I cannot fanthom how anyone could call this person "black". If anything, his complexion is similar to what US people call "hispanic" (although to me that's just southern European, not a distinct race).
How pale a person looks doesn't really have bearing on whether they consider themselves black. We don't know what his parents looked like, but they might have been fairly dark. We don't know what his sibling look like, but you'd be surprised at the variation there is. I have a black family friend and he has some blond grandchildren. Don't know if they consider themselves black, but they have a better claim to it as I have to consider myself Swedish.
I also think you're off on what the US considers hispanic. While many hispanic people have some southern European origin, the term really mean people from Mexico on south from a Spanish culture of any race or ethnicity. It's a little weird, but you can have hispanic black Dominicans and hispanic Indian Brazilians. Actual Spanish people probably aren't hispanic in the US sense, although I get different answers on that. Filipinos are another people difficult to slot into the standard US hispanic definition.
I teach programming to a group of black young adults. Self image is very important to most young folks. Just seeing other black people who are successful computer programmers helps them imagine themselves as computer programmers.
Identity matters to young people who are trying to shape their own self image.
Why? Because then the article isn't trying to claim that one of the most notable things about him (notable enough to be in the title of the article) is his race. Young black people would see him being lauded for his work, regardless of any other aspect about him.
Otherwise, you end up with the idea that the article is saying "Hey look! A black person actually did something notable in tech!" Not the message you want to get across.
White people are a majority in technology, so it's assumed to be obvious to white children that they too can be a technologist. There's not a significant gap in perceived identity between themselves and Mark Zuckerberg, for example.
So, that begs the question, why focus on encouraging specifically white children? They don't face racial barriers and have many famous role models. Preference for white people has a long and ugly history in America.
BS, have you seen us brown folks? we are literally the IT race. You could say white blokes are at a disadvantage. Point being, I feel kids should be taught their code and their core values are important, and should be also taught the art of not giving a shit about stuff that clearly doesn't matter. No black folks in tech? all the more reason to become a God
Either you're right, and white supremacy is not a problem at all, or you're wrong, and culture today has made it acceptable to say "fuck white men", which is disgustingly racist and yet no one is willing to publicly acknowledge it except "white supremacists" themselves.
I'm also not convinced that xenophobia is the same thing as white identity.
Could you not also say that almost every article caters specifically to Jewish people? Or would that be anti-Semitic in your mind?
- whites are a non-diverse group of people
- whites (of all types, as a group) have been as historically unempowered as nonwhites in America
- whites think whiteness is underrepresented in America
- whites aren't bothered by how nonwhiteness affects outcomes
- messages about race are currently at peak broadcast capacity, so talking about race is a zero-sum game where prioritizing one audience takes a potential piece of information away another audience
- race is something other than ingroup/outgroup attribution
Even if we assume that this is true (despite the fact that it's not) what does it have to do with printing articles with headlines that read "{INSERT NON-WHITE RACE HERE} miraculously succeeds in life!"?
The reason people like headlines like that is that milestone accomplishments by minorities is inspiring.
The guy's race matters because it's important that people from minorities see that people that look like them and sound like them can succeed. The guy's race matters because in the past history has been rewritten to give prominence to white faces even when black faces have carried out exactly the same roles [1]. It matters because they've had to overcome, in many instances, a system that is structurally biased against their success. And it matters because middle aged, white, heterosexual men, who completely coincidentally stand to gain the most from things staying as they are, are the ones who argue the loudest that we shouldn't recognize these structural biases. It matters because in order to succeed they have had to overcome obstacles that you haven't.
If you think that we are somehow overcompensating by even recognizing the color of someone's skin, perhaps you can also tell me why there were two BAME people in my year of four thousand people at Oxford. One of whom went to Eton.
Well, I wouldn't tell him, but I would definitely ask him if he claimed he was black. Then he would probably explain that he doesn't mean "black" as color but "black" as culture (same as "Jewish" religion vs. "Jewish" ethnicity) and that's fine.
> people that look like them and sound like them can succeed.
After a (semi-)black president, is this really still relevant?!
