A sports broadcaster said this morning that the upcoming Superbowl is the first to have two black quarterbacks starting. I was reminded of Mitchner’s book Caribbean wherein the racial categorizing ideas of one French slave owner of Haiti were described. A black was said to be anyone to have 1/256% African black ancestry.
All-Pro Reels from District of Columbia, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Having painted hundreds of buildings over the years I tend to object with calling a color something other than what it is. Patrick Mahomes’ skin simply isn’t black. Wal-mart paint departments ( I am not making a recommendation here) generally have laser paint color identifiers that can detect the angstrom wavelengths of light reflect off a color sample fairly accurately. If the Walton group that bought the Denver Broncos used their paint sample analyzer on Patrick Mahomes I am certain that it would not report the finding ‘black’.
In my opinion it is wrong to continue to use slave-era color generalities for television analysis classifications of players. If a player if coffee with cream colored the sportscaster should say that the Superbowl is the first to have a coffee colored with cream quarterback vs a somewhat black quarterback.
Creamed coffee color is not the best term. I am sure the Wal-mart paint analysis laser would have a more accurate term. The genome of Americans with African black ancestry is 24% European and nearly 1% American Indian. Muhammad Ali was probably more than 50% Euro and perhaps was 75% Euro, Mahomes probably is more than 60% European ancestrally speaking, so why the inaccuracy anyway. Get the paint machine out there and sample everyone’s derm and get the HTML color code chart out for better verbal communication.
Garrison Gibson: books and blog 