Comment on Is this just how it’s gonna be till Election Day?

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barsoap@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

As I have said, picking individual outliers does not invalidate a category.

I didn’t say anything about validity.

Probably not, but even if she could, she doesn’t have any Sicilian ancestry to my knowledge, so it would be inaccurate to call her Sicilian.

So it would be inaccurate to call Obama black because he has no slave ancestry?


“African American” is a subculture identified with people freed from slavery. It is not a thing of ancestry, or Obama wouldn’t be part of it. It is not a matter of phenotype, or Harris wouldn’t be part of it. And both aren’t outliers, they’re simply prominent examples. At the same time, you have more recent African immigrants to the US who very much insist that they are not part of that group identity.

Noone, at least no American, is questioning Harris’ and Obama’s identity as African American, and that’s precisely because it’s neither about ancestry nor phenotype but subcultural belonging. They’re African American because they stay vibing that way.

She could call herself Nordic and we would laugh at her.

Plenty of people with much darker skin in the Nordics. If she had gone to school and studied in Norway or something Nordic would be absolutely accurate. See here on the other side of the Atlantic we don’t sort ethnicities by phenotype because phenotype has nothing to do with ethnicity. Correlation, yes, causation, fuck no. Double triple fuck no.

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