Burn Gorman

This somewhat lengthy blog post on race and linguistics is my favorite response to those who think that someone looks a certain nationality.

On Not Being a Mexican
I have a confession to make: I am not really a Mexican.

Therefore, to all those I have misled, confused, or outright lied to by claiming to be Mexican, I apologize.

There’s more: I also am not Asian, Native American, Filipino, Chinese, Arabic, Pacific Islander, or Mulatto. Though the constant collisions of my ambiguous features and other people’s assumptions allow me to regularly masquerade as if I were.

Usually, we tend to think of our personal racial, ethnic, or cultural identity as something static, not a variable to be tweaked or something we can simply mix and match as we would a week’s worth of camisétas. But I am frequently offered opportunities to engage in guerrilla sociology, and find it impossible to resist the urge to play along.

If an inadvertent ‘research assistant’ asks me: “So you’re Asian, right?” or “are you Chinese?” and I don’t feel like explaining myself or trying to educate my curious and often well-intentioned interlocutor, I’ll simply agree to whatever the current assessment of my ethnicity happens to be. This has led to many fascinating and entertaining situations.

When I hear musings about my ethnic status secondhand, the results are even more colorful.

Example: My friend Lilli was walking to lunch with a co-worker, and the topic of my heritage somehow came up. She was relating to him that I am often confused for another racially-ambiguous, mutual friend who happens to be half-black and half-white—what people call a mulatto in much of South America. At this point her supportive colleague became incredulous, and jumping to my defense, said:

“That’s just stupid! I mean, Jason is clearly from the Pacific Rim!”

I am not, actually.

My second example is a bit more sobering. For eight years I worked as a touring musician and composer. One particular evening, Lesley, one of our vocalists, said her aunt was coming to the show. Lesley’s aunt was moved by a piece that I had written, entitled “Lullaby,” a showy classical fugue. After the performance, Lesley relayed an interaction she had in which her aunt informed her:

“I really enjoyed that beautiful composition by the Asian guy in your band.”

Lesley laughed and corrected her aunt: “I’m glad you liked the tune, but Jason isn’t Asian. He’s Mexican.”

“Mexican!?” her aunt replied confusedly, then exclaimed, “I didn’t think Mexicans could write music like that!”

Lesley’s aunt had obviously never heard of Silvestre Revueltas, or Felipe Villanueva. What kind of music does she believe we “Mexicans” are limited to creating?

In the face of such disrespect, I began to wear my Mexican-ness as a badge of honor. It was preferable, though incorrect, to the Hispanic and Latino monikers which I found insipid, and to the pretentious, militant, Chicano label, which I will deal with in a moment, but first some background.

Apparently, Ethnic Obfuscation Has a Rich History in My Family

I inherited much of my identity crisis from my family, which has puzzling and contradictory views of itself. No one seems to agree on what we are.

My Spanish-speaking grandparents often joked about Mexicans and regularly referred to them as mujáos, a term which translates loosely as “wetbacks.” A pejorative for people who come illegally to the United States by swimming across the Rio Grande river.

My family has been in the Southwest United States—New Mexico and Texas—before it was part of the union. We didn’t cross the border between the U.S. and Mexico so much as the border crossed us in 1848—on my Dad’s side of the family at least.

After much searching, I was able to trace, though inconclusively, only one ancestor back to Spain: my maternal great-great-great grandmother. According to what I could piece together from apocryphal family legends, she was the wife of a French officer that ended up in Mexico after Napoleon III’s invasion of the region in 1862. My maternal grandmother’s maiden name is Lovis, which comes from the above mentioned Napoleonic Frenchman. “Lovis” is a corruption of the French “Louis”, as in King Louis the XIV. The letter “U” in colonial times was often written as “V.” You can still see the word “justice” spelled “jvstice” on many old federal buildings.

My mother’s maiden name is Branson. Her great-grandmother, Natavidad Montoya, had children with Anglo man. He disappeared, never to be seen again, shortly after fathering my grandfather John M. Branson. John was raised near Marfa, Texas in a Spanish-speaking household. He served in the Navy during World War II, as a sailor on the USS Saratoga. Like me, he was regularly quizzed about his ethnicity, and when he was he usually said he was Greek.

Apparently ethnic obfuscation has a rich history in my family.

According to my grandmother, Grandpa was trying to dodge the rampant discrimination suffered by Mexicans in the military. If they thought he was a Mexican, they would surely stick him with the undignified latrine and kitchen work.

