The Americas are a special case when it comes to race, because very few of us are from here more recently than the last 100-odd years, a lot of us who did show up early-ish (particularly West African, West European and Southern Chinese) arrived around the same time, and we all interbred with each other and with various migratory native populations for a hundred-odd years before an even bigger influx of people from all over the world started pouring in. It all gets more 'special' when we consider that most of that interbreeding has taken place with Anglo-Saxon and Germanic people in power over everyone else, including, often enough, those with whom they were breeding. It gets even more 'special' when we consider the treatment of various people based on their placement on one side or the other of a wide, jagged, blurry line.
For now, terms like "black" and "white" have descriptive power over a sufficient proportion of the populace to retain some utility, but that utility is already dwindling in many areas where there are sufficient mixed-race (or effectively, raceless) populations or large enough communities of people who could perhaps be termed "black" or "white" (or Asian, Middle Eastern, etc) but for whom there are more prominent or specific signifiers, and more often, both.
Out of curiosity, Algonquin Blackfoot or Blackfoot Sioux (Lakota)? To the best of anyone's knowledge, my great-great-grandmother was Lakota Blackfoot.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jeff777
