Am I black?

Your other question is really interesting. I think some of it has to do with the spirit of why you go, if you go. Are you interested in the issues facing black journalists? Are you interested in black journalism, or issues of minority peoples? I take it that 'black' here means African or of African ancestry. If you are insterested in these topics, then I'd hope you'd be welcome, even if you're 'wholly' not mixed whatever. Just white, whatever that means in this context.

If you're doing this the try to get away with something, or having rejected a partial/complete ethnicity in the past only to claim it when there was something to be got, then that could be a different matter. Even then, I'm not sure there are any ethics involved whatsoever in questions of attending conferences of any sort, especially if you can get a boss to pay for it, or there might be drinks.

The previous is not at all facetious. What matters is whether you hurt someone personally by attending. Then I don't know.

i'm not a journalist!! >:0

But seriously, sorry to post such long comments, but once in college, I went to a step show at the Black Student Union (I'm not black). I was stopped at the door by students, who were black, demanding to know why I was there. I wanted to see the show. I made the mistake of saying "I'm meeting Tina ___." and I was. I knew they would know who she was, and they did. Unfortunately, that didn't help much. It turned out, they didn't think she should come either, even though she was black, she was too bougie for their taste. Eventually they let me in, and the show was really fun. But it was clear I wasn't welcome. I'm not entirely sure why. This was at a very liberal, mainly white school in New England. Maybe they thought my presence alone meant I was making fun of them. I wasn't. Maybe they were being racist. I don't know. That's a serious term that gets thrown around too much. It was a learning experience, at any rate.

And I didn't mean my previous post to be one of those, "I've been reverse discriminated against" [awk] tirades. It was just an illustration of how an action as seemingly neutral as simply being somewhere can hurt people's feelings. Even when it shouldn't.

Lara, wtf?

This post had left me curious.

As for penis size, my experience and some studies I've seen suggest that there is no noticeable difference in erect penis size between black and white men. Black men's penises apparently tend to be larger when flaccid, and to grow less when they get erections. In fact, penis size generally varies far, far more when flaccid than when erect.

Question at large: Am I black? Does the pope shit in the woods? And, if you want to know, I am extremely gifted in both length and girth and want to thank God and Bono for that!

Wow, open fucking racism. How unwelcome.

Nick: surely you're just ethnically part-Asian and culturally mostly-British. I don't know how strongly you identify with or participate in Asian culture -- my guess from knowing you here is not a whole lot. But as far as the people sending you the invitation know, you could identify yourself as Asian more strongly than white. And organizing these things is sort of like organizing a political rally: they want to be really inclusive and get everyone under the tent.

And Skottie's right about going. If you went, that would imply you had some interest in issues for black/Asian journalists, which is the only point of the thing.

Whether or not I'm black was always some sort of weird issue when I was younger: lots of people wanted to say that being a recent immigrant, and from East Africa, somehow makes one not-black. Obviously there's a real distinction in there, between immigrated-Africans and descendent-of-slaves Africans, but clearly this doesn't make someone not-black: I don't think there are any common terms, at present, that distinguish between those two things.

Also, there are strains and racism between Asian and Afro-Caribbean communities as well. And between Hindu and Moslem within the Asian section, and so on.

most white people here lump Pakistanis, Indians, Egyptians, Palestinians, etc into a capacious "Arab" category

That's a bit of a problem then, isn't it? Considering some Arabs (i.e. Arabic speaking peoples) have skin colour which is indistinguishable from that of Europeans and ARE Catholics. I happen to live in an area of Melbourne with a sizeable Lebanese population so some of them are my neighbours.

The most well-known Parsee in the UK was Freddie Mercury. I don't think he was ever seen as a racial other by people of European descent in the UK. Taking an anglo-sounding name was probably the key. Indian Parsees have Iranian ancestory so they look more European than other Indian peoples. Nick, how do you think of yourself? How do you think that other people see you? Do people of South Asian descent see you as one of them?

While I agree with this in principle, we go back to the Gary Younge story: we all do have skin color and it's a useful identifying trait. If you were picking up a white guy at the airport in Ghana, but he didn't bother to tell you he was white, it's the same as someone not saying he was black in a mainly white country. I suppose you could say "I'll be wearing the paisley bell bottoms and the Seinfeld puffy shirt" by way of identifying oneself, but then the problem is, you'd always find yourself wearing an unfortunate ensemble whilst traveling.

Of course the problem is not identifying people by their skin color, but treating them differently because of it. Which is, of course, wrong, and it may be that it's a short trip from one to the other. As with so many things, it depends on how you mean it.

Speaking of which, what was this all about? Did I miss the joke, or is this just very, very bad?

kate:
Did your ex have a square head and had a pug face that looked like he was constantly chasing parked cars?

Ha - outside of that part of the family (maybe), I wouldn't have thought so. I mean I look more like my mother and am totally white (though someone on ILE, maybe Tom Millar, asked just on the basis of my photo and without knowing that my surname was Parsee, if I had Persian ancestry, which astounded me).

bully for you.

Prince of Persia roXors.

I think people should apply for anything that would help them towards their chosen career. The whole reason these programmes exist for journalists/media is specifically to combat a type of networking which is mainly done by privately educated white people with family in the business. Obviously there are smaller but also powerful Asian/Black networks coming along, but then you have to legislate for the people who haven't gone to day schools and Oxbridge wherever. Also if you fancy doing some writing on being unsure about where you are on the shades of black thing, might be interesting to go and check it out.

Also acc. to my friend Satinder (who has an MA in this stuff from Yale but was born in Southall), the whole axis of 'black' thing started because liberal members of the post-Colonial emigrant community (Africans, Indians, Jamaicans/West Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Chinese) identified black = previously oppressed by whites from a government near you and this concept really didn't begin to unravel until the mid-80s.

Where I think Americans get most confused, especially these days, is with the idea that Iranians, Iraqis, Afghans, etc. are not Arabs. Americans actually seem to have a lot of trouble with the idea that non-western countries have different ethnic groups.

What is race anyway?

PS... I'm still reeling from the all the ilXors who want to be in porno!

One thing Nabisco reminded me of... when she was an undergraduate at the State University of NY, my mother joined the African-American Students Association. My mother, (being white) in all innocence, assumed that because she was born in Africa, because she had spent over a third of her life in Africa, because her only surviving parent still lived there ... that that qualified her as being "African American". Boy, did she get some heat from the established members of the association, but in the end, they were forced by the university to allow her to join, or be disbarred as a racist organisation.

She said that it was really interesting because, instead of splitting down colour lines on issues, as one would expect, it split down lines of how recently people (or their families) had emigrated. My mother, time and time again, would find herself agreeing with first generation Nigerians and Zimbabweians, who would be completely in disagreement with the Americans. Although she was most definitely not-black she was incredibly more African.

Would it surprise you if I told you that, in my experience, they don't?

And I would really like to be able to call myself African sometimes.

Also - in SA, all Asians tend to get called Indians. This caused me some confusing moments when I got to the UK and I had to figure out that Indians are called Asians but the Chinese aren't.