Being curious, I looked him up on Wikipedia, and he’s not entirely half black… his father is only a portion black, not full.
For every Tiger Woods, you’ll find a Mariah Carey, Jason Kidd, or Jennifer Beals. Sometimes people don’t even know these folks are biracial (my father still can’t seem to remember this about Mariah Carey). And the thing is, you don’t even have to have one white parent to be this ambiguous. Colin Powell, Lena Horne, Vanessa Williams, and Julian Bond would probably be viewed as white in a society where white is defined soley by phenotype.
So I’ve never agreed with the idea that black “genes” are dominant. Not only does such a thing not make sense, it isn’t even supported by any evidence.
When I was in high school I knew a black kid who I didn’t realize was black until he took up “The Cause of the Oppressed Black Man” and someone explained it to me. Had I had to pin him down, I might have guessed Jewish - I don’t know, something about him made me unable to wish to classify him at all.
I don’t always agree about the features part, but it is odd to me that you don’t have any famous people who are half black half white who are thought of as “white” by the populace- they’re always thought of as black.
A Detroit news anchor Amyre Makupson is black.
I must have watched her most of my life and when I heard that she was black, I was floored.
I don’t think I was thinking along the lines of " Well, blacks haven’t ever been anchors, because here in De-Twa for a long time , we have a bevy of African American peoples (one more) , so I grew up with them “in my house”, so to speak. And, I’m kinda proud of this, Detroit News teams also has alot of “other races” before the camera. Yanno, Arab, Asian, Possibly Latino. I think the CBC is the only other major news that I see the entire rainbow.
I watch the news about 1 a month, if I am forced, and while Detroit is a shithole in so many ways ( thanks Kwame and Coleman Young) it is refreshing to see something other than Perky White Wimmen and Older White Guy at the desk.
I think people who are of mixed heritage like that are so stunning that it makes me feel remarkably bland.
I also think people just notice certain characteristics first. My husband is of mostly unknown origin, his father’s side looks Greek / Italian / Middle Eastern. Black hair, brown eyes, dark olive skin. I am Dutch with blond hair / blue eyes. When our first son was born, with black hair and brown eyes, and dark skin (for a newborn), people assumed he was all kinds of things. Black people thought he was mixed race (I had several black people comment to me on things like "oh, that happens with black / mixed babies), white people thought he was “exotic” looking but not black.
Now that he is older, his hair has straightened out and he doesn’t get mistaken for mixed race any more, but people still comment on how dark he is (probably more so here in West Michigan, there are lots of Dutch, very white people around here so his “darkness” stands out more.)
His facial features look more like me, but everyone on first glance says he looks like his dad, because they both have dark hair and eyes. Now my second son, has blond hair blue eyes, and everyone on first glance says he looks like me, but his facial features I think are actually more like my husband’s. I think eye color / hair color are just immediate impressions that people see first.
Not to mention that nose is strictly aftermarket and not in any way attributable to her genetic makeup.
It’s cultural perspective. The other day I was in my regional capitol and I saw a white guy, so like a good Cameroonian I poked my friends and said “Hey…look at the white guy!” A few minutes observation showed he was actually an American black guy. My entire concept of who is “white” has changed since I’ve got here.
I’ll give a similar example. My wife and I had a friend who was white, and had a daughter by a black man. The daughter looked fairly typically black to me. The 1/2 white Daughter later had two children by two different black men. One is a girl, who is so peaches-and-cream caucasian looking that she might as well have come across on the Mayflower. The other is a boy who looks very black. People don’t believe that they’re brother and sister.
So, no – black features do not dominate in mixed race kids. Its all a roll of the dice.
[
Now that I think about it, I could possibly have said “subconscious ethnocentricism”, since I emphasized that it isn’t malicious. But then if stipulate that racism must be malicious by definition, then we’d be condoning conditions in our culture that do not deserve it.
