Host: Are interracial and intercultural relationships getting easier or more challenging today?
Gloria MacDonald: It is getting easier today for people who are involved in interracial or intercultural relationships because we are living more and more in a global world and people are more accepting. Frankly, we are just seeing more multiculturalism in our societies, so we are getting more used to seeing people of different races, different ethnicities, different cultures, different languages on a day to day basis and the more we are getting used to that, the more it makes having relationships that are intercultural, interracial be more acceptable.
Having said that there still are prejudices and it's really unfortunate, but there are still are those and they are going to always to a certain extent, depend upon where political hotbeds are. So for example, say 75 years ago or 50 years ago if you had a couple where one was from Northern Ireland and one was from Southern Ireland that would have been a huge conflict.
Today, fortunately, that whole political hotbed has really quieted down and it wouldn't be anywhere near as big a deal today, but a long time ago it would have been a big deal. So today, we are dealing with challenges perhaps in the Middle East say, if we are looking at the United States and the Middle East so a relationship between someone from the States and from the Middle East might be a huge challenge today. 200 years ago, that political challenge didn't exist so it wouldn't have been as big a deal, so it really depends upon where we are at politically in society, where the biggest points of tension and the hotbeds are going to be.
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