Transracial Woman Under Fire in Spokane

[ApostateAbe]

RavenSky, do you think probability judgments of the ancestry of individuals can be made based on phenotypes? I am not asking about absolute certainties, but probabilities. Is it just completely random, completely open to question, no knowledge about race or geographic ancestry can be judged based on appearance?

As an illustration, let's say you were asked by someone who isn't trying to trick you to place a bet about which individual has a greater share of recent African ancestry as decided by a DNA test by 23andMe.com. You are given these two pictures and no other information:

Upon which individual do you place your bet?

 

[RavenSky]

You are NOT being given a photo with no other information. You are saying that Gabrielle Reece is lying about who her father is.

 

[ApostateAbe]

I take it you would place your money on the individual in the first picture, as you should. Now, given that reasonable bet, do the facts that Gabrielle Reece has very white skin, straight blonde hair, and blue eyes in combination make it (1) more likely, (2) equally likely, or (3) less likely that Gabrielle Reece is wrong (not necessarily lying, just wrong) about the race of her father? Choose one out of the three.

 

[RavenSky]

I take it you would place your money on the individual in the first picture, as you should. Now, given that reasonable bet, do the facts that Gabrielle Reece has very white skin, straight blonde hair, and blue eyes in combination make it (1) more likeley, (2) equally likely, or (3) less likely that Gabrielle Reece is wrong (not necessarily lying, just wrong) about the race of her father? Choose one out of the three.

No, sorry, you do not get to set up a strawman and attribute it to me any more than you get to state (based on a photo) that "Gabrielle Reece is wrong (not necessarily lying, just wrong) about the race of her father" when she has said publically that her father was black. When you produce ANY factual evidence that "Gabrielle Reece is wrong (not necessarily lying, just wrong) about the race of her father" then let me know. Until then, your racist opinions about Gabrielle Reece are just that - your racist opinions.

 

[ApostateAbe]

OK, where do you place your money, RavenSky? Don't let me misrepresent you. Represent yourself. Do you place your money on both individuals evenly?

 

[RavenSky]

If this woman told me that her father was a black man, and I had no other information about her, I would have no reason to call her a liar, or "mistaken".

 

[ApostateAbe]

Go ahead and place your bet, unless you need more time to think.

 

[RavenSky]

Go ahead and place your bet, unless you need more time to think.

I've answered your question. And I don't place bets on people's ethnic backgrounds. I believe what people tell me they are until I am given a fact-based reason not to. Why? Because, unlike you, I don't care what their ethnic background is so I don't need to call them liars because a self-identified black woman has blue eyes.

 

[ApostateAbe]

Such a bet would be an opportunity for easy winnings, but, OK, as you like.

 

[fromderinside]

Such a bet would be an opportunity for easy winnings, but, OK, as you like.

How many strawmen until they self combust?

Is the problem that she might be lying about an attribute she may not have even though she's obviously competent at her job? Is that attribute essential for here to have that job? Is this entire ethnic issue a gotcha?

One of those questions is true. Can you guess which one ApostateAbe?

 

[ApostateAbe]

fromderinside, to answer your questions: no, no and yes (not that I completely understand your questions). Feel free to answer the same challenge I constructed for RavenSky. Where do you place your money? First individual? Or second?

 

[fromderinside]

For me to reply to your question would an I'd be accepting one of your strawmen as competent. Please understand.

Thanks for playing.

 

[TSwizzle]

It depends, if she has mental health issues then perhaps I'd be more willing to indulge her fantasy. But if she is just flat out lying then I'd be a lot less gentle with my opinions. I suspect the former but I really don't care that much about it. Ho hum.

I think perhaps one could call her "differently sane" put there is a certain order and logic to her behavior and who are we to judge?

To me, she is the same "differently sane" as the god botherers. She's a Walter Mitty fantasist.

Heck, I bet she could lecture you for hours on white privilege without a hint of irony.

I don't think so.

 

[ApostateAbe]

The given gamble is a cognitive dissonance generator generally for anyone who thinks races are not biological. There is a community of thinkers who used to called themselves "race realists," a title which has become more of a slur so it is less popular among the advocates ("HBDer" is becoming the same), but the "realist" point seems accurate. The belief that races are not biological is kinda like staring directly at an elephant and saying, "What elephant? No elephant here." The realist says, "Um, yeah, that's an elephant."

