re: #343 Nyet

No, it’s not a claim*, it’s a question. If the answer is “he may look like the whitest person in the world, and he was identified as white by other persons, but he self-identified as black”, then so be it. The prior probability of that is pretty low, and in this case this did not turn out to be the explanation.

* You will probably argue (just for the sake of arguing) that in saying that this is a white dude we are making a claim; well, duh - except we do that all the time, without verifying whether the person we’re calling white has “one drop”. If you disagree, well, you may as well stop calling any people you don’t know white - after all, you don’t know if they didn’t have a black ancestor.

Oh, I’m not arguing just for the sake of arguing, believe me. My point is that asking that question (“this person is identified as white here, so how can he be identified as black over there”) is wrong, basically, because a) it’s not really anyone else’s business how people identify and b) there are lots of plausible mundane explanations.

By the way, you may be interested to know that I don’t particularly call people “white” or “black”. Which does not mean that I’m somehow blind to racism, or can’t tell people apart. But I don’t go around saying “Oh yes, you know, Bill, the black guy.” So my disagreement with you doesn’t really lead me into terrible difficulty as noted by (*) above.