208288, I don't disagree that biological identifiers of race are problematic
Posted by kfine, Mon Jun-15-15 08:05 AM
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>>Element: race
>>Outer Identifiers: skin colour, hair texture, eye
>>colour/shape, nose shape/size, etc.
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>because these identifiers are far from uniform and run the
>gamut when it comes to Black as it is know and accepted in the
>US.
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>Or as you saying that Black is an ethnicity in America? cause
>that opens up another can of worms.
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But I don't think these identifiers disqualify Black Americans as being of black race. There are multiple combinations of each variable that, when observed, would be identified as indicating 'black race'. This is not necessarily MY belief, because I place greater weight on how a person identifies. But I do think this is how race has been defined in the books, so to speak.
And yes I do subscribe to the belief that capital 'B' Black is an ethnicity in America. It opens up a can of worms but I don't think it's invalid. It's kind of my point. People can be transethnic. And if you ask me, the word transracial should be restricted to cases that include intentional reconstruction of biological features (eg. Negroid, Mongoloid, etc.) to mimic those historically recognized as indicating a different race. There are plenty of examples of this (eg. Skin bleaching or darkening, silky weave/relaxer, eye colour surgery, eye shape surgery, etc.). And I think Dolezal qualifies. In fact, it seems the only reason famous people like Vybez Cartel,Sammy Sosa or Tiny (TI's wife) are not considered transracial is because of this ongoing conflation of race and ethnicity. These individuals maintain strong ETHNIC identities so nobody really laments that they are reconstructing their historically negroid features to look caucasian, even though that is exactly what they're doing lol.
Likewise, nteresting transethnicity examples might be Iggy Azalea and Eminem. They have made no attempts to reconstruct their biological features to those that are historically identified as indicating 'black race', but they very diligently embrace Black American ethnicity by adopting Black American cultural behavior, language, etc.
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