Muhammad Ali on Interracial Marriage

Interviewer – That’s because, that’s societies fault, we got to educate people about it.

M.A. – Life is too short for me to be catching hell for something like that, I’d rather be with my own, and have a beautiful daughter, beautiful wife, both look like me and we are all happy and I don’t have no trouble.  I ain’t that in love with no women to go through all that hell, there’s no one woman that good.  You understand?

Interviewer – I understand, I  do understand, I think it’s sad ….

M.A. – (Interrupting) It ain’t sad because I want my child to look like me, every intelligent person wants their child to look like them, I’m sad because I want to blot out my race and lose my identity?  Chinese love Chinese  they love the little slanty eye, pretty brown skin babies.  Pakistani love their culture, Jewish people love their culture, a lot of catholic wanna be with Catholics and want the religion to stay the same… who would want to spot up yourself and kill your race?  You’re a hater of your people if you don’t want to stay who you are.  You ashamed of what god made you?  You think he made a mistake when he made you?

Interviewer – I think that’s a philosophy of despair, I really do

M.A. – Philosophy of despair?  Here let me tell you, listen.  No woman on this earth, not even a black woman in Muslim countries can please me and cook for me and socialize with me like my American black woman, no woman, and last is a white woman… can really identify with me and my feelings, and the way I act, and the way I talk…. it’s just nature, you can do what you want, but it’s nature to want to be with your own, I want to be with my own.

Incidentally, at the time when this interview was carried out (1971), about 75% of Americans would have agreed with him, including 40% of US Blacks.

Comments

  1. German_reader says

    Do you have an opinion on that as well or did you merely post that clip out of antiquarian interest?

  2. Anonymous says

    Incidentally, at the time when this interview was carried out (1971), about 75% of Americans would have agreed with him

    How do JayMan and hbdchick square data like this when they’re constantly arguing that everything is genetic and that “NW Europeans” are genetically inclined to support things like interracial marriage?

  3. Anonymous says

    It’s funny. My initial reaction was, “good for him, I agree”. Then I quickly realized, oh yeah, I’m a white man married to an Asian woman. I guess that “interracial” includes me?! And it’s not one of those things where I am not aware of her being Asian. It’s what attracts me to her. I am ONLY attracted to Asian women. I’m so glad it’s 2016 and I live in the U.S.

  4. landlubber says

    You are both right. What’s bad is forced integration or segregation. There are activists in gov’t and media who have done everything possible to demonize views such as Ali’s. On the other hand, there are commenters on this website who would demonize you for not having saved the white race by pumping out 3 kids with some tattooed, 2-packs-a-day heifer who is of same race.

  5. Maybe people can just marry who they like and not have to give an account to anyone else? No good?

  6. “Maybe people can just marry who they like and not have to give an account to anyone else? No good?”

    I think that interview may be thought of as M.Ali’s concern for preservation of genetic variability of human ethnicity and prevent the nations/world from turning into a homogenized generic homo sapiens. Somewhat akin to the project of preserving native germplasm.

    See http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK235638/

  7. What they claim, in their titles, that those charts represent is different from the questions actually posed by their interviewers. One might well approve of marriages between Whites and so-called Asians, or between non-Hispanic Whites and Hispanics (who may be of any race), yet disapprove of marriages between Whites and Blacks, or even between Blacks and any non-Blacks. Simply assuming that an interviewee draws no such distinctions is an implausible leap of faith.

  8. Erik Sieven says

    this is obviously the best solution. Yet the problem remains that different races have different levels of male / female attractivity, thus interracial marriage is not symmetrical. That means freedom of marriage combined with no borders might lead to some people disappearing in the long term and shortage for potential spouses of males / females of specific groups in the short terms. The question is whether such a development should be avoided.
    In the end I think individual freedom is more important than that, so interracial marriage should be free.
    Another question is whether institutional contains should be adapted. For example there is good reason to believe that without the welfare state, pseudo-occupation for woman in jobs payed by the state, etc. some forms of interracial marriage would be much less common. Also immigration policy could take the non-symmetrical interracial partner market into the account.

