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Comment by akomtu | Hacker News Reader

What's "white" even mean? Descendants of north Europeans? Surface albedo of skin greater than 0.85 in the visible spectrum?

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Race is self-reported. There isn't someone in Google HR researching your ancestry, they ask you what race you identify as when you join. If you self-identify as white then you are white according to Google HR.

Interesting, that introduces some very skewed incentives: from a game theory perspective it would always be better to lie about your race in HR surveys. Then according to the data, your actual race would be underrepresented and the industry would try to hire more people who look like you, making your next job search easier.

Descendants of Europeans. It's not ambiguous.

Just so you know, Middle Eastern folks from Lebanon and Egypt fall under the race of "White" in the US census. Source: https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-census-middle-east-no...

The US Census categories are incorrect.

10 bucks says you could meet some of these folks on the street and you'd think they were European.

There is definitely a spectrum between Mediterranean and Middle Eastern.

What race categories are correct? Race is arbitrarily defined so any categorization is going to have flaws.

At least Census is consistent.

What degree of purity is required to count as a European? Europeans can and do mix with non-europeans.

The 99% of white Americans for whom all ancestors were from Europe, are European.

> The 99% of white Americans for whom all ancestors were from Europe, are European.

“White Americans” average a little under 99% Eurooean ancestry, but far fewer than 99% have exclusively European ancestry.

Just checked that there are 7 millions Jews in the US. That's a lot more than 1%. About 3 millions are Slavic people. Many millions are european-type Arabic people. They all look like white Americans and if they grew up in the US, they won't even have an accent. The number of "true north-european descendats" must be a lot lower, maybe 60% of white Americans. And this number is going downhill rapidly because Americans don't hesitate to mix with other races and nationalities. My point is that albedo of skin is a really poor predictor of ancestry, about as good as a coin toss.

Every human being descends from the original humans in Africa so I don't think the term "true north-European descendants" makes much sense.

Under US law, 'one drop of blood' is sufficient to count as nonwhite. Might be an outgrowth of puritanism, I'm not sure.

"One drop" is not and was never federal law in the US[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule

That was only true in some states during Jim Crow. Others had different definitions of "white". In fact it was possible for some "black" people to become "white" just by crossing a state boundary.

Racism is stupid.

You know nothing about demographics and race. Do some research before for you continue this conversation.

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