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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   27882 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

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The category "African-American" is neither limited to American Descendants of Slavery nor does it include Elon Musk. The Census definition is "A person having origins in any of the Black [sic] racial groups of Africa."

So it's pretty clear that neither Mamdani nor Musk is "African-American", but Obama (regardless of whether there's really a slave in the family on the white side) is.

IMO the census definition should be made more specific to include ADOS and ADOS alone, but "Obama, not Mamdani or Musk" is close enough.

The category "African-American" is neither limited to American Descendants of Slavery nor does it include Elon Musk. The Census definition is "A person having origins in any of the Black [sic] racial groups of Africa."

Not only is this silly in that it declares government to be the final arbiter and definer of race, it doesn't even work out well when governments themselves disagree on these types of definitions.

Check out the status of groups like the Brazilian or Portuguese Americans for instance.

For the Portuguese, whether or not they are officially Hispanic depends in part on the state they live in.

Some states, such as Florida, categorize Portuguese Americans as Hispanic, while others, such as California, do not. In a few places, including Massachusetts, laws and regulations treat them as a disadvantaged group for at least some purposes.

Is ethnicity really a concept that is state defined? Does a person's ethnicity really change if they move from California to Florida?

Brazilians are even more confusing, they aren't officially considered Hispanic or Latino either, and yet it seems more than two-thirds of them define their identity that way

This is more people than some traditional Hispanic groups!

In fact, enough Brazilians identified as Latino in 2020 that they would fall in the middle of rankings of U.S. Hispanic or Latino origin groups by size, if they were officially counted as one. In 2020, Brazil would have been the 14th-largest Latino origin group with 416,000 who identified as Latino, ahead of Nicaragua (395,000) and below Venezuela (619,000).

It even changes constantly in this list of racial prerequisite cases on who is determined white

Syrians, Asian Indians and Arabians are both white and not-white. Mexicans btw in the single case for them are white.

Chinese aren't white, but they do get a pass in Jim Crow Era Mississippi to attend the white only schools and join the White Citizens Council so it seems even that isn't fully clear!

Throwing up a lot of words as a smokescreen doesn't change that Mamdani's claim was well out-of-bounds. The category "Black or African-American" isn't nearly as ambiguous as "Hispanic", and neither extends to people of Indian ethnicity born in Africa. Historical changes in the meaning of the term "white" don't matter either, because none of them would make a person of Indian ethnicity born in Africa "Black or African-American" either.

Throwing up a lot of words as a smokescreen doesn't change that Mamdani's claim was well out-of-bounds.

There are people who have called Elon Musk, who is much pastier in skin color an African American before!

The category "Black or African-American" isn't nearly as ambiguous as "Hispanic", and neither extends to people of Indian ethnicity born in Africa. Historical changes in the meaning of the term "white" don't matter either, because none of them would make a person of Indian ethnicity born in Africa "Black or African-American" either.

If every other category we use for ethnicity and race is fuzzy and ambiguous, how is that not relevant?

This argument still doesn't address the elephant in the room, it is patently obvious that the term "African American" for darker skinned people doesn't make sense when a light skinned person whose family has lived for generations in Africa and practices local traditions does not count when they move to the US but a dark skin person whose family has lived in France for generations and has no African cultural identity does.

If there's a major discrepancy between category and reality, what does that suggest? The problem is categories.

There are people who have called Elon Musk, who is much pastier in skin color an African American before!

Yes, it's a common joke. But everyone knows it's a joke, and Musk didn't fill out any official forms claiming to be African American, at least not that anyone knows.

If every other category we use for ethnicity and race is fuzzy and ambiguous, how is that not relevant?

Because the existence of ambiguities at the edges of categories does not mean there aren't unambiguous cases. Especially ambiguities in DIFFERENT categories.

This argument still doesn't address the elephant in the room, it is patently obvious that the term "African American" for darker skinned people doesn't make sense when a light skinned person whose family has lived for generations in Africa and practices local traditions does not count when they move to the US but a dark skin person whose family has lived in France for generations and has no African cultural identity does.

There's no elephant. Mere darkness of the skin is not sufficient. Culture has relevance to Hispanic ethnicity, but not the racial categories. And Mamdani's family hasn't lived for generations in Africa; both his parents were born in India, and his mother grew up in India.

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