jessica Alba was chosen to represent a "perfect human" in ''[[Dark Angel]]'' because [[Word of God|James Cameron]] commented that he was tired of the representation of an ideal human as one with "Aryan" features and that there would likely be evolutionary benefits in someone who was a mixture of ancestries.
* In ''[[Firefly (TV series)|Firefly]]'', two main characters are white siblings with the Chinese-sounding last name Tam. Since Firefly takes place in a future that is heavily influenced by Chinese culture, it is implied that they are part Chinese.
== Tabletop Games ==
* Averted in ''[[Traveller]]'' though cultural groupings are different. Most present cultures seem to have assimilated though some are [[Space Amish|artificially preserved]] but they are recombined into new cultures. Adding to that mix are tons of races of [[Transplanted Humans]].▼
* In the ''[[BattleTech]]'' games, the major nations are highly multiracial and multicultural. In an [[Expanded Universe]] novel, a [[Green Eyed Red Head]] uses the alias "Rabbi Martinez" without arousing suspicion.▼
== [[Video Games]] ==▼
▲* Averted in [[Traveller]] though cultural groupings are different. Most present cultures seem to have assimilated though some are [[Space Amish|artificially preserved]] but they are recombined into new cultures. Adding to that mix are tons of races of [[Transplanted Humans]].
* The protagonist of ''[[Beyond Good & Evil (video game)|Beyond Good and Evil]]'', Jade, is infamously racially [[Ambiguously Brown|ambiguous]], but she's far from the only one on her futuristic planet. Quite a number of human characters are tan-skinned and dark haired in an undefinable manner (and one bald guy who looks like he might be part black and part Asian). Even her AI companion is a weird Spanish/Italian/French mush, and he's a computer program. And then there's [[Amazing Technicolor Population|Yoa]]. Going against the usual nature of this trope, though, humanity hasn't become a species of [[Ditto Aliens]]; skin tones and hair colors of all sorts can be found on Hylia. And loads of [[Petting Zoo People]] with [[Canis Latinicus]] species names. It's just that nobody maps to any contemporary race. It also doesn't help that there's the added filter of cartoon exaggeration and stylization on top of everything else.▼
▲* In the [[BattleTech]] games, the major nations are highly multiracial and multicultural. In an [[Expanded Universe]] novel, a [[Green Eyed Red Head]] uses the alias "Rabbi Martinez" without arousing suspicion.
* Played mostly straight in ''[[Mass Effect]]'' in that it is confirmed that
** In ''[[Mass Effect|Mass Effect 2]]'', {{spoiler|the lack of genetic homogenisation in humans is one of the reasons why the Reapers have targeted humanity as the first (or perhaps only) Reaper to be built out of the current galactic races.}}▼
** Though you frequently meet humans of widely varying skin tones (contrast Miranda's pale complexion with Jacob's dark skin, for instance). This shows up even in random extras and NPCs with five lines or so, such as Fist and Dr. Michel.▼
*** Human characters also frequently speak with various accents and the Codex says instantaneous machine translation is available, so human beings have united ''politically'' without surrendering their own cultural identity, language, and certainly not without becoming a race of [[Ditto Aliens]]. Likewise, the codex states outright that Turians, Asari, and Salarians at least all identify with their colony, world, clan, and religion even while still falling giving their allegiance to their species and the Citadel Council. Apparently they are able to spot visual differences and Turians even paint their faces to show their allegiances. More than once an alien comments that "all humans look the same to me," suggesting they cannot spot our racial differences easily.▼
** Notably, the only racism within a species is the Asari disdain for "purebloods" of their own species. Human racists are "speciests" in the game and only dislike aliens. "Human first" characters are generally shown to be sympathetic but in the wrong, as seen in Navigator Pressly's changing attitude in his journals from [[Mass Effect 2]] and how rebuking Terra Firma, Ashley Williams, and Pressly for these attitudes is a Paragon act. Human sexism, however, is still present, but every person who displays it is a complete scumbag or [[Complete Monster]]. Most species heavily stereotype other species, however. Humanity's hat is ambition and how they cannot be stereotyped easily, as pointed out by Moridin, Liara, and others.▼
* ''[[Real Life Comics]]'' referenced this trope, as main character Tony claims that this is his race.▼
== Web Original ==
* In ''[[Orion's Arm]]'' it is stated that modern-day races only exist on certain baseline reservations, and most are genetic recreations. Of course, humanity isn't even one ''species'' anymore.▼
* This premise was behind a favourite [http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/blondes.asp dire prediction of futurists]
* ''[[Cracked.com]]''
** In
** #1 of columnist Pauli Poisuo's [http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-creepy-directions-human-evolution-can-take/ 5 Creepy Directions Human Evolution Can Take] is "We'll All Become The Same Race", where a global melting pot produces [[Ambiguously Brown]] people resembling "the mixed-race people of Brazil."