My mother was born with long, straight black hair, brown eyes, and a dark complexion. Her teachers and schoolmates teased her and called her Geronimo and Pocohantas, thinking she was an ‘Indian’. This was long before the advent of the politically correct term “Native American”.

Mom, with her tall, lean figure, and habit of wearing braids, certainly looked the part. One of my favorite stories describes how she came to have her distinctive chipped-tooth smile.

She and her docile younger brother were walking home from school one day when a pack of white children set upon them, throwing rocks and shouting: “Dirty Mexicans!” One boy, whom my mom recognized as the son of a local police officer, threw a stone and hit my mom square in the mouth, chipping her front tooth. Furious, my mom charged the scoundrel, punched him to the ground, and preceded to beat the tar out of him. Once my mom had her fill, the kid ran home, crying and threatening her saying:

“My dad is going to arrest you!”

Terrified they were going end up in jail or worse, my mom and uncle ran home and hid. Later they found out the boy did indeed tell his father, but instead of arresting my mom, he punished his son: for getting whupped on by a girl!

My father, in contrast, is a shorter, stocky man with green eyes and a very pale complexion—thankfully I inherited my mom’s good looks and tall stature. As a young boy my father even had blond hair. This raised suspicions among the other children in his mostly Mexican neighborhood. They dubbed him “El Alemán” (the German). They were surprised to discover that not only did he speak fluent Spanish, he did not yet speak any English.

Both my mother and father attended Catholic grade schools in Carlsbad, New Mexico, and they related that nuns routinely punished children for speaking Spanish by beating them with rulers or forcing them to stand holding bars of soap in their mouths.

To spare my sister and me such humiliations, our parents raised us speaking only English. My grandmother, for similar reasons, raised her younger children such as my mom, as monoglots, though they all managed to pick up some Spanish anyway from their friends.

Shortly before my paternal grandfather died I asked him and his wife what they thought we were.

He said:

“We are espánish.”

His wife answered:

“We are white, but also espánish.”

Linguistic digression:

In colloquial American Hispanic conversation one often hears an /e/ sound before adopted English words beginning with “S”, for example “esóup”, “espécial” and “eStár Wars”. This process of systematically adding an extra syllable to words I would later learn—when I minored in applied linguistics—is called epenthesis.

Spanish does not tolerate clusters in words which begin with an /s/, and is well known for adding /e/ to such words, e.g., “spice” => espécia , and “stress” => estrés .

Adopted words tend to be epenthesized with /e/ because /e/ is typically the most commonly occurring vowel before word initial sC- clusters in Spanish.

White?

I never considered that I could possibly be white, mainly because I am obviously brown, even after living in the Pacific Northwest for ten years.

My mom is one of five sisters. Most of them married white men. My mom did not, so when the punnet-square arithmetic dealt out my phenotype, I was the only tawny kid among the children in my immediate age group. My closest cousins looked white, acted white, and passed for white. With their fathers’ Anglo last names, they were white as far as anyone could tell. I was not. I had dark-brown skin and a Spanish last name. Where I come from, that meant you were something other than white.

In my provincial, New Mexican high school, things were racially segregated ever-so-slightly-less than how I hear they are in prison, and when the chips fell and lines were drawn, it was clear that whatever I was—it was not white.

Now this isn’t to say that there is something wrong with being white. My daughter is half white; Some of my best friends are white—actually, all of my best friends are white. (Wait, do Jews count as white? I forget. If they don’t, then most of my best friends aren’t white, they’re Jewish. What the hell does it mean to be “white” anyway?)

Some of my earliest memories are of sitting with two of my half-breed cousins and disconcertingly listening to them share racist jokes (with respect to Mexicans and African Americans). Most of the ‘jokes’ are too offensive for me to share here.

One punchline involved a Texan kicking a Mexican out of a moving airplane whilst shouting “Remember the Alamo!”

Hearing these jokes may have been the first time that I was conscious that I was not white, of the concept of “race” in general, and that there is, supposedly, a qualitative difference between races.

As a child, these were distinctions that seemed to carry great weight. I also felt confused that members of my own family were disparaging me—and by logical entailment—their own mothers.

I often heard my cousins advertising that they were only “half Mexican,” part French, or simply white.

What was baffling to me, as a child, was that I saw these same cousins playing all sides of the race game; downplaying their Hispanicity one moment and bragging about it with pride the next. I would see them sharing racist jokes with one white friend, then beating up a different white kid who had insulted them for being Mexican. Apparently It was okay for my mixed cousins to insult Mexicans, but not okay for a white kid to say the exact same thing they themselves had moments before.

