4 ms·
Not that it really matters, but is it only me or she is not actually "black" but most likely of mixed race (almost certainly mostly white, given her skin tone)?
by brabel 6y ago
Not that it really matters, but is it only me or she is not actually "black" but most likely of mixed race (almost certainly mostly white, given her skin tone)? I mean, people seem to quite literally only see races in black/white, where any hint of non-white blood makes you black, as if white were the only pure race... they consider people "black" whenever they are very slightly tanned or have curly hair? It's interesting to me how when you have a white parent and a black parent, you're going to be called "black" (even though having half white and half black genes, you might be equally called white) as if that were a problem you have.
- HelloMcFly 6y agoThis question is a bit of a hornet's nest that is probably best handled with some outside reading. It's a complicated question. Here's a place to start that gives a bit more context: https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/how-are-black-white-biracial-people-are-perceived-in-terms-of-race https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/how-are-bla... I think the "one-drop rule" has cast a long, long legacy on racial identification.
- wojcikstefan 6y agoAre you familiar with the US history of racial classification and e.g. the "one-drop rule"? [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule
- brabel 6y agoNo, I was not... and I wish you didn't tell me!! That's so incredibly racist. So apparently this woman is black in the USA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashida_Jones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashida_Jones People still use this one-drop rule, like, in the 21st century?? What the hell?!
- webmaven 6y ago> Not that it really matters, but is it only me or she is not actually "black" but most likely of mixed race (almost certainly mostly white, given her skin tone)? I'm sure it isn't "just you", but this is wrong. Gebru was born in Ethiopia to parents from Eritrea, a West African nation whose inhabitants are often much lighter skinned than the "African" stereotype.
- brabel 6y agoWell, the reason they are lighter no doubt is due to mixing with nearby Arabs, who are predominantly white, throughout history, no? Just because you're African it doesn't mean you're black (See South Africa and Tunisia for example)... Wikipedia seems to confirm that: "approximately 40% of their autosomal ancestry to be derived from an ancient non-African back-migration from the near East, and about 60% to be of local native African origin "... Not to mention there's no single black race... Africa has more genetic diversity than the rest of the world combined... Calling them all simply "black" is even worse than calling everyone else (Europeans, Native Americans, Asians, Australians, Polynesians) by a single term (brown/white/yellow people, oh man, that' terrible)... just doesn't make any sense.
- krapp 6y agoOf course race makes no sense if you look at it genetically. Race has no real basis in genetics, it's a sociopolitical construct that loosely correlates to superficial traits like skin color and eye shape.
- webmaven 6y agoAre you arguing that stating Gebru is Black is a miscategorization, or are you arguing that the category doesn't make sense?
- brabel 6y agoI think that in the future, categorising people by their made up race will be as absurd as categorising people by their eye colour or hair colour (see how skin colour falls into the same kind of trait?). Imagine a group of people who discriminate all red headed people. Makes as much sense as discriminating all people of a certain skin colour. To answer your question: in this hypothetical world where red heads have a hard time: imagine someone being fired for fighting for the rights of redheads while actually looking blonde with a tiny amount of red in their hair colour! That's the situation we seem to be in.
- 6y ago