Black, or White? Or Both?

Whereas tomorrow we may see the birth of the first black president of U.S.A., I thought I could write something about racial issues in the USA.

Basically, the reason why I am writing this, is because that I noticed that African Americans, which I mean descendants of Africans who were traded to north America a few hundreds of years ago, look different from those recently immigrated from Africa. Well, my explanation was, food, climate, and some introduction of white European genes are responsible for these changes. These changes did not come overnight, but gradually.

But, when I look at Black celebrities, I noticed that more and more of them resemble white people. And of course, Obama is one of them. Excuse me but I think Obama is more of a celebrity than a real politician. But his 1/2 white blood seem to have appealed to many white voters. In fact, he is more white than black judging from his background, but he has “pretended” more to be black for various reasons. However I am not going into those. He simply has much more white European facial traits than most African Americans.

To name a few popular black celebrities, I can say the following possess more white traits than average black people: Halle Berry, T.I., Obama, Beyonce. In fact, Halle Berry and Obama are half white. Here is a list about racial backgrounds of some seemingly black celebrities. Most notably, Tiger Woods, is only 1/4 black. Although many people consider him black, his actual racial background is: one quarter black, one quarter Thai, one quarter Chinese, one eighth white, and one eighth American Indian. So this is actually very interesting.

So look at this Beyonce picture.

There have been many debates online about this “lighter” Beyonce picture. It is for L’Oreal commericial. I am not sure whether T.I. has background of other ethnics other than Black, but I think he looks a lot like a mixed.

Through google, I came across this article about black models on fashion magazine. Apparently this was rejected before someone called the editors racist. And this Kanyan model apparently look more black than most black American celebrities.

So what does this mean? I think it means that, white people accept black people more if their appearance resemble white more. For sure, to be real celebrities in the USA, you have to be liked by white people. Second, if some black person look more like white, they are more likely to be successful in the entertainment industry. And this could just be a beginning of this story, because I barely found any other web page that talks about this. Maybe I was not searching the right terms maybe people don’t care, or maybe black people stick together so much that even if someone is only 1/4 black, they are still black as long as they are dark skinned.