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.
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.
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