Skin colour...ooooh controversial!

[Bluemoon115]

Nobody in the world has black skin and nobody in the world has white skin. Everyone is brown; it's just however long your ancestors spent in caves because of the climate depends on how light that brown pigment became.

What about the yellow people?

The Simpsons?

Don't know if anyone's ever told you, but it's not real.

 

[Tuearts right boot]

Homo sapains were actually brown by nature,the 'whites' are a natural mutation.The puzzling question that I cant understand is that the birth place of man was,they say, somewhere on the African continent/middle eastern area.A hot and sunny place by all acounts,why then is the natural skin colour dark when dark colours absorb heat therefore making the body work harder to cool down.White reflects heat which is the natural colour of northern europeans,one would have thought the need would be to absorb heat and sunlight in a cooler climate.Nature is a strange thing.....

 

[Anonymous]

Homo sapains were actually brown by nature,the 'whites' are a natural mutation.The puzzling question that I cant understand is that the birth place of man was,they say, somewhere on the African continent/middle eastern area.A hot and sunny place by all acounts,why then is the natural skin colour dark when dark colours absorb heat therefore making the body work harder to cool down.White reflects heat which is the natural colour of northern europeans,one would have thought the need would be to absorb heat and sunlight in a cooler climate.Nature is a strange thing.....

put ed sheeran up against an african man who's the same size and weight in the saharra desert and i know who's dead first.

 

[didactic]

Look at that picture of the lady above (beautiful lady, reallllly beautiful lady at that), and tell me what colour that lady is. Someone (not on Bluemoon) was rambling on before about why African-Americans can't just be called black, and why don't we just call them Americans and why do they have to be called African americans etc. etc.

We got into how white people from Africa who have parents in America or they were born in America etc are still African-Americans regardless of colour, and how if you want to take it all the way back, literally, we are all African-Americans or Afro-British, since we all came from somewhere else originally.

Either you are one of a small minority of English who were there thousands of years ago, or you have descended from Germanic, French, Scandinavian, Jewish, or some other tribe or people who invaded/moved to Britain at one point. So in all fairness, a child born in Britain today could potentially be classified as Afro-Euro-Jewish-British.

Anyway, I digress, so, again look at the picture of the lady above and tell me what colour she is. I say she is brown, and that her hair, eyebrows and eyelashes are the only things black about her (strictly from looking at that picture).

Why are black people called/labeled as being black, when in all honesty, the vast majority are a shade of brown.

Obama, is he black? Micah Richards is he black? Denzel Washington, is he black? How about an albino born into an African-American or Afro-British or African family? They certainly aren't black.

How are the colours black and brown so blatantly misused and misrepresented? This conversation about the labeling of African-Americans and the fact many 'black' people who you ask about such a subject claim to be simply American, had got me thinking about why it is we use the words we do to describe the colour of peoples skin.

Alternately, think about white people and why we are called/labeled as white.

Why exactly are we called white people? Is that lady in the picture above white? Some say that 'white' is the absence of colour, yet some say that 'black' is the absence of colour. The background upon which I am typing (albeit not what this ends up on once submitted) is what we call white. Using that/this background as a template, and a piece of A4 paper, or a tin of white paint, how many white people do you know?

Lot's of questions there and lots of responses I hope Blues. Cheers.

The first one is hot very cute face, smooth skin, I like. The black thing came about because of the one drop rule. This is the same rule that applied during and after slavery on the colonies and everywhere else.

One-drop rule

The one-drop rule is a historical colloquial term in the United States for the social classification as black of individuals with any African ancestry; meaning any person with "one drop of black blood" was considered black. The principle was an example of hypodescent, the automatic assignment of children of a mixed union between different socioeconomic or ethnic groups to the group with the lower status The one-drop rule was not adopted as law until the 20th century: first in Tennessee in 1910 and in Virginia under the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 (following the passage of similar laws in numerous other states).

Despite the strictures of slavery, in the antebellum years, free people of mixed race could have up to one-eighth or one-quarter African ancestry (depending on the state) and be considered legally white. More were absorbed into the majority culture based simply on appearance, associations and carrying out community responsibilities. These and community acceptance were more important factors if a person's racial status were questioned, not his or her documented ancestry. The mobility of the society meant that many people did not have documentation about their ancestors. Thomas Jefferson's four surviving "natural" children by his mixed-race slave Sally Hemings were seven-eighths European in ancestry and thus legally white although they were born into slavery. Three of the four entered white society as adults, two married white persons, and all their descendants identified as white. Many of later generations of his mixed-race descendants also entered white society, according to their appearance.