I suspect it was by observing these social dynamics that I acquired a certain fluidity and pragmatism regarding my own ethnicity.

Was My Family Racist? Self hating?

These are murky waters, but by my liberal definition I conclude that yes, most members of my family fall somewhere on the bigotry spectrum.

By bigoted, I mean that most of my family—white, mixed, and Latino folks, believe and try to impart to their children that there is a non-trivial difference between black people and us—whatever we are. Nearly all are also homophobic.

My mother and father both, on separate occasions, told me:

“Don’t you bring home a mayáte as a girlfriend.”

Mayáte, is a Spanish word for “dung beetle” and is roughly equivalent in awfulness to the “N word” in English. Even my sweet, old grandmother, who is one of the most kind and loving people otherwise, is definitely a bigot in this regard. She would say when I was watching break-dancing on MTV, “Why do they always have all those mayátes on TV now meijó?” She also repeated the admonitions against inter-racial dating.

I don’t ever remember anyone in my family openly advocating violence against other races, but they did seem to favor a certain degree of separation between cultures. Not only did they not advocate mistreatment, but they displayed active hospitality. I remember many instances of congenial interactions between my relatives and African Americans. My father, a Volkswagen mechanic, was always fair and kind to his black customers. My grandma would strike up small talk with older black ladies at the grocery store or church, and I remember seeing both of my grandfathers at different times sitting on their respective porches, drinking a beer, or sharing stories with old black men.

I never understood why my grandpa would have such a close friend he would not invite inside to join us for dinner, though my grandma would sometimes wrap him up a burrito to take home!

The racism in my family consisted mostly in talking behind people’s backs and in encouraging the children not to engage in interbreeding. This fear was openly expressed from all sides in my community. A good drinking buddy of my dad’s, a kind, white Vietnam veteran, was also the father of my little sister’s best friend. He told my mom he’d be disappointed if his daughter married a Mexican and was worried this would happen if the girls continued to be best friends. He cautioned my dad that my sister might likewise end up with a “gringo”.

All this paranoia is ironic because several of my cousins—in fact—had children with black men, and another adopted an African American girl—through a Catholic charity.

I married a white woman, and while my grandpa was visibly disappointed, my uncle congratulated me for—and there is no politically correct way to put this: “bagging” a white girl.

(Unsurprisingly, said Uncle has been divorced five times and now, in his late 60s, lives with his octogenarian mom.)

My aunt married, and has a son and daughter with, a Japanese man.

Although all of the above mentioned supposed miscegenation was much gossiped about, my family pretty much just shrugged and moved on. There was no disowning of daughters and their mixed offspring. The children from these relationships are loved and add another rich layer to my family’s confused muddle of an identity.

The incoherence of all the above, while better than abject, malevolent racism, is unsettling to me. I wish we would simply jettison the bigotry altogether. For better and worse though, that is my family. They are the maelstrom from which I emerged.

Hispanic?

I have discovered that if you do not admit to some label one will simply be assigned to you, and in my case quite arbitrarily.

My ex-wife and I were married in Lexington, Kentucky. Before our ceremony, we headed to the local courthouse to obtain our marriage license. When the woman at the desk handed us the paperwork to check over and sign, I was surprised to see that she had listed “White” for both of our races. When I politely corrected her, she addressed me in a thick southern accent, and said: “Well honey, the only two choices are white or black.”

To this day I still wish I made her check “Black”.

Similarly, I was shocked when looking upon my daughter’s freshly-minted birth certificate to see that it also listed BOTH of her parents as White.

When I asked our naturopathic pediatrician why he registered me as such, he nervously responded that he: “Couldn’t tell what I was and was too embarrassed to ask.” This error took much engagement with bureaucracy to undo and replace with the somewhat more precise designation: Hispanic.

“Hispanic,” by the way, is a term invented ad hoc by the Nixon administration for the 1970 census. Nixon sought to unify the diverse Spanish speaking demographic under one category while simultaneously creating a partition to distinguish them from the majority ‘white’ populace.

Of course, “white” is also an amorphous term used to unite diverse peoples for political ends. People once excluded from “whiteness,” such as Greeks, the Irish, and Italians, now have become white. Nixon’s camp also created the blanket “Asian” ethnic group.

Personally, I am hesitant to claim membership in a clan for which Richard Nixon is the founding patriarch!

Chicano?

In college I learned that to call yourself Spanish or Hispanic, at least in certain hyper-politically-active circles, was to face the Don’t-Call-Us “Spanish” Inquisition.

