Which is to say, perhaps the reason "Black" and "White" have been adopted (and persisted) as ethnoracial descriptions so successfully is because so many Americans are not the descendants of "pure" (for lack of a better term) ethnic unions, talk more of pure racial unions, and thus have a mix of heritage lines that they may or may not know of (or were robbed of knowing in the case of Black American DOS). For example, a White American may actually be Norwegian-Dutch-German American, right? Likewise, a Black American may actually be a Mandinka-Fante-Bamileke American, and so on.

I forget what I was reading not too long ago, some article about something going on in France... But I remember being struck by how unfamiliar it felt to read them say French v. other, meaning their default when talking about their native "White" people/descendants is to say French not White because that is their indigenous European identity (which itself is a blend of tribes from the area or conquered in it eg. Frankish, Gaul/Gallo-, etc). One tends to come across similar media language from Britain (eg. Britons) and other European countries (eg. Swedes).

Tbh, "White" tends to only be a popular label in nation-states which are:

*multi-ethnic (where there's a constant and diverse population of "others" to juxtapose against each other),
*wealthy (and thus attracting a steady and dynamic stream of "others" through migration, tourism, etc),
*post-colonial (and thus have a foundational legacy of oppression which shaped social stratification from jump and its accompanying labels/categories)

right? Like US, Canada, Australia, etc (I'm sure somebody somewhere has studied this). Similarly, "Black" tends to only be a popular label in post-colonial nation-states where institutionalized enslavement of Africans was a key antecedent to the state's founding (eg. Black Americans, Black Jamaicans, Black/Afro- Brazilians, Black South Africans).

*not denying the racist/oppressive elements of the labels by any means, but do think the sociological aspect might play a role too









>It’s not a theory. It’s actual color science . Black
>doesn’t reflect light. It absorbs all of light, which is why
>you get hotter when wearing black material.
>
>So the identification with the word black to reflect a skin
>color is incorrect,
>because black isn’t even a color. Black and white are
>representations of light wavelengths being absorbed or
>reflected.
>
>Why accept a name that we didn’t create, and was used to
>degrade us , and the
>term isn’t a reflection of color?