 

[tantric]

i suppose i could be considered 'transracial'. my racial identity is based on being part of a group of extinct north american pygmies who are being reincarnated as mixed race children. the odd bit is that i believed this before i had my DNA scanned and it came back 2% subsaharan african - which has given me a great deal of material to use with my traditional deep south family. i was told my grandfather was 'one of those wild ass indians', which i assumed meant muscogee rather than the civilized cherokee, but now i suspect he was 'merely' high yella in hiding.

race is a cultural concept - my people call ourselves the 'real people' and everyone else the 'notpeople'. this is normal for hunter-gatherer and neolithic societies. we consider ourselves people and our neighbors dangerous beings, probably cannibals. of course, i'm crazy - racial identity isn't subject to postmodern interpretation. black, white, asian - these are facts of nature, right?

i started working on a system for racial identity based on modern concepts of biology. there were three roots, -gens, -pheno and -cult for genetics, appearance and culture. i would be 'weseurominbantugens' = west european minimal bantu genetics. then angloampheno and cosmocult = anglo american appearance, cosmopolitan culture. it was actually pretty nifty, but it was also newspeak. if it amuses y'all, we can start a thread and hash it out, just for shits and giggles.

 

[ApostateAbe]

i suppose i could be considered 'transracial'. my racial identity is based on being part of a group of extinct north american pygmies who are being reincarnated as mixed race children. the odd bit is that i believed this before i had my DNA scanned and it came back 2% subsaharan african - which has given me a great deal of material to use with my traditional deep south family. i was told my grandfather was 'one of those wild ass indians', which i assumed meant muscogee rather than the civilized cherokee, but now i suspect he was 'merely' high yella in hiding.

race is a cultural concept - my people call ourselves the 'real people' and everyone else the 'notpeople'. this is normal for hunter-gatherer and neolithic societies. we consider ourselves people and our neighbors dangerous beings, probably cannibals. of course, i'm crazy - racial identity isn't subject to postmodern interpretation. black, white, asian - these are facts of nature, right?

i started working on a system for racial identity based on modern concepts of biology. there were three roots, -gens, -pheno and -cult for genetics, appearance and culture. i would be 'weseurominbantugens' = west european minimal bantu genetics. then angloampheno and cosmocult = anglo american appearance, cosmopolitan culture. it was actually pretty nifty, but it was also newspeak. if it amuses y'all, we can start a thread and hash it out, just for shits and giggles.

Feel free! I would be interested.

 

[RavenSky]

ApostateAbe's inserting his hobbyhorse aside, I think the more interesting question is how much "black" do you have to be to be "black"?

What makes Fredi Washington, with her red hair and green eyes, "black" while Dr. Albert Johnston was "white" until he decided to say he was "black" and Carol Channing "white" until her book in 2002 while Ina Ray Hutton was "black" until she was 8-years old, then "white" until after she died with a niece who was always only "white"

 

[Bomb#20]

I wouldn't be that rude, but I am not talking to either of these women personally, and I think I have the right to make probability judgments informed by established knowledge of human genetics...

No, you really don't. Not when we are, in fact, discussing two specific individual women.

Yes, he really does. But thank you for clarifying your position on the right to think freely.

This isn't one of the six-bazillion pseudo-science threads you start. This is a political discussion about specific people.

Gabrielle Reece's biography states, and has always stated, that he father was afro-trinidadian. For you to instead insist that she "very plainly belongs to the white (Europe-descended) biological race" completely negates her father... or you are calling her a liar or "mistaken" or whatever other prettified way you want to choose to call her a liar.

This has gone too far. You are out of line. You are making a libelous personal attack on another poster. You have zero rational basis for repeatedly accusing ApostateAbe of calling Reece a liar when he has repeatedly made it clear that he simply thinks she is wrong. "Mistaken" is absolutely not a prettified way to call her a liar and you have no even half-way plausible reason to think it is. You are making an ad hominem argument with reckless disregard for the truth. You owe ApostateAbe an abject apology and a commitment to never behave this way again.

Incidentally, when Gabrielle Reece says her father was Afro-Trinidadian, that can mean quite a few different things, none of which involve Reece lying. It might mean:

1. She's adopted.

2. R.E. Reece was her stepfather but she regards him as her real father because he was the man who raised her when she was a child, unlike her absent biological father.

