Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2024 September 3

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September 3

Dark-skinned mixed black-white people

Is it possible that a mixed race black-white person can be dark-skinned? 86.130.217.84 (talk) 19:58, 3 September 2024 (UTC)

Yes, of course. Witness the furore about the speculation about the colour of the then-unborn child of Meghan and Harry. (Btw, for the life of me I still can't understand what that issue was all about. Harry is white, and Meghan has half-African ancestry, so zillions of people were already wondering about and talking about this very question. But for a member of the Royal Family to voice such a thought - shock! horror! How dare they! I have a lot of respect for Oprah, but she seemed to be the main culprit in fanning the flames of this confected outrage.)

The technical term is mulatto. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 20:20, 3 September 2024 (UTC)

I remember my black uncle and white aunt wondering about the colour of their unborn children. And tbh I didn't realise Meghan was black until I was told. Hey ho. DuncanHill (talk) 20:27, 3 September 2024 (UTC)

Barack Obama, with a white mother and a black father, is fairly dark-skinned. He would have been called "mulatto" in the old days, though that term has fallen out of favor (to say the least). Going farther back, Roy Campanella was mixed-race and dark-skinned. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:56, 4 September 2024 (UTC)

Agreed, don't say "mulatto" in London, it won't end well. Alansplodge (talk) 18:47, 4 September 2024 (UTC)

I can't keep up with what's deemed to be offensive today that wasn't offensive yesterday. Can anyone make a submission to the committee that makes these decisions? Is there any formal appeals process? We have this ridiculous cultural situation now where people feel constrained to avoid certain words because of their alleged innate offensiveness. I remember when "negro" was widely used by the African-American community; Martin Luther King Jr. used it all the time, and he wasn't about offending his own people. It was the standard expression, and it wasn't offensive, innately or in any other way. But somehow its very essence has magically changed, and now it's innately offensive. As for the N-word, we can't even say the word that "N-word" represents, not even in some theoretical context where nobody is using it in reference to anybody else.

Get this: there is no such thing as a word that is inherently offensive. Some people get offended by certain words, while others don't have that experience of those exact same words.

The other aspect of the cultural thing is that for someone to be offended by something someone else says has become a fate worse than death, so we must all weave our way gingerly through the cultural and linguistic minefield we've created, to ensure that never happens. People are dying in wars and famines everywhere, kids are getting massacred in schools every day, DJT was elected president - there's no end of these disasters. How come people don't get mightily offended by any of that; offended enough to actually do something to change them? I guess that all seems too hard, so we stick to what we can manage (whether we should manage them seems never to be considered). We've become exactly like the Nazi book-burners and the Index of Prohibited Books, except we're all to some degree complicit in creating these Regimes of Fear and then making sure we keep ourselves under own thumbs. Neat trick that: self-repression in an age where self-expression is lauded as the sine qua non of what human life is all about. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:08, 4 September 2024 (UTC)

The solution is simple: Consideration for others. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:10, 5 September 2024 (UTC)

Oh, certainly. The trouble is, the things we're enjoined to be considerate about, and the list of Words We Must Not Use, grow longer every day. Ultimately, we might end up with a wordless language. (something to brush up on while eating foodless sandwiches). -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 02:23, 5 September 2024 (UTC)

I assume you would be offended if someone calls you a moron. You may not be personally offended if you hear the term applied to someone else, but presumably it may diminish your respect for the speaker. But when American psychologist Henry H. Goddard coined the term in 1910 it was a technical, non-offensive term, meant for clinical use. The adjective dumb was likewise originally not offensive. Terms may become offensive through how they are used.

The censure that may be bestowed on someone using a non-PC term, unaware of its newly acquired non-PC status, usually does not come from someone who the term refers to, but from the self-appointed PC police. It is more productive to explain why a term is now considered offensive.  --Lambiam 23:42, 5 September 2024 (UTC)

It would be even more productive to explain how, societally, we've become addicted to being offended. The formula "That word is offensive, so I must be offended by its use, whether directed towards me or anyone else; and I must speak up" has become a sort of 11th Commandment. Also, to explain why being offended has become a fate worse than death. Put those together, and we've become addicted to a fate worse than death. Is it just because people can take legal action and potentially get millions of dollars just because someone said some nasty words to them? Is that how we're teaching our children to be resilient, and to focus on the things that matter? -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 20:34, 6 September 2024 (UTC)

Halle Berry, I believe, also has a blond mother. —Tamfang (talk) 18:33, 5 September 2024 (UTC)

Ahem: [1] AndyTheGrump (talk) 18:57, 4 September 2024 (UTC)

Fraternal twins. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:10, 5 September 2024 (UTC)

Following Human skin color § Melanin and genes and later sections, the genes that determine the amount of melanin produced (and other determiners of skin color) are somewhat scattered around the world, and combine with partial dominance. Assuming you're using a U.S.-based concept of race and color (and if I understand the articles correctly) one can have two light-skinned Europeans who carries a number of such alleles mate, and if the carried alleles all make it to the embryo, then the child can have significantly darker skin than both parents. SamuelRiv (talk) 16:35, 5 September 2024 (UTC)

@Lambiam: I knew this already, as one of my ancestors wrote a book on the subject which I read many years ago. [2]. I was rather delighted to see this blurb:

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.

[3]

Sort of nachas in reverse! 2.102.11.143 (talk) 15:14, 6 September 2024 (UTC)

For the law on this see Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2021 March 8#Why do Americans care so much about the British royals? 2.102.11.143 (talk) 16:40, 6 September 2024 (UTC)

The few dark-skinned mixed race actors/fictional characters I've noticed were... From Small Island, Hortense Roberts (Naomie Harris) who had a white father and Michael Jr (Hugh Quarshie) whose mother was white, Laura Harrier whose mother is of Polish and English descent and her Spider-Man: Homecoming character Liz who had a white father. 86.130.217.84 (talk) 18:24, 7 September 2024 (UTC)