  9. Interracial marriage for the few who wanted it did no harm in the past. Unfortunately that’s no longer the world we live in.

  10. Traitor.

  11. Santoculto says

    I’m not against PONDERATION, so if some people desire to marry with people of other groups (and races) i don’t see any problem. The problem is when this attitude become viral and by weak understood reasons, i mean, weak understood of bonus and onus.

  12. anonymous says

    Clay was relatively light skinned and was often praised for his looks. His complexion was due to the contribution of his white great-grandfather. Without that he would have been darker and not as well regarded. He hammered Frazier for being dark and likened him to a gorilla. He was against race-mixing yet was the beneficiary of it and his best looking wife was also light skinned. Black videos always feature light skinned black women as the lookers. So they hypocritically are against it yet grab at the results. However, he’s basically right, African DNA offers nothing to white people whatsoever and should be avoided. The one-drop rule was a good Anglo innovation and the results contrast favorably with the mediocre results gotten by the Spaniards who didn’t have it.

  13. Obama is lighter than his wife, that is very unusual for a successful AA , but he could never have had a political career with a white wife, because black women would not have voted for him. White liberals might have also disproved I suspect. I have read Obama had far more white girlfriends than he admitted in his book. Ali may have seen the black is beautiful ethos was good for his marketability.

    However, Ali’s orientation was the subject of much rumour in the boxing community, and I have to wonder if his lack of attraction to white women (who are objectively the most sexually attractive) wasn’t at least partly a side effect of weak heterosexuality.

  14. [white women (who are objectively the most sexually attractive)]

    “Objectively” and “to the statistically average man” are not synonyms.

    Also, you must be one of very few people who believe that Barack Obama is more strongly attracted to women than Cassius Clay.

  15. Derbyshire Disease?

  16. Objectively” and “to the statistically average man” are not synonyms.

    That made me ask myself: do East Asian men prefer White women to their own? The way to check this is to go through the Forbes list of billionaires and see how many of the Asian guys there are married to White women. Above a certain income level all men become attractive to most women, so men’s betaness disappears as an issue and men’s preferences become the only thing determinig marriage outcomes. In other word, rich guys can have anyone they want. Whom do rich East Asian guys want? Without checking this, I would guess that they mostly want their own, unlike Blacks.

  17. And then there are just ordinary law abiding tax paying white folks who have two or three children with a spouse who doesn’t smoke, drink, has no tats and is not overweight.

  18. I agree 100% with Ali and think this British interviewer is a tool. Basically Ali is just saying that he prefers his own kind as most people do and is not into social engineering. The interviewer seems to confuse preference with prejudice and is perhaps afraid to admit his own biases, instead describing a healthy desire to like one’s own group as “a culture of despair”. Little wonder why the English youth of today have been so discarded by their labour party masters.

  19. Former Darfur says

    Until I became racially conscious, I had a distinct fascination with “Oriental”-primarily Japanese but occasionally Chinese and once or twice Korean-women. I liked their appearance, their smaller stature, their personalities, and especially the sex-being small of stature, I just felt more domineering, so to speak, and the Japanese girls all felt that I was impressively equipped. Or perhaps, they were saying that to build my ego and ardor.

    I never married or had offspring with any of them and had no intention of doing so. Probably, even then, had I wanted to get married, I would have shied away from marring a nonwhite.

    Today, while I have a high opinion of the Japanese people-perhaps especially because I have a high opinion of the Japanese people-I am sorry for what I did. I do not have relations with nonwhite women.

  20. Former Darfur says

    They marry their own kind, but if wealthy they will pursue outside sex with the Whitest women available for fun.