I discovered this during my stint at the University of New Mexico where I briefly participated in MECHA (the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanos de Aztlán).

MECHA is a political organization born out of the Zoot-Suit Riots and Chicano movement of the late 1960’s. Most people have heard of the Black Panthers; these were the Brown Berets. According to my MECHA peers, “Spanish” is what self-hating Mexicans who want to be white call themselves. In their opinion, “Hispanic” is the recitation of the Latino bourgeoisie who identify more with the marauding and genocidal Spaniards than with the Natives they raped and interbred with. My zealous colleagues were incensed that some would choose to forget and disown those indigenous women whose blood still flows in our veins and for whom we can thank for our swarthy complexions—a perspective I certainly sympathize with.

My politically engaged comrades were adamant: the correct thing to call ourselves was Chicano. The word, which is purported to derive from the indigenous Nahuatl language of the Mexican peninsula, was chosen to distinguish people of Latin American descent who affirm a non-Anglo identity.

I certainly did not want to be a Mexican version of what Malcolm X called: “a house Negro,” so I tried the “Chicano” label on for size.

There was a problem here too, as not only did I not speak Spanish, but my Chicano cohorts also found it distasteful that I was a vegetarian, a Buddhist, and married to a white woman. I didn’t like the ‘right’ kinds of music, and worst of all: I preferred falafel, and sushi to menudo, and enchiladas.

My experience in the Chicano movement felt isolating, insular, and separatist.

Though sympathetic to many Chicano issues, I wanted the freedom to listen to whatever music, read whatever books, eat whatever food, and—importantly— to have sex with whomever I chose, without first having to check for a proper Chicano pedigree.

I am proud of my ancestry, love the way I look, and am excited to learn Spanish, Hell—I even play the motherfuckin Guitarrón!— but I refuse to limit my belongingness to one corner of the planet or my mind to the riches of a single culture. I want it all.

Mexican?

I have, of course, in the interest of brevity, or just out of habit, as I alluded to in the introduction to this essay—said I was Mexican.

Unfortunately and far-too-often, I have realized that the person inquiring of my heritage was disappointed by my answer.

“You’re Mexican?” They often said (the subtext reading):

“I thought you were more interesting than that.”

Some went as far as to ask:

“Are you sure you’re a Mexican? You really look Asian.”

I have twice heard:

“But you’re so tall! Mexicans are all short.”

Another said: “I think you might be half black,”

As if I should reconsider my own assessment of myself in favor of their ethnographic expertise.

Occurrences like these fascinate me. People can be quite oblivious to how insulting and demeaning their words are. To my younger self, the above affronts just made me want to shout my Mexican-ness from the rooftops! To celebrate it. My somewhat-more-cool-headed adult self, however, values accuracy and nuance over antagonism. Pursuant to this:

Mexican or Mexicáno generally refers to:

An immigrant from, or native of, the nation of Mexico.

Those who affiliate themselves with a Mexican national or cultural identity.

I have never lived in the country of Mexico, and neither have my parents or grandparents. All of my immediate ancestors were born and raised in the Southwestern United States—as American citizens. We have always identified proudly as American. We had no Mexican national identity whatsoever.

What my family does have that sets us apart from mainstream America, is our Spanish language and Catholic religion: features common to both Mexico, New Mexico, and to almost every other nation south of the United states. Mexico is merely the nation that borders us.

New Mexico has evolved its own cultural identity. Our food, speech, and music are quite distinct from that of our Mexican friends to the South. It is this uniquely New Mexican culture to which I belong, not that of Mexico proper. I don’t speak the language or eat the same food. The cultural nuances, taboos, and presentiments endemic to Mexico just don’t register for me.

Further, when happened I to mention being Mexican in the presence of real Mexicános, they laughed at me! They would ask (in Spanish):

“Where are you from?” (¿De dónde eres?)

“Nuévo Mexíco,“

I would answer. Then they would laugh harder and say:

“It’s true! Americans really do think New Mexico is part of Mexico!”

Mestízo?

I have found one word that I do comfortably identify with. That word is mestízo.

Mestízo is a word that was used by the early Spanish colonists in Latin America and the Philippines to describe persons of mixed Spanish and indigenous descent. Mestízos had fewer rights than native born Spaniards and “creóles” (people born in colonies to parents who were both European) but more rights than African or indigenous people.

