Fun trick question. Most people fell into the skin color trap, but obviously not all "Africans" are dark skinned! In fact, you also have to account for South Africa, Egypt, and the rest of northern Africa. People might also assume that darker skin is assumed "African" because they think that dark skin is just unique to Africa. This is also not true. The native "aborigenes" of Austrailia are also dark-skinned!
So the answer is you can't, unless you are talking about a skin color versus an ethnographic indicator - two very differnt things!
Your question points out a problem of taxonomy applied to politics - often politics screws up science for its own twisted ends, resulting in mass-confusion.
The source of the problem is, of course, colonization and trying to sort everyone out into "camps." While there may be some people with good intentions of righting some past wrongs, it is far from perfect.
How about an only-slighly-different example?
"Latin-American"
This is completely confusing because it actually is composed of many, many racial subgroups such that the person may be more tinged white, black, brown, or orange. Hair color may vary wildly. It's also a cultural designation drawn from the latin language group, which means that quite a few people could be included unintentionally, causing the definition to blur to obscurity.
Now let's look at "white." In many ways this is just as bad. In one government survey, "white" was defined as "people descended from anywhere from Ireland to Pakistan." This, of course, neatly side-steps Russia, which has a vast racial diversity of its own, but still smacks of something silly when you consider the cultural diversity and inequality of everything in the described range!
Still, despite all the confusion, it's probably a slight improvement over what preceeded racism - the kind of nationalism that would keep the French and English at each others' throats for centuries on end. Considering how long that went on, I'd say that our maturing out of racism over the last 100 years has been something of an amazing growth spurt. It's in that context that you realize that people like MLK really do deserve a national holiday for accomplishing something on this side of miraculous.
Michael Jackson is African American. He has had many operations and that has turned his skin the color it is now. Are you serious about this question??
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Fun trick question. Most people fell into the skin color trap, but obviously not all "Africans" are dark skinned! In fact, you also have to account for South Africa, Egypt, and the rest of northern Africa. People might also assume that darker skin is assumed "African" because they think that dark skin is just unique to Africa. This is also not true. The native "aborigenes" of Austrailia are also dark-skinned!
So the answer is you can't, unless you are talking about a skin color versus an ethnographic indicator - two very differnt things!
Your question points out a problem of taxonomy applied to politics - often politics screws up science for its own twisted ends, resulting in mass-confusion.
The source of the problem is, of course, colonization and trying to sort everyone out into "camps." While there may be some people with good intentions of righting some past wrongs, it is far from perfect.
How about an only-slighly-different example?
"Latin-American"
This is completely confusing because it actually is composed of many, many racial subgroups such that the person may be more tinged white, black, brown, or orange. Hair color may vary wildly. It's also a cultural designation drawn from the latin language group, which means that quite a few people could be included unintentionally, causing the definition to blur to obscurity.
Now let's look at "white." In many ways this is just as bad. In one government survey, "white" was defined as "people descended from anywhere from Ireland to Pakistan." This, of course, neatly side-steps Russia, which has a vast racial diversity of its own, but still smacks of something silly when you consider the cultural diversity and inequality of everything in the described range!
Still, despite all the confusion, it's probably a slight improvement over what preceeded racism - the kind of nationalism that would keep the French and English at each others' throats for centuries on end. Considering how long that went on, I'd say that our maturing out of racism over the last 100 years has been something of an amazing growth spurt. It's in that context that you realize that people like MLK really do deserve a national holiday for accomplishing something on this side of miraculous.
Michael Jackson is African American. He has had many operations and that has turned his skin the color it is now. Are you serious about this question??
First of all I think this is a racial question because it really isnt that hard to tell the difference unless you have something wrong with you.
whites have white skin african americans mostly have dark skin
I am afraid that I dont understand the question
Whose white?
How do you define white?
um isnt the color of white and black kinda different?