  21. Frankly the native people of Mesoamerica would of been better off if Europeans had never conquered them, I mean we don’t even have our own fucking language. Spanish is the language of Spaniards not our language. Mesoamerican people were not living in mud huts, their civilization was quite advance, specially considering the total isolation from advancements happening in the rest of the world. Furthermore not only did most Mesoamericans died, the totality of the elite died too or was incorporated into lower stratum of the conquerors. Also I will say that Spaniards didn’t conquer Mesoamerica because of their superiority, it was mostly a historical accident. Lets see how superior Europeans feel when China becomes the next superpower!

    “Pero ni el genio político de Cortés, ni la superioridad técnica —ausente en hechos de armas decisivos como la batalla de Otumba— , ni la defección de vasallos y aliados, hubieran logrado la ruina del Imperio azteca si éste no hubiese sentido de pronto un desfallecimiento, una duda íntima que lo hizo vacilar y ceder.”
    El Laberinto de la Soledad – Octavio Paz

    If your Spanish is as good as my French you will have no problem understanding the text above.

  22. landlubber says

    Well, it depends on where you set the bar for ordinary. My (of course limited) observation has been that in the classes below the upper middle class, Whites are more degenerate than Asians.

  23. Anonymous says

    I think our attraction to Asian women is wholly dissimilar. I’m a masculine white male who dated only white women, beautiful white women, until my late 20’s. My ideal woman was white with blond hair and blue eyes. I never thought of Asian women at all in considering a potential mate for me. And not just because of the stigma from family and society. I was never attracted to Asian women, especially relative to white women. That all changed in one night when I had a dream that I was walking through a garden and holding hands and kissing an Asian woman (Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese or Japanese– I can’t tell them apart). I woke up the next day obsessed with Asian women. They were, and still are, all goddesses to me. I found Asian features (mainly the eyes) extremely attractive. Since that day I have ONLY found Asian women attractive. And I like ’em all. Small, big, short, tall, skinny, chubby, et al. I can’t explain it.

  24. British leftists seem to be the smuggest and most insufferable for some reason. Ali is just making the case for basic freedom of association,

  25. Meh, the Old World would’ve eventually conquered the New, no point in bemoaning it.

  26. Anonymous says

    They just ignore it 😉

  27. Those were non sexual reasons Ali cited, and I suspect Obama has had more white but far fewer black women that Ali.

  28. Lots of people all over the world would have been better off if various things had not happened to them, but they did. Europe would have been better off if the Asian introduced black death – bubonic plague – had not wiped out half of its population, but it did. You should bear in mind that the Conquistadors could never have conquered Mexico if all those Indian tribes hadn’t supported them against their human sacrificing Aztecs overlords.

  29. Santoculto says

    It’s the accent, probably, 😉

  30. Anatoly Karlin says

    Unless a gamma ray burst had wiped the eastern hemisphere clean. Would make for an interesting alternative history.

  31. I think that when Europeans arrived here, agriculture was spreading up the east coast of North America. Agriculture in the high latitudes seems to select for big brains, self-control and lots of other stuff that’s necessary for complex civilization. Amerindians only just started on that northern-farming journey, and then it was ended for them.

    Mesoamerica can be thought of as Amerindians’ Fertile Crescent. After a few thousands of years of farming North America they could developed their equivalent of Greece and Rome, and then, later, maybe even their own British Empire, based in modern Canada. They might have needed another 5 thousand years of being left alone.

  32. Anonymous says

    Ali married light skinned black women, who seem to be the type that black men overall prefer the most. If you watch and follow black media and culture, this is the type that is most prominently and typically depicted as ideal. Genetically these types seem to be quadroons or mulattas, and they don’t look like pure black or white women. They’re lighter than and have different features from black women, but they’re also darker than white women and have differently shaped and proportioned physical features from white women, especially with respect to legs, hips, and buttocks, that generally don’t appeal to white men.

  33. Anonymous says

    As I recall there was a SF novel based on the premise that a large meteoroid composed of a freshly activated, and therefore very intensely radioactive but a short-lived isotope, struck the earth, and killed off or rendered cancer-ridden, sterile, and short lived the entire human population of Earth. Shorter-lifespan mammals survived and could breed their way back, but all of humanity was doomed except people in nuclear submarines, or who could stay a long time in underground nuke bunkers and suchlike.