I discovered that in Spanish there are very precise linguistic distinctions made regarding race. For example, mullátto, refers to a person with one European parent and one of black African descent. A choló meant you had one mestízo and one indio (indigenous) parent. For every degree of separation from a “pure” Spaniard, it seems a new word and social stature was differentiated. This is in stark contrast to the “one-drop rule” in the plantation-era United States, where if a person had “one drop of black blood” they were considered black under the law.

In Mexico, meztízos soon became the majority ethnicity and due to widespread interbreeding it became impossible to keep track of who was what and the caste system collapsed. I find that strangely reassuring:

I’d like to believe that we can just fuck our way out of our racist tendencies.

The term meztízo embodies much of the tension I feel in myself, and I appreciate its roots in Spanish colonialism and attendant interbreeding—a bloody history that brought me into being and bequeathed to me this identity which I now ponder. I like the idea of reclaiming the word mestízo with pride. So if somebody asks me today what I am, I confidently say, “mestízo,” then they, embarrassed to have never heard the term, quickly move on to the next topic of conversation.

Zelig

I am 6’2” tall, I have black hair and brown, almond-shaped eyes, and I become incredibly dark given enough exposure to sunshine. When surrounded by other similarly-skinned people I tend to blend in. My appearance varies dramatically with different facial hair configurations, hairstyle, and clothing.

Being Mr. Racially-Indeterminate has its positive sides. Sometimes I receive preferential treatment instead of discrimination.

Once, at a sushi restaurant in Texas, the host asked me if I spoke Japanese. I said no, and he smiled and said it was a shame that the “younger generation” was abandoning the mother tongue. He asked if I wanted to learn, and I honestly said I’d love to, He was touched, and taught me a few phrases. The nice guy didn’t bother to confirm if I was, in fact, of Japanese descent.

I have been confused for an Ethiopian of all things, in an Ethiopian restaurant, by the hostess, who complimented me on the way I eschewed spoon and fork and instead ate my meal the traditional manner using the spongy injera bread as a utensil.

She said: “I thought you looked part Ethiopian!”

I didn’t have the heart to tell her we Mexi-Chicano-Spaniards use our tortillas as utensils as well.

So what is it like being so often misapprehended?

I feel as if I am a real life version of Leonard in the Woody Allen film “Zelig”, which chronicles the life of a man who is afflicted with a strange chameleon-like disorder that causes him to resemble whatever people, of whatever race and socioeconomic class, that he is surrounded by. Like he, I am often privy to—usually brief—unedited, insider’s perspectives of certain cultures I would otherwise not be, and I have witnessed first-hand how slippery and frail our notions of race and culture are.

What’s in a Label?

By approaching my circumstances and family history as an experiment I have gained much insight into the stratification which splinters our societies.

My conclusion? The labels and categories we use to divide ourselves from each other are vacuous human constructions, impotent of all power save for that which we imbue them with.

If we weren’t so attached to our separation, we could quite easily cast such categories aside. Whether we choose to call ourselves white, Mexican, Klingon, or Esperanto, is, to a large degree, artificial and arbitrary. This being said, we currently do give a tremendous amount power to these fictions. People definitely perceive, and interact differently with me depending what they believe I am.

In spite of this there is much hope.

I have been in mosques with Muslims, Arab and otherwise; in synagogues with Sephardic Jews; Spanish, and Portuguese Catholic churches, and Japanese, Zen-Buddhist temples. I have walked the working-class neighborhoods of Lisbon, Athens, and the Turkish neighborhoods of Hamburg without seeming at all out of place, and:

Until that moment when I open my mouth to speak, and the illusion is promptly dispelled by a revealing shibboleth, it is beautiful to feel like I belong to the whole world.

My twelve-year-old daughter seems happily oblivious to matters of race, and is baffled, incredulous, and embarrassed by these stories I have just shared with you here.

As Philosopher Sam Harris wisely said:

“Our children will be embarrassed by our own bigotry as we are of our parent’s, and that, in and of itself, is progress.”

Wow, what an incredible post.
That was a lot of reading but it was well worth it. Thanks.
Being bi-racial myself, there is so much in your post I identify with.
This was a real education regarding , gee what term use, Spanish speaking people.
Being in Florida, I work with a lot of Spanish speakers and your post was a real education.
Luckily growing up, both sides of my parents family and all relatives embraced the relationship, marriage and children.
Growing up in middle class suburbs, ran with the neighborhood "white" children and was just one of the gang.
1st experience with a parents racism. Huge Baseball fan growing up, totally color blind. I had pictures of all my black and white heroes on my bedroom wall, Willie Mays, Roberto Clemente, Frank Robinson ect. My mother wasn't thrilled by the black players on my wall and said so but the pictures stayed up.
Actually pretty minor racism. Mom grew up admiring Gandhi so she had a lot of respect for MLK.
I do get those questioning looks trying to figure out where I am from.
I get assumptions such as being approached by a Spanish speaker.
The choices for race on paperwork has really expanded as I have grown older.
Younger, had to choose white or Asian, hmm, flip a coin.
Lately have seen different versions of bi-racial.
Maybe instead of a mixed salad, we are becoming a melting pot.