== Western Animation ==▼
* The future people, or "Goobacks", from ''[[South Park]]'' (seen above) are an example of this trope. Played with, though, because the episode involves them going back in time to the present, where they're considered a ''different'' race from all the modern people.▼
== Real Life ==
* Inverted in [[Real Life]], allegedly, as with nearly all geneticists think that the human population was as small as less than 10,000 just 70 - 80,000 years ago, and all our modern races actually evolved since then. It has also been demonstrated that it took only about 2,000 years for the racial traits as we know them to develop - the only reason why no such major cosmetic changes have followed is that there are no new environments to favour different body-types.
** It's because of this factor that many anthropologists suggest there is no such thing as race, citing the official literal use of the term as one of anthropology's biggest blunders. There have been efforts to correct it; many people in the US particularly may have noticed that in recent years, areas of official forms that previously asked for "race" now ask for "ethnicity."
* [http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/91/will-all-humans-one-day-be-the-same-color The Straight Dope]'s take on the plausibility of the trope.
* Because skin color is controlled by a number of loci, with several alleles each, this isn't realistic. People who are both "brown" can have a huge range of variation in their children. The quirks of independent assortment can give the children anything from very dark to very light skin tones.
** Over a long enough time scale, it would happen. Even without selective pressure, genetic drift tends to cause fixation (one allele becoming vastly more common than the others). If the "light" alleles for some of the genes that influence skin color becomes fixed, and a "dark" alleles for some of the others, then you would get a population with a consistently heritable intermediate skin tone. It's also possible that all the dark alleles will fixate, or all the light ones, but an intermediate mixture _is_ much more likely.
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* Cynicism suggests that if humans are ever one race they will just find other things to hate each other about. So it may not really matter.
** But this trope is already coming into effect with [[Melting Pot Nomenclature]]. People came to hate and fear other races because of generations of slow/low/no communication between continents. With the mass communication and diplomacies we have today, any racism found today is more of a "tradition" than anything else.
* The specific post-racial set of features that humanity is predicted to
* The Euro/East Asian combination mentioned in the introduction is already happening in Sydney and Melbourne. The first big generation of "half asian" children is in primary school at the moment; their progeny will be "part asian" or "part white", etc, and this is ignoring such issues as Fillipinos ''already'' having a lot of European genes. The reasons for whites and asians interbreeding to the exclusion of every other ethnicity is not publicly debated.
** To be fair, those are the two largest "racial" groupings in each city, and with the exception of the small minority of indigenous Australians, also the two groups that have lived there the longest. Although there is a growing Afrian minority, emigration from Africa was rare until the last decade or so. Give it another generation or two, and who knows?
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* This trope is starting to happen in Latin American countries which have historically been very racially diverse. For example, round about 90% of Mexican people are directly or indirectly mixed-race.
** Yet their skin tones range from extremely light-skinned blondes, especially near Chihuahua, to the stereotypical "dark" Latin American. For all this mixing, diversity is still quite high as can be seen in any large city like Mexico, Guadalajara, and Monterrey.