This notion of the “invisible” or “intangible” membership to an ethnic group has seldom been applied to people of Native American ancestry; the notion has been largely applied to those of Black-African ancestry. Langston Hughes wrote, "You see, unfortunately, I am not Black. There are lots of different kinds of blood in our family. But here in the United States, the word 'Negro' is used to mean anyone who has any Negro blood at all in his veins. In Africa, the word is more pure. It means all Negro, therefore Black. I am brown." During the Black pride era of the Civil Rights Movement, the stigma associated with sub-Saharan ancestry was claimed as a socio-political advantage.

The 1910s were the nadir of the Jim Crow laws era by most measures. Tennessee adopted a one-drop statute in 1910. It was followed by Louisiana the same year, Texas and Arkansas in 1911, Mississippi in 1917, North Carolina in 1923, Virginia in 1924, Alabama and Georgia in 1927, and Oklahoma in 1931. During this same time, Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and Utah retained their old racial blood fraction statutes, but amended these fractions, such as one-eighth or one-sixteenth etc., to be equivalent to simply one drop of Negro blood, de facto. By 1925, almost every state had some form of a one-drop law on the books. These were the laws that empowered to bureaucrats like Walter Plecker of Virginia, Naomi Drake of Louisiana and a number of others around the country, to insistently label families of mixed ancestry as “Black,” despite the actual percentages.

 

[Anonymous]

good to have ya back didactic :)

 

[didactic]

good to have ya back didactic :)

good to see you too ban.

 

[mat]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HHT_V294Co[/youtube]

 

[Dubai Blue]

Go to the Caribbean, shut your eyes and ask for beer can.

You won't have a local passing you a Red Stripe but you won't go hungry either.

And I'm sure the majority of blind people don't picture Barry White as some middle class white boy.

I understand the joke that "beer can" sounds like "bacon" in a jamaican accent but when would you ever ask for a beer can? would you go into an off licence or your mate at a barbecue and ask for a beer can? must try harder gaz.

As for the thread, it smacks of somebody desperate to put themselves across as anti-racist but actually getting too wound up over trivial things in life. nobody really gives a fuck.

To the people asking why you would ever need to label a person by their skin colour, I give you this - my Ghanain friend came to Eastlands once to watch City v Chelsea. I left him at the pub while I went to get the lad something from the club shop. In the meantime, my Dad phones me from the same pub asking where I am. I tell him I'll be 5 minutes but my mate is outside. Now, when telling my Dad who to look for, am I trying to describe the person or is it give us a fucking clue? Do I say -

a) He's 6 foot tall with dark hair, a blue top on, brown eyes and Nike trainers.

or b) He's the black lad outside that's built like a brick shithouse?

I rest my case.

My 6-year-old nephew has grown up in London, attending the most multicultural school you could ever imagine. He makes no distinction between skin colours whatsoever. He simply doesn't notice it and will spend ages describing someone by their clothes/hair rather than by what - to us as adults - is the most obvious characteristic. The sad thing is that in all likelihood he will eventually lose this naivety of childhood, but it's refreshing to see while it lasts.

 

[nijinsky's fetlocks]

Homo sapains were actually brown by nature,the 'whites' are a natural mutation.The puzzling question that I cant understand is that the birth place of man was,they say, somewhere on the African continent/middle eastern area.A hot and sunny place by all acounts,why then is the natural skin colour dark when dark colours absorb heat therefore making the body work harder to cool down.White reflects heat which is the natural colour of northern europeans,one would have thought the need would be to absorb heat and sunlight in a cooler climate.Nature is a strange thing.....

put ed sheeran up against an african man who's the same size and weight in the saharra desert and i know who's dead first.

Sometimes there's a lot to be said for natural selection.

 

[mcfcphil]

Homo sapains were actually brown by nature,the 'whites' are a natural mutation.The puzzling question that I cant understand is that the birth place of man was,they say, somewhere on the African continent/middle eastern area.A hot and sunny place by all acounts,why then is the natural skin colour dark when dark colours absorb heat therefore making the body work harder to cool down.White reflects heat which is the natural colour of northern europeans,one would have thought the need would be to absorb heat and sunlight in a cooler climate.Nature is a strange thing.....

In very simple terms black skin absorbes the heat which isn't a problem.white skin reflects it which is a problem - it's the sun's rays skimming off the surface of the skin that causes it to burn. Imagine it as a kind of friction between the skin and rays and the sun. If the skin just absorbes the rays there is no friction. If the rays skim off the surface of the skin there is friction and it's this friction that causes the skin to burn. Nature is strange....and very, very clever!