re: #342 iossarian

What you said was:

In other words, if a birth certificate says “the father of X is hereby classified as white”, it’s an incorrect statement for person X to say “my father is black”. These are verifiable facts, after all.

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.