Talk:Hypodescent

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[edit] Show Boat

"In the musical Show Boat an otherwise illegal marriage is made by sharing blood between white and black."

I cannot understand what this is trying to say. Can anybody clarify this? -- 14 October 2005

I wondered about that, too. But today I fortuitously came across a Straightdope article that describes the scene in question: What percentage of black parentage do you need to be considered black?I've updated the article. ThePedanticPrick 16:39, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Dawkins and the alleged biological basis for U.S.-style hypodescent

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, observes in passing that in the United States and England children with one "black" parent/grandparent/great-grandparent are consistently classified as "black" instead of "mixed race" or "white" or something else (402-403). He opines that this may be a cross-cultural practice with a biological basis; that perhaps humans are genetically wired to do this. See Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 401-02.

Dawkins's theory is demonstrably false. In Latin America, people of mixed race are not classified as "black" by default.

I am also skeptical about the claim that the English classify mixed race people the same way as Americans. That should be double-checked. FilipeS 12:44, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

"Although mulattos and Blasians are both half Black, only the former are generally percieved as Black, while Blasians such as Tiger Woods are not forced to self-identify as Black." - I presume this quote is talking about in the US, because mulattos in Canada are not generally perceived as black, and based on other articles, it seems this statement isn't true in Brazil either. I've added the US-globalize tag till this is fixed. Baiter 19:21, 26 November 2006 (UTC)