Post #250001 by Sneakytiki on Mon, Aug 21, 2006 1:18 AM

You are both right about the race of the LP covergirl, African Americans who have ancestry going back any significant amount of time in the Americas have a good portion of European American ancestry. That said I always believed it to be an African American woman with tortured straight hair. Just to take this post further off topic, almost half of all African Americans claim american Indian ancestry as well, and it is a little known fact that early on Indians were enslaved as workers as well as blacks. I have seen many black- Indian marriage records from the original colonies and though Jazz is credited as a black and sometimes black/white American invention, the creoles who started it often had as much Indian blood as they did black ancestry. Americans judge race by cultural rules. if half white/ half black ,than black, half Indian/ half white, than Indian, half black/ half Indian, than black, these rules are actually based on real laws from colonial times that said anyone with even an eighth black blood was colored and a half Indian was colored, but not a 1/4 Indian, you then had your rights as a white, of course this was in the Massachusettes charter, Southerners were either more extreme in their racism or more varied in their categorizations. Race is just a cultural construct. Sicilians are more closely related to African Moors than Norwegians, they are white due to sharing with Most Europeans a Judeo Christian, Roman influenced history. etc. etc.