3. Her mother lied about who her father was.

4. Her mother had sex with more than one man during the relevant time frame, and guessed wrong about which one was her daughter's biological father.

5. R.E. Reece was not Afro-Trinidadian; but Gabrielle Reece, five at the time he died, wasn't competent to personally judge the matter when she knew him, so when she grew old enough to even know what the term meant she took her mother's word for it that he was Afro-Trinidadian.

6. R.E. Reece was Afro-Trinidadian going by the social conventions of 1970 Trinidad, but not by any reasonable biological criterion. "African" is not, in point of fact, a dominant gene. But it is depressingly common in many cultures to pretend it is.

Social interpretations of race in Trinidad and Tobago is often used to dictate who is of African descent, e.g. a person might appear "white" in appearance but may still be considered "black" based upon significant African ancestry. Mulatto, Zambo, Quadroon, or Octoroon were all racial terms used to measure the amount of African ancestry someone possessed in Trinidad and throughout Latin American and Caribbean history.
(Source)​

Based on the meager evidence presented in this thread, option 6 is the most probable account of what's going on. And in the event that R.E. Reece's ancestry was, for example, 1/8 African and 7/8 Caucasian, it would be perfectly reasonable both for Gabrielle Reece to have been told he was Afro-Trinidadian even though he would have appeared "white", and also for ApostateAbe to consider that categorization a mistake.

Tabloid journalism notwithstanding, being 1/16 black is not the same thing as being one of "16 Celebrities You Didn’t Know Were Black". A great great grandparent who was African does not metaphysically outweigh fifteen who weren't. One-drop rules are imbecilic.

So stop claiming ApostateAbe is calling Gabrielle Reece a liar. Now.

 

[Nice Squirrel]

Breaking news: Al Sharpton is a 13-year old Asian woman.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

I don't much care what race she wants to claim or identifies with; but given the high number of apparent lies on multiple topics (including police reports), she sounds like a nut... or her mother is.

In listening to this woman being interviewed I have no doubt she deeply and sincerely wishes to be perceived as Black by society, and inventing things like a Black father are a manifestation of that desire.

Calling people who wish to be perceived as Black insane does not strike me as particularly tolerant or progressive.

I don't think she wishes to be perceived as black.

I think she wishes to BE black. This is not as uncommon among white people as you would expect, nor is it uncommon for black people to sincerely wish they were white. And I think she wishes she was black because she genuinely wants to help black people overcome their difficulties and wants to be respected for doing so.

Racial politics in America being what they are, NEITHER wish is socially acceptable. Partly this is because white people pretending to be black is the LITERAL origin of the term "Jim Crow" and has a lot of white supremacist baggage attached to it, but mostly it's because nearly everyone agrees that pretending to be part of an ethnic group you don't belong to just for credibility's sake is a shitty thing to do.

Credibility is funny like that, and yes it sucks that you can be totally right about something and nobody will listen to you because you're the wrong KIND of person to have that sort of insight. THAT problem isn't limited to race relations; you can have the wrong education, the wrong gender, the wrong age, the wrong friends, the wrong political views, the wrong religion, the wrong family structure, the wrong sexual orientation, the wrong taste in music. Any one of which could COMPLETELY invalidate you in the eyes of academia even if your theories are 100% correct. And this in academia, whose denizens are supposed to know better; what chance do you have in the less formal field of race relations and civil rights activism?

The only way to get past these superficial disqualifiers is to build up a hard-earned reputation for excellence.

"He's not a woman, but he has done alot of work over the years on women's studies and income inequality, he's worked with woman's lib organizations, he's chaired committees with Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton and he won a Pulitzer for exposing the income gap at Sun Microsystems." <-- Credibility established.

"He's white, but he's spent several years working with American Indian tribes on social justice issues and worked as a consultant to the Iroquois Confederacy in that big lawsuit over gaming rights back in the 90s." <-- Credibility established

Dolezal didn't bother to establish that kind of credibility. She instead tried to claim the automatic +4 credibility boots one gets from being a black woman working for black civil rights. And maybe it's not fair that a white person has to work a lot harder to establish herself as an authority on the difficulties faced by minorities in America. But that's life.