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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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You can kind of make sense of it if you just suspend disbelief and pretend that in this fictional world skin color and other phenotypic racial characteristics are just a matter of complexion, and no more important to identity than is hair color among white Americans. So it is not any more unusual for a black mom to give birth to a white child than it is for a white brunette to give birth to a ginger child. (Although even this isn't great film making, because a film-maker shouldn't require any more suspension of belief than necessary, so better to just cast families that intuitively look like families).

But what grinds my gears is when the producers advertise the casting as "adding diversity and racial dynamics to the show which will make it more interesting", then halfway into the show when watching it you realize that they did not actually add racial diversity to the in-story universe, they simply added complexion. The fictional society is actually a post-racial one where the different racial phenotype does not actually matter. I end up very confused because I am coming in expecting race to be an issue, expecting it to be a difference that matters in story, waiting for the shoe to drop, but it never happens.

So it is not any more unusual for a black mom to give birth to a white child than it is for a white brunette to give birth to a ginger child.

Gingerness is caused by a single recessive gene which (in double dose) causes the production of pheomelanin instead of eumelanin, so it is as genetically significant as skin colour. The gene is associated with specific white ethnicities (Scots, Irish, Udmurts) and seeing it in someone not from those ethnicities is unusual. So it is not normal for a white brunette to give birth to a ginger child unless both her and her male partner have ancestry from one of those ethnicities.

When my wife gave birth to a ginger IVF baby (I have Irish ancestry, she thought she didn't) we had a DNA test done. The testing company was most confused as to why we were asking for a maternity test and mostly unconcerned about paternity. After discovering that the clinic hadn't made a mix-up, one of my wife's relatives admitted that an Irishman might have been involved somewhere in her family tree.