Re: BELL CURVE CRITIC EXPOSED?
Frosch (dexter@aries.scs.uiuc.edu)
3 Feb 95 16:32:02 GMT
james_n@coulomb.uwaterloo.ca (James Nicoll) writes:
> Not quite. Here's the complete posting:
>In article <3gp0bt$qnp@agate.berkeley.edu>,
> <jerrybro@uclink2.berkeley.edu> wrote:
>>pn8886@csc.albany.edu (Phil Nicholls) wrote:
>>
>>> The "guesses" are based on superfical phenotypic traits, not on
>>> any information about ancestry.
>>
>>Only when there is no such information available. Whatever
>>the guesses are based on, they are *about* ancestry. If, for
>>example, someone were to identify me as black, and then discovered
>>that I was in fact a dark-pigmented Hindu, I'd expect him to
>>admit his error. "Black" means "African-American".
> What race are Africans*, then?
>* Those Africans not of recent European or Asian origins, I mean.
___
actually, the confusion of definitions is worse than i had
picked up in passing. the use of 'african-AMERICAN' to mean
any person of african descent, i could _just_ manage to forgive
as an americocentric slip of the tongue. but using "hindu" as
a designator of "race"??
let's try the parallel linguistic construct:
"if, for example, someone were to identify me as black,
and then discovered that i was in fact a dark-pigmented
Christian, i'd expect him to admit his error. "black" means
"british-african"."
actually, australian aborigines use the designator "black"
or "blackfella" as a positive description of identity. i am
still lost as to what jerrybro meant by "black". are aborigines
in australia "not black", but aborigines in africa "are black"
(or perhaps "not black", while dark-skinned people in the usa
"are black" and those in britain are not)?
annette
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