Posted By: digdirkler
Re: Complexion and Culture/Country of Origin???
This is silly.
What is silly, even stupid, is TER's current use of "Ethnicity" as a Profile field. White? French? African American? German? Baltic? Those are ethnicities? THOSE ARE DESCRIPTORS THAT ARE SUPPOSED TO TELL US SOMETHING ** useful ** ABOUT WHO WE WILL MEET BCD. But those terms are full of ambiguities and inaccuracy.
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Some guys want to know something about appearance and associate peach colored skin with "white" and cocoa colored skin with "African American" BUT THAT IS NOT RELIABLE AT ALL! (As you say in your comments.) For the guys interested in appearance, give them an UNAMBIGUOUS color / complexion descriptor from a color chart (see above).
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Some guys are interested in cultural background and personality and language skills. "White" says NOTHING about any of that. She could be an uneducated Okie from Muskogee or an albino from Zimbabwe. Etc.. A cocoa colored Provider whose ancestors arrived in the US 100 years ago who grew up in Podunk, Middle America is almost certainly not "African" (no hyphenated -American) culturally. She probably speaks English very well and knows all the latest fads, movies and gossip. She is culturally American. An immigrant or first-generation Sub-Saharan African living in DC is less culturally "American" but it would be up to the reviewer to choose the best descriptor (English so-so; didn't know a bunch of common idioms; ... Country of origin: Africa and Culture: African. English excellent but accented; reads People magazine; can name all the judges on the SCOTUS ... Country of Origin: Africa but Culture: AMERICAN.)
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What do YOU think of the current "ethnicity" field? Why don't YOU suggest an improvement? As simple or complicated as you want. (You can suggest DNA-based genealogy testing, but that would be pretty useless as far as informing potential clients about the appearance and personality of that Provider.)
People are not randomly varied by skin tone.
Clients want to search Profiles and Reviews for a particular appearance and that includes complexion (color) or "SKIN TONE". Currently, the only way to come close to that is the ethnicity field. ADD A COMPLEXION FIELD AND AN UNAMBIGUOUS COLOR CHART!
Race is something that is easily detected from skeletons and from a swabs of cheek cells, and the DNA scans can even break down your percentages of each race if mixed, and subgroups within races. Telling me someone is Caramel from Brazil doesn't tell me if they are a tanned person from ancestors who lived in Northern Europe for thousands of years (white), or a person who's ancestors were from Japan (East Asian) or if their ancestors were from Sub-Saharan Africa and Europe (mixed white-black mulatto) or from the ruling castes in Punjab, or mestizo mixture of American Indian and White. Whereas one could look at all those persons and usually tell those deep ancestral backgrounds at a glance.
Recent cultural or geographic background is also misleading. People in the DC Metro of Sub-Saharan African ancestry (black) have HIV rates similar to Sub-Saharan Africa (very high on average) and those of Northern European or East Asian background (white and yellow) have rates similar to Northern Europe and East Asia ( low on average, except gays). Being from 'DC' says something real and important, but not the same thing as where your ancestors were from for 1,000 generations.
Race is real, not a social construct. Race is not skin deep, and skin color is only one part of it, though used as a simplified proxy naming system ('white' is easier then 'pinkish unless tanned' and also 'of European ancestry')
If you care to, please search for some of my other posts on this topic on S&P that actually discuss some of the things you mention.
-- Modified on 7/8/2017 6:11:27 AM
-- Modified on 7/8/2017 6:13:16 AM