There’s a picture going around the Interweb showing Barack Obama with some of his Kenyan relatives. You just have to barely glance at the picture to be able to pick out the half-white guy in a group of black Kenyans.
Here’s the photo on Snopes, accompanied by the racist context it is usually spread with, and Snopes’ debunking of that context:
I had an aunt (black) who had a child with a white guy. Resulting child came out looking completely white (I was a teenager before I realized she was not adopted). The same aunt then had a child by a black guy. The resulting child was so dark-skinned that he was the darkest person in the whole clan.
Roll of the dice indeed.
Woods’ father was Black/White/Native American, so I’m not sure where the 50/50 comes in.
I will say this much, I have never seen a mixed-race person (half black and half white or anything else) who had a strong, straight nose (like John Barrymore, for example.) This seems to be a feature that will be overtaken by the non-white genes, to me anyway. (I’m not saying that half-black people with those kind of noses don’t exist, just that I’ve never seen one. Have you?)
Just dropping by to agree that:
-
Most “black” Americans are in fact of quite mixed background, and
-
I am a product of a “black” dad and a (lilly-) white mother and get most of my facial structure from Mom. If people aren’t primed with the “mixed-race” idea they tend to think I’m Hispanic; we spent a large chunk of my childhood in Mexico and the locals would ignore Mom and try to talk to me on the theory that I, as a native, would understand them perfectly while the blond “gringa” woman wouldn’t speak any Spanish (in fact, she’s good with languages and I’m lousy, so her Spanish is very much better than mine).
So count me as another who thinks that the phenomenon is driven by the semi-reflexive sorting which says “darker-than average skin, broader-than-average nose, curly hair; therefore black” being stronger than the similar sorting driving “Asian” or “Indian” or what-have-you.
Some evidence for this is that, until they are told otherwise, people who aren’t familiar with a given dark-skinned ethnic group (such as Australian Aborigines or southern Indians) will tend to shove them into the “black” category, regardless of actual ethnic origin, even if the facial features aren’t particularly “African”; and also, there are more and more divergent ethnic groups in Africa than practically anywhere else and aside from being dark-skinned they don’t really look all that much alike.
Also, unrelated but important: do not do a Google image search on “indian” with SafeSearch off. Unless you are looking for that sort of thing.
JRB
Giancarlo Esposito’s nose is pretty close. His mother is a black American, and his father is Italian.
http://images.broadwayworld.com/columnpic/GiancarloEsposito.jpg
http://www.indiewire.com/ipop/gothgiancamyiPOP.jpg
Not that I’ve comprehensively queried everyone I’ve seen about their ethnic roots, but it seems to me that that kind of nose is only typical of a minority of Caucasian groups as well. Less common among southern/Mediterranean areas, perhaps?
JRB
As an example of the degree to which skin color “colors” our interpretation of ethnic status, take a peek at these kids:
http://www.afrikaansealbinos.nl/Images/thumbBIG_moederkind.jpg
http://www.afrikaansealbinos.nl/Images/thumbBIG_Three%20Schoolkids.jpg
http://www.afrikaansealbinos.nl/Images/thumbBIG_Sherif%20Buba%20met%20zijn%20moeder.jpg
The pictures are all from an organization that is trying to cut down on skin cancer in albino people in Africa by passing out free sunblock (I think all of these photos were taken in Senegal). I think most Americans would say they look a bit odd (maybe not the first kid, she’s a cutie), but probably wouldn’t immediately guess that they are “black”.
JRB
I looked at both pictures, and neither seems to have significanty black facial features. Actually, I think both lack them. They don’t even have a really dark skin. Tiger Woods does have a larger nose than an european, but that’s the only black feature I could notice. Maybe the hair, but since in both pictures they are very short, you can’t tell whether they’re curly.
If I hadn’t known who Obama was and that he was black, I would have guessed Indian, or maybe Egyptian, on the basis of the picture you linked to.
Ahh! I had a childhood friend who looked exactly like the girl in the first link. White mom, black dad, and her brother and sister looked black.