Quote: Pacomartin

Always was fond of Eve Myles

99% of her pics have her mouth closed.
I wonder why.

Quote: Fleastiff

My twelve-year-old daughter seems happily oblivious to matters of race,”

I hear this a lot lately. It's meaningless.
I was oblivious to matters of race when
I graduated from HS in the 60's, so what.
I never met a black or Latino or any other
race till I started working. Ditto for most
guys I knew. A lot of them got drafted
and man, did they change after boot camp.
They were full fledged racists over night.

People seem to think because kids are
not racists they never will be. Think again.

Quote: terapined

Wow, what an incredible post.
That was a lot of reading but it was well worth it. Thanks.

Thank you. I just want to make it clear that I can not write that well. Nor do I have a rich knowledge of linguistics or philosophy. That blog post is from Jason Flores formerly of Vagabond Opera, a PNW Jewish/Gypsy/Steampunk group that also toured the US and Europe. He is now a PhD candidate and professor of Philosophy specializing in the Sociology of Mathematics. I merely think its an interesting viewpoint and one that is expressed very well.

Quote: Fleastiff

Thank you. I just want to make it clear that I can not write that well. Nor do I have a rich knowledge of linguistics or philosophy. That blog post is from Jason Flores formerly of Vagabond Opera, a PNW Jewish/Gypsy/Steampunk group that also toured the US and Europe. He is now a PhD candidate and professor of Philosophy specializing in the Sociology of Mathematics. I merely think its an interesting viewpoint and one that is expressed very well.

I figured you had pasted that in ... did you not think others would assume you wrote it?

Quote: Fleastiff

Linguistic digression:
In colloquial American Hispanic conversation one often hears an /e/ sound before adopted English words beginning with “S”, for example “esóup”, “espécial” and “eStár Wars”. This process of systematically adding an extra syllable to words I would later learn—when I minored in applied linguistics—is called epenthesis.
Spanish does not tolerate clusters in words which begin with an /s/, and is well known for adding /e/ to such words, e.g., “spice” => espécia , and “stress” => estrés .
Adopted words tend to be epenthesized with /e/ because /e/ is typically the most commonly occurring vowel before word initial sC- clusters in Spanish.

My grandfather emigrated from Spain when he was 20, but always pronounced the e in front of the s until he died in his 90s.

Quote: Fleastiff

I have been confused for an Ethiopian of all things, in an Ethiopian restaurant, by the hostess, who complimented me on the way I eschewed spoon and fork and instead ate my meal the traditional manner using the spongy injera bread as a utensil.

She said: “I thought you looked part Ethiopian!”

I have been mistaken for Italian and a light skinned Ethiopian. I must conclude that there are so many ethnic types in Ethiopia, that even Ethiopians are not sure what an Ethiopian looks like.

Quote: Fleastiff

As Philosopher Sam Harris wisely said:
“Our children will be embarrassed by our own bigotry as we are of our parent’s, and that, in and of itself, is progress.”

The word "race" is in English from 16th century, but the modern meaning of "one of the great divisions of mankind based on physical peculiarities" is from 1774 . So the fully formulated concept that mankind could be neatly divided up into sub-species is relatively recent, while other physical differences (like brown and black hair) are considered relatively minor.

I point that out because while groups of people have always been aware and wary of different groups of people, the whole sub-species notion is relatively recent.

It sometimes seems difficult to understand that my grandparents (all dead now) grew up at a time when they honestly believed that different races had entirely distinct ancestry back to the dawn of man (or at least Noah's flood) . Marrying across racial lines according to my great uncle was exactly the same as inter-species mating.

Ethiopians pronounce it Eeethyope-ya
and they say it real fast.

Quote: Evenbob

99% of her pics have her mouth closed.

The gap toothed look has always been more popular in Europe than the USA. These women obviously have enough money to afford dentists.Sylvie Vartan was one of the most successful French female singers in the 1960's.

It looks hillbilly to me, always has.