Spoken by Eliot Chang, Asian-American comic:

[Victor Steinbok]

Actually, what got my attention is "West-Indian". I though "Caribbean"
is more PC these days... But UK use is different. And I am not sure
what's used "at home".

I suppose, he could have meant that she was of South Asian ancestry,
e.g., Indian or Tamil, but from from the West Indies as well.

     VS-)

On 1/28/2012 6:09 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
> "I used to date a West-Indian girl. She was from Trinidad. She was
> very dark-skinned. In fact, she _looked black_. When we went out,
> since she _looked black_ and I look how I look, racists didn't know
> who to confront first!"
>
>
> Last year, on this same program - Comedy Central Presents - a white
> comedian, discussing Obama's race, noted that major problems for white
> Americans are the fact that his father was a native of Kenya and that
> he himself wasn't born in the continental United States. "If his
> father had been a native of Chicago and he had been born in
> South-Central, we [white people] would *know* that he was black."
>
> "You have to be born in the United States to be 'black.'"
>
>
> That seems to be the way that Chang feels. The point of the bit hinged
> on the fact that *he* definitely is not white and his girlfriend
> *appeared to be black*, even though she was actually not, despite her
> visual affect/aspect, what with her not being an American.
>
> Is it generally the case that, for non-black Americans, the semantics
> of the concept, _black_, *necessarily* includes "born in the
> continental United States"?
>
> FWIW, I feel that, for some people, a person born in sub-Saharan
> Africa of sub-Saharan ancestry is not "black" in the same sense that a
> black American is "black."
>
> --
> -Wilson
> -----

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