toinette said:
think of this from a scienctific point of view. for research purposes, if you were trying to figure out if it was possible for black poeople to grow type 1 hair, would u include creoles in your sample??? no, because they have mixed ancestry. would you include a black latina??? maybe not because they are of mixed ancestry. african-americans and caribs??? we know the sotory on that one. nobody is sayign they arent black, but for the purposes of answerign your question you are gonna want a sample that is most representative of your target population, and those people just dont cut it. of the peope who do, subsaharan africans, i have never seen any with type 1 hair. maybe there are, show me a pic and i'll believe it.
If you think about the issue from a scientific basis you'll completely undermine what you are trying to research. There is no scientific basis for this concept of "for-real Blacks", or "Negroid Africans". The phenotypic diversity that people fixate on is simply a result of humans adapting to different environments. Actual genetic diversity is greatest within Africa, within the very regions that we're trying to stereotype as having the only "real" Black people. These people have adapted, changed, migrated and intermarried as have most communities of humans, such as the other African groups that are being deemed here as not Black enough. There are no, and have never been strict boundaries between populations, so there is nothing to guarantee that all sub-Saharan groups are only descended from ancestors that looked exactly as they look now.
If people from Somalia and Ethopia are not really Black because there has been some intermixture over the millenia with Arab groups, then Italians, Jews and Gypsies are not really White and should not have been included in the other discussion.
There is no biological/scientific basis for race at all. Race is a social construct. So to answer your question, yes I would consider African-Americans, Creoles, Afro-Latinas, etc to be Black because socially there are Black. The OP didn't ask if people knew of unmixed, Black, sub-Saharan Africans with type 1 hair, she just asked about Blacks period. So if individuals in these groups have the ability to grow type 1 hair, then I would say, yes there are Black people that have that type of hair. I don't believe in this idea of quintessential Blacks, to me I'm just as Black as an individual from the Congo. They obviously have greater African ancestry then I (;-)) but IMO "Blackness" is not dependent on blood quantification, its useless (to me) to go digging through someone's family tree to try and gauge how Black they are. Someone can't be more Black than someone else, Black is Black.
Also, for those against the idea of Black being inclusive (one-drop rule), what would happen to the Black community if all those who weren't considered Black enough were told they couldn't be Black anymore? In the Western Hemisphere there basically wouldn't be a Black community anymore. I think its a slap in the face to those who came before us to create these restrictions on who is or isn't a real Black person given that they struggled to make things better for all people of African descent. In the US at least, many of our greatest leaders were individuals who could not boast of a completely unmixed African ancestry. IMHO Black is Black whether its blue or brown eyes, straight, curly or kinky hair, thin or full features.
(sorry this is so long)