New Book Claims that ‘Interracial People are Healthier and More Attractive.’

Alon Ziv


Breeding Between The Lines: Why Interracial People are Healthier and More Attractive, a new book by author Alon Ziv has been making the rounds. While Ziv claims that his message, which is loosely based on actual research, is 100% serious, I’m not buying, and neither is most of the public.

Ziv, who predicts that America is “on the cusp of a mixed-race explosion” claims that he isn’t promoting a warped form of Eugenics, but the problem is, he kind of is.

What he fails to acknowledge or realize is that constructs of race, whether social or biological, still center whiteness. Ziv points to Hawaii, which has a significant white/asian population as an example. His book’s cover uses a child of African descent with blonde highlights to represent mixedness. And when asked to clarify his definition of race, once again he uses whiteness and opposes it to blackness to explain himself:

Good question. In population genetics there are two schools of thought: Lumpers, who lump people together into a small number (5 – 6) of “races” and Splitters, who divide humanity into a larger number (30+) of “populations”. I don’t really take a stand on this issue. I see race as something of a continuum. Two Swedish people will be more genetically similar on average than a Swede and an Italian (even though they would all be classified as “white”). The Swede would be even more different from someone of African descent. When we bring those different genetic profiles together in interracial people, there are a lot of physical benefits.

His entire analysis centers whiteness, leaving individuals of mixed race who are say, Japanese and Iranian or African-American and Mexican out in the dark.