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Comment by kyro | Hacker News Reader

Well, I'm referring to Egyptians specifically, who aren't technically African-Americans. According to the consensus, we're Caucasian.

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An Egyptian who immigrated to America fits the criteria for being considered African-American.

IMHO Skin color isn't the only designation.

The term African-American is just out-and-out silly. I've seen American media refer to a black British model who worked in France as 'African-American' - despite her being neither African nor American. Born in England, but labelled American because of her skin. Isn't that an own-goal?

Heh heh. Who was it that referred to people in Chad as "African American Africans"? Some politician.

And who is more African American that someone like Teresa Heinz Kerry, who was born in Mozambique and is a naturalized citizen?

Yeah, it's a stupid term.

I hear it is a particular problem for jamaican people as well, with their shall we say, complex relationship to african identity.

I disagree. Arabs are considered Caucasian in some parts.

An anecdote: Egyptian friend studies abroad in the US, gets arrested visiting New York state for very overdue parking tickets he was unaware of (studying elsewhere in the US). They bring him to the station, and the cops attempt to fill in the paperwork, and they admit to my friend they are not sure what to fill in. In the end, they look in their procedure book, and said he is Arab and that is considered a subset of Caucasian in their definition. I was actually surprised by this.

Whether Arabs are caucasian or not is not GP's point: it's that someone who was born in Africa, and lives in America, can fairly consider themselves to be African-American, just on that basis.

For most of these cases, skin color is the lowest common denominator that allows them to game the system.

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/story/2011-12-...

We do live in America, so your actual ethnicity matters, but not as much as what people think you are on first glance (i.e. police, interviewers, etc).

Race is something that affects people's lives in the real world, beyond boxes on applications. This argument is becoming a little academic.

I thought Egyptians were ethnically Arabs?

Arabs are classified as Caucasian

Race in America is such a messy clustering of arbitrary phenotypic and cultural features. I wonder what our "racial" categories would look like if people treated these groupings as a statistical problem, rather than some sort of given natural phenomenon. Maybe we'd just give up on the concept all together?

People do display distinct genetic clustering based on ancestral geography. If someone has your DNA, they can tell with high certainty where your ancestors came from.

Of course, a substantial number of white Americans would be surprised by discovering they had ancestors from Africa in the recent past. (Most African-Americans, on the other hand, wouldn't be too surprised to find out many of them have European ancestry.)

>People do display distinct genetic clustering based on ancestral geography.

For sure! But I suspect the most meaningful coarse clusters might end up being some large number of divisions of sub-saharan africa and then everyone else. Definitely not the "White", "Black", "Asian" categories people in the states take for granted. And even ignoring the amazing diversity of Africa (compared with the rest of the world), did the Irish become more genetically white when they became culturally accepted as white? Did Latin Americans of European descent become less genetically white when people further North stopped viewing them that way? Why do some races trump others (i.e., why is Barack Obama considered black)? The boundaries of these categories seem very arbitrary and not derived by any rigorous means at all.

I think i have seen this before, it came out basically pretty well aligned with the generally accepted racial groups, except there were i believe 2 groups for sub saharan instead of one group of 'blacks'. Has been a few years since i saw the study so dont quote me on it.

Find the citation please. I'm not even sure what you mean by generally accepted racial groups. In the UK, unlike the US, you would probably distinguish between Indian & Pakistani vs. all other Asians. You might also distinguish Irish as a separate ethnicity and probably would not think of Arabs or Turks as white. This stuff is very culturally dependent and I don't know which set of "racial groups" would be considered canonical.

One of the main confounds seems to be "large immigrant group". For example, even ethnically-100%-Spanish Latinos in the U.S. are considered different from "Anglos", in significant part because it's a large group. That sometimes leads to significant differences between countries. I'd say that for the past 50 years or so, Greek-Americans have been considered part of the undifferentiated majority "white" population. But Greek-Australians are still considered different in Australia, not really properly white, or at least white with an "ethnic" asterisk.

Despite a lying Senator, checking the Native American box is a pretty simple exercise. Are you enrolled with a federally (or state in some cases) recognized tribe? Yes, check box. No, pick something else.

"I wonder what our 'racial' categories would look like if people treated these groupings as a statistical problem, rather than some sort of given natural phenomenon."

The outcome would no doubt have a lot in common with the ugly and ill-fitting suit made for Gulliver by the tailors of Laputa, who used quadrants, rules, and compasses rather than a simple tape measure.

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