Race is a social construct-at least for some people.... David in the comments for my post about Mandela below noted that the esteemed elder statesmen talked about the black vs. white dynamic in the Middle East, as in the black Arabs vs. the white Jews. He found this rather bizarre, and I can understand that, as I've met a fair number of Arabs with brown hair and green or hazel eyes (generally Lebanese or Syrian). Mandela specifically notes that the US has had a problem with the black Secretary Generals of the UN-Koffi Anan and Boutros Boutros-Ghali. Here is what the Coptic Egyptian looks like: See, he's the black one on the right [1]! There's a German white guy in the photo to show you the contrast. Godless interjects: Check out this picture as well. Guess which one is Boutros? Back to Razib: On my previous blog, I noted the peculiarities of ascribing absolute blackness to people that were of obvious mixed-race. For instance, here is a quote from Miss America 1994:

KIMBERLY AIKEN COCKERHAM, Miss America 1994: I remember watching the pageant, and I don't know that I had watched it before and I remember her singing. I remember her performance. I remember her being crowned, I remember thinking wow, she looks like me.

Take a look here.... On the left Kim, in the middle Vanessa and on the right some random Miss America winner that is "white." Who does Vanessa look more like? Probably Kim, but not that much more like Kim than the random white winner. Vanessa, and to a lesser extent Kim are both mixed-race. The average black American is ~ 20% white, and both these women, like many prominent African Americans are more like 50% white. Because of the idea that anyone with black blood is black, women like Williams or Halle Berry can have the best of both worlds, doing good for their race (the black race), but trading on the fact that they look closer to the European American ideal of beauty than more African looking women. Racism and color prejudice among black Americans is an ugly secret. I lived next to a dark-skinned guy from Mississippi once, and he told me as a kid that some of the light-skinned upper-middle class blacks in his town would call him "skillet blonde" and "field nigger." They took pride in their light-brown skins, curly rather than kinky hair, and more European features. Of course, I'm sure these kids could have easily received "black" scholarships if they wanted to. Mandela's statements reflect a Manichaean division of the world between white and non-white, oppressor and oppressed, that simply doesn't reflect reality anymore. The irony is that Left-wing identity politics and small-town ignorance converge, as both groups often downplay differences between "people of color." I know of this from personal experience, since in eastern Imbler people would often refer to me as "colored" or "black" because of my dark skin [2]. My best friend was 1/4 Lebanese, and though he was totally white looking, with green eyes and blonde hair he was self-conscious of being "colored", while his darker sister was called "the nigger girl" in grade school constantly. There was even a Chinese girl that one of my friends referred to as "black." Things like this might not seem like a big deal, but before we can deal with our differences, we need to be clear and rigorous as can be as to what they are. Obscuring the issues only put off the eventual reckonings.... On a more amusing note-the most accurate racial slurs that have been directed toward me are "sand nigger" and "camel jockey." Interestingly, I was born in a nation that gets about 80 inches of rain a year and is subject to flooding, so something like "paddy nigger" or "elephant jockey" would have been more appropriate. Also, to show that it's not only white people that are a bit confused sometimes, a Latino checkout clerk at my local supermarket, who tends to be at the express station which I use every other day, pulled me aside and told me this: "I've been seeing this Indian or Pakistani name over and over again on our Club Card's, and I was wondering if you could tell me how to pronounce it?" She wrote out the name. It was Nguyen. I told her how to pronounce it. [1] Of course, there are black Egyptians. Anwar Sadat's mother was a Nubian for instance. Ghali happens to not be one of them though. [2] Americans often confuse South Asians and people of African ancestry. Pretty understandable since both groups have dark skin, South Asians being the next darkest population to Africans among the major groups of humanity. The physicist S. Chandrasekhar (He was a Tamil, and I refuse to spell out their ridiculously long names!) and the poet Rabindrinath Tagore both experienced racial prejudice in the early 20th century. Tagore refused to ever return to the United States while Chandraekhar had difficulties socializing in public with his colleagues, as when they went to a baseball game and an usher yelled at him, "Hey blackie, get in the colored section!"