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Comment by h4nkoslo | Hacker News Reader

You might be surprised, but in the American context numerous people considered "black" for political reasons clearly have microscopic amounts of black admixture.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Johnson

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamala_Harris

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Butterfield

https://twitter.com/mayorvincegray

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Jealous

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You can't necessarily discern a person's racial makeup from just their skin tone so assuming these people have "microscopic amounts of black admixture" seems pretty ignorant. Basically you just made a list of light skin black people.

That's a revolutionary discovery; you should probably publish it immediately since it refutes decades of genetic research.

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/9f67/21bf5954d1129d0212bc4f...

http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jour...

I didn't argue skin color wasn't genetic so I don't see how those papers support your assertion that light skin black people "clearly have microscopic amounts of black admixture." Neither paper even discusses race and race is certainly more than just your skin color.

Well race isn't the color, but the genetic makeup. My wife is "technically" Cherokee Indian because her great grandmother was a full blooded "Sally Anne Lamb" Cherokee. As such, she would be entitled to scholarships for Native Americans and whatnot for school. Whether she chooses to or not doesn't make it any more her right.

The "They're not black enough" argument was the same racist bs they used against Obama. Can we please collectively give it a rest please?

- Your neighborhood pasty white American tech friend

> You might be surprised, but in the American context numerous people considered "black" for political reasons clearly have microscopic amounts of black admixture.

E.g. Mr. Obama, who is actually half-white but considered black by American blacks and whites alike.

American blacks who are on average about 12% white and 5% native. The obsession with discussing how black black people are is annoying. Slavery, Jim Crow, and racial discrimination wasn't and isn't exclusively for 100% sub-Saharan African descended people; only South African apartheid micromanaged that much.

edit: And 50% is a microscopic amount, now?

I knew a colleague who had a relative who knew Obama before he became a politician. Back then, Barack was far more embracing of himself as a mixed-race individual. He made a choice later on to be identified as a black man.

Another interpretation is that the choice was made for him.

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