> why there were two BAME people in my year of four thousand people at Oxford
Maybe because Oxford is in England and England is predominantly white?
In general, I oppose such categorisations, because (1) they're racist, and in emphasizing race, they encourage other people to do so as well, and (2) race is far less relevant than other characteristics, in particular class (wealth), and by focusing on race, you're playing a divide-and-conquer game, making groups of people hate each other, while ignoring the most important inequality in existance. (Which, coincidentially, was the most likely cause of the discrepancy you saw at Oxford.)
When the current President has committed to rolling back much of what said President achieved socially, economically and culturally, it's fair to say that Obama being elected wasn't the panacea people thought it would be.
> Maybe because Oxford is in England and England is predominantly white?
The number is off then by two orders of magnitude - and there are specific patterns of underachievement amongst black youth in England which exist when you control for other factors such as class and wealth. Black youngsters in the U.K. are twice as likely to be unemployed as white ones.
Focusing resources on the specific problems these communities face is not playing 'divide and conquer' any more than is providing specific support to LGBT communities who have a higher prevalence of mental health issues.
http://www.runnymedetrust.org/blog/how-black-young-men-are-o...
One black guy being elected President doesn't solve that - you need to see examples of black guys as doctors, lawyers, computer scientists, engineers for it to work. Studies have shown that one of the greatest predictors of whether someone goes on to do a certain career is whether they or their family knows anyone in that profession.
That's why it's important and not 'racist' to proactively point out examples of successful black people. It's not that there aren't successful white people as well - they're visible everywhere, and we recognize them anyway (ever see the Oscars?). We do it because sadly the status quo leaves some people without black role models.
As far as why he is considered black, it's probably because someone found it economically advantageous to consider one or more of his ancestors black at some point in their history, and the norm was that a son of a slave was also a slave (i.e. "black"), regardless of complexion.
Relevant: https://psmag.com/why-your-race-isn-t-genetic-559908897f93#....
2:) That lighting makes his complexion look much lighter.
3:) If they say he's black, i'll take their word for it, skin colour varies significantly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness_(race)_in_the_...
As to how someone could call them black... "it's not the color of your skin, it's the race of your kin"
In other words "making up shit". It's time to stop listening to this bullshit.
The first two sentences of the article says
>At a time when “googling” has become the generic term for conducting an internet search, it can be hard to remember that search had a long history before Google came along. But it’s worth revisiting that past during Black History Month, because the pre-Google era saw one of the most momentous black contributions to the development of the internet: the invention of internet search itself, by Alan Emtage.
Emphasis mine.
Effectively, racial labels and identities are more about ethnicity (that is shared cultural identity [on the identity side] or shared ascribed kind of "otherness" [from the imposed labelling side]) than biology (either phenotype and genotype), though the latter influences the former.
(And "hispanic" is explicitly an ethnic label/identity, which applies to people ranging from completely European descent to completely African descent to descent completely from the indigenous peoples of South and/or Central America, and every possible combination in between, as well as some others.)
Recently 'blacks' weren't allowed in certain venues/institutions and were required to take a generally subservient stance vis a vis 'whites'. White also receive(d) preference for admittance to the country and citizenship.
The non-denotative nature of the language is well-discussed: http://forward.com/opinion/318667/im-a-mizrahi-jew-do-i-coun...
If you read the first paragraph of the article, you'd know that his race is the reason the article was published:
At a time when “googling” has become the generic term for conducting an internet search, it can be hard to remember that search had a long history before Google came along. But it’s worth revisiting that past during Black History Month, because the pre-Google era saw one of the most momentous black contributions to the development of the internet: the invention of internet search itself, by Alan Emtage.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=Alan+Emtage&source=lnms&tbm=...
Life is full of such arbitrary nuance and complexity.
A Black Technologist is an expert in Black (=incomprehensible to laypeople) Technology. Since we're talking about search engines, I figure that's accurate enough.
But it seems that "people of color" is the hot new Politically Correct term for black people (or non-white people depending on who you ask). Do not ask me why.