OT: See there? It ain't just none of us!

[Wilson Gray]

>From the Harvard Gazette Online:

[Dominican anthropologist, Prof. Juan] Rodriguez ... cited the fifteen
kinds of hair texture that ranged _from "bueno" (good) for straight
hair to "malo" (bad) for kinky hair_ [officially-recognized for use on
Dominican national ID cards] .


To give the devil his due, FWIW IME, white people of whatever
nationality,  including United States, lack a clear understanding, are
not fully cognizant, of what feature, exactly, the distinction between
"good" hair and "bad" hair references.

The official stance in Santo Domingo is that the population is
essentially Native-American with trivial admixtures of European and
African, However, studies have shown that the Dominican population
averages, in the paternal line, 58% European and the rest African,
with a soupcon of Native-American. In the maternal line, Dominicans
average over 98% African, with a kiss of Native-American. That is,
from the point of view of the average American, Dominicans are, in
general, "Black/African-American," though a small subset might could
qualify as so-called "mixed," a distinction so meaningless that no
clearly-qualifying, well-known black American - Thurgood Marshall,
Mohammed Ali, Lena Horne, Joe Louis, Halle Berry, Cab Calloway, Kid of
Kid & Play, Frederick Douglass - has ever used it

And, just as in the U.S., the colored recognize, at the most casual
glance, in-group distinctions that the The Man doesn't give a second -
or even a first - thought to.

Prof. Rodriguez is pictured and, were I to pass him on the street, I'd
see only another black man of definitely more sub-Saharan African
ancestry than that of our beloved President. It's too bad that the
article doesn't mention where the professor is on the Dominican
"racial" spectrum.

--
-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"––a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
–Mark Twain

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