Benedict Cumberbach

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Edinburgh Black Cat said:
If he had any other obvious feature then yes, probably. It would depend who I was talking to though - would be more likely at work.
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Hmmm, how can I describe him? ;)

Charmless Man said:
People usually go by their parents/grandparents and usually it makes it fairly obvious what their immediate ethnic background is. Go with what they look like. If you make a mistake and it upsets them apologise and explain.



A shovel?
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we're talking about describing a hypothetical bloke at work. how the fck would I know where his gannie is from?
 
Cockney Mackem said:
The issue with the word coloured is that it has always had at least some negative connotations around it.

The South Africans (who during apartheid seemed to have used the programme options on their washing machine as the template for deciding on the status of their citizens) used Cape Coloureds as a category and moved them all into their own township.

And in the USA there had historically always been a trend for categorising exactly how much black someone had in them, with the assumption being the more white the better.

The picture became less clear when civil rights people set up the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People in the US, doing so at a time when it was very difficult to find a word to describe ethnic minorities that wasn't used by the white majority as an insult.

Since then it got some use as a word in this country when white people from the late sixties onwards noticed that black people were a bit cross about something and decided that everything would be fixed if they stopped calling them black and called them coloured instead. Except being called black wasn't the problem and black people didn't appreciate the assumption that the word black carried some sort of stigma.

Nowadays if someone uses the word coloured it's a bit cringe even if, as is often the case, no offence is intended.
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I worked in South Africa a few years ago and the mixed race lads took real offence at being referred to as black. They wanted to be known as coloured. They usually spoke Africaans as their main language too.
If people think it's complicated here (which I don't think it is), it's a minefield out there.
 
Sorry, but this is a total non story. Yet again the 'Coalition of the Permanently Outraged' are venting their spleen over what was quite clearly an innocent remark in what is a minefield of faux outrage.

A lot of folks need a slap round the head (in my humble opinion).
 
Horatio Pugwash said:
There was a woman on Radio 2 a few months back complaining that football commentators only ever mention the name of white players and not ethnic minorities!!
:lol:
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Should have told her it's because only white players can receive the ball. Might have brought a stroke on.

Cockney Mackem said:
My brother in law is black. My wife's best mate's boyfriend is black. If I were trying to point either of them out in a crowd and he was the only black bloke in a group, I would say the black bloke to save time. If the two of them were stood together and I wanted to point one of them out, I would say my brother in law is the taller one with the glasses.
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Ooo he's having ago at the disabled now. Why not just say he's the blackest (or less black) one? That's quicker than the glasses way. Or are you saying all blacks are the same colour? You racist.
 
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Sebasaurus II said:
Unfortunately that's not your decision to make. Non-white people don't really like being lumped into one big non-white group by white people. I can understand why.

I don't find anything offensive if it's used in a context I agree with.



I think you've missed my point.
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From a genetic perspective there are only two populations of skin pigmentation genes. AfRican and non African. It would be more accurate to refer to black and coloured for this particular allele
 
the flying graysons said:
From a genetic perspective there are only two populations of skin pigmentation genes. AfRican and non African. It would be more accurate to refer to black and coloured for this particular allele
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Off the top of my head I can give you three examples of genes involved in skin colour which associate with European and Asian populations differentially: OCA2, TYR and SLCA45A2.

That's without going into variation within those units of DNA (which I definitely can't remember).
 
Charmless Man said:
Off the top of my head I can give you three examples of genes involved in skin colour which associate with European and Asian populations differentially: OCA2, TYR and SLCA45A2.

That's without going into variation within those units of DNA (which I definitely can't remember).
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interesting that is at odds to something I read last week that claimed the light skin variant only arose once.
 
the flying graysons said:
interesting that is at odds to something I read last week that claimed the light skin variant only arose once.
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TYR SNPs and some data on their geographical distribution: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/projects/SNP/snp_ref.cgi?rs=1042602

Carries a Serine to Tyrosine mutation at position 192 which predominates in Europeans and is almost never observed in East Asians.

OCA2 SNPs - Histidine to Arginine at position 615 which predominates in Asian communities: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/projects/SNP/snp_ref.cgi?rs=1800414

One might conclude European and East Asian skin colour similarity is an example of convergent evolution rather than the ancestral state...
 
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