    When the Navy discovered what was going on, they hurriedly rounded up a hundred or so young women from a upper crust girls’ school (only because it was next to the sub base-might have been Groton, CT) and put them on a missile submarine, together with a male skeleton crew to run the boat. These women, mated with surviving, non-irradiated men on other submarines-ours (the United States’) , Britain’s, France’s and the Soviets-were the nucleus of the rebirth of the human race.

    I read that book sometime circa 1975, and it was old then-I remember it was in a library binding, and must have been contemporaneous with Nevil Shute’s On The Beach -but sadly have forgotten the title or author. I remember one of the girls was named Ginger Baker, so I’m guessing this was well before the (male) drummer of that name was famous.

  34. Santoculto says

    ”Agriculture in the high latitudes seems to select for big brains, self-control and lots of other stuff that’s necessary for complex civilization. ”

    You’re talking about alpine european subrace, common in central Europe. A complex civilization need more than a one type of people of the same racial group ”to flourish”.

  35. Anonymous says

    Meh these Germanics and their Germanic mulattoes, we Latins will turn the planet into a big Mediterranean island.

  36. Hector_St_Clare says

    Speaking for myself, I’m attracted to a wide variety of races, but not my own (I’m mostly Indian). Nor to East Asian women, if it comes to that.

    People should have the freedom to date interracially, or not, as they choose, and shouldn’t be shamed for it either way. There is probably an optimal amount of interracial coupling, and it’s not 0% or 100% (I think some measure of cultural and ethnic mixing is good, but I also don’t want, e.g. distinct phenotypes to disappear). Maybe down the road gene editing will allow us to generate new genetic variety to somewhat counterbalance the homogenization due to increased migration, inter-ethnic mating, etc..

  37. If you’re not an 80 IQ dudebro type with a backwards baseball cap and a neck tattoo, that’s pretty much the only type of white woman you’ll be able to attract younger than 30.

  38. I was talking about latitude, not altitude. They are different things.

  39. unpc downunder says

    Black males are primarily attracted to mulatto females, as any rap video demonstrates. This is also why Turkic Afrophile Kim Kardashian is trying to turn herself into a bootylicious mullato women .Only about 30 percent of black men in the US are attracted to skinny-bottomed, white and oriental women. The percentage is higher in France and the UK since black guys in these countries have moved to Europe with an eye to scoring white women.

    About 20 percent of white women are attracted to black guys, but only about 5 percent actually prefer black guys over white guys.

  40. Ali was a master of trash talk, getting in to his opponent’s head, so I wonder if he’s playing games or trolling with that white TV host …is there a way for him to answer without sounding a pathetic cuck or a loathsome racist?

    I would have said that you cannot really tell your children who to love … nothing good could come out of that .. and leave it to that

  41. Erik Sieven says

    “perhaps especially because I have a high opinion of the Japanese people”
    thats a very important concept. Maybe more people should act like that.

  42. Erik Sieven says

    “About 20 percent of white women are attracted to black guys, but only about 5 percent actually prefer black guys over white guys.”
    Hard to say which are the real percentages. For sure I do not believe that the OkCupid data on interracial attraction show the right picture.
    My estimation would be that both general attraction and preferred attraction towards black men is higher among white women.

  43. Santoculto says

    Yes, but higher altitude tend to be climaticaly similar with higher latitude, cold, difficult to breathe, problem with higher direct exposure to the sunlight and yes, i read without attention.

    I know that latitude is different than altitude, don’t offend me, please!!

  44. Erik Sieven says

    and I think it is not only racial. Obviously East Asians have on average different personalities. But culture also matters. For example in my experience working class people from muslim countries tend to quite calm, family orientated people. White people of the same class on the other side often live a life of constant drama, escalation, party etc.

  45. Santoculto says