▲== [[Video Games]] ==
▲* The protagonist of ''[[Beyond Good & Evil (video game)|Beyond Good and Evil]]'', Jade, is infamously racially [[Ambiguously Brown|ambiguous]], but she's far from the only one on her futuristic planet. Quite a number of human characters are tan-skinned and dark haired in an undefinable manner (and one bald guy who looks like he might be part black and part Asian). Even her AI companion is a weird Spanish/Italian/French mush, and he's a computer program. And then there's [[Amazing Technicolor Population|Yoa]]. Going against the usual nature of this trope, though, humanity hasn't become a species of [[Ditto Aliens]]; skin tones and hair colors of all sorts can be found on Hylia. And loads of [[Petting Zoo People]] with [[Canis Latinicus]] species names. It's just that nobody maps to any contemporary race. It also doesn't help that there's the added filter of cartoon exaggeration and stylization on top of everything else.
▲* Played mostly straight in [[Mass Effect]] in that it is confirmed that humanity -- at least in North America -- is certainly heading this way, with most human characters you'd define as "white" actually having light brown skin tones, noticeably. This is apparently similar to how years of living as a galactic-scale society has done this to the individual ethnicities of all the other species, and humanity is slowly starting to homogenise as well. May be lampshading how aliens often seem to lack ethnicity in the sort of genre Mass Effect is in.
▲** In ''[[Mass Effect|Mass Effect 2]]'', {{spoiler|the lack of genetic homogenisation in humans is one of the reasons why the Reapers have targeted humanity as the first (or perhaps only) Reaper to be built out of the current galactic races.}}
▲** Though you frequently meet humans of widely varying skin tones (contrast Miranda's pale complexion with Jacob's dark skin, for instance). This shows up even in random extras and NPCs with five lines or so, such as Fist and Dr. Michel.
▲*** Human characters also frequently speak with various accents and the Codex says instantaneous machine translation is available, so human beings have united ''politically'' without surrendering their own cultural identity, language, and certainly not without becoming a race of [[Ditto Aliens]]. Likewise, the codex states outright that Turians, Asari, and Salarians at least all identify with their colony, world, clan, and religion even while still falling giving their allegiance to their species and the Citadel Council. Apparently they are able to spot visual differences and Turians even paint their faces to show their allegiances. More than once an alien comments that "all humans look the same to me," suggesting they cannot spot our racial differences easily.
▲** Notably, the only racism within a species is the Asari disdain for "purebloods" of their own species. Human racists are "speciests" in the game and only dislike aliens. "Human first" characters are generally shown to be sympathetic but in the wrong, as seen in Navigator Pressly's changing attitude in his journals from [[Mass Effect 2]] and how rebuking Terra Firma, Ashley Williams, and Pressly for these attitudes is a Paragon act. Human sexism, however, is still present, but every person who displays it is a complete scumbag or [[Complete Monster]]. Most species heavily stereotype other species, however. Humanity's hat is ambition and how they cannot be stereotyped easily, as pointed out by Moridin, Liara, and others.
▲* ''[[Real Life Comics]]'' referenced this trope, as main character Tony claims that this is his race.
▲== Web Original ==
▲* In [[Orion's Arm]] it is stated that modern-day races only exist on certain baseline reservations, and most are genetic recreations. Of course, humanity isn't even one ''species'' anymore.
▲* This premise was behind a favourite [http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/blondes.asp dire prediction of futurists] -- not nuclear war or mass starvation, but that there would be no blondes in the future! Imagine mankind deprived of Marilyn Monroes! The Horror!
▲* In ''[[Cracked.com]]'''s [http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-reasons-you-should-be-in-mixed-race-relationship_p2/ 5 Reasons You Should Be in a Mixed-Race Relationship], Christina H proposes worldwide miscegenation to promote cultural understanding and calls it "The Only Thing That Will Literally Get Rid of Race".
▲== Western Animation ==
▲* The future people, or "Goobacks", from ''[[South Park]]'' (seen above) are an example of this trope. Played with, though, because the episode involves them going back in time to the present, where they're considered a ''different'' race from all the modern people.
{{reflist}}
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