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Notes -
On the contrary, the HBD-curious faction of the right has a pretty sophisticated understanding of how to categorize people of various ancestries; many are bringing back old, but at one point widely used, terms like castiza, quadroon, mulatto, etc. Such people would see Zegler not as “brown” in some absolute sense, but rather as simply too brown to play a character named after how pale she’s supposed to be.
We can quibble about how “European” she is — although she apparently describes her paternal ancestry as “Polish”, “Zegler” doesn’t sound like a Polish surname to me, but rather like an Ashkenazi surname — but if she’d self-identified as basically white from an early age, and not made a big deal out of her partial Amerindian/Latino ancestry, I think most people would probably look at her, hear the name “Rachel Zegler” and think, “Yeah, that’s white enough for me.” If I knew nothing about her and you showed me a picture of her, I could imagine being persuaded that she’s Cypriot or Lebanese or something like that, which I would consider at least contingently white.
Obama is a tougher case because, as you note, people with African history have been set apart, legally, culturally, and otherwise, for so long in this country that Americans do still have a pretty keen eye for identifying who’s “black” and who isn’t. Obama’s not light enough to pass for “ethnically ambiguous”, let alone “white”, even though his level of European admixture is probably roughly the same as that of someone like, say, Rashida Jones, who is far more white- or -white-adjacent-passing.
That being said, Obama was not raised as black, did not have any connection or interaction at all with black culture until college (there were few black people in Hawaii, and none at all in Indonesia), and still decided that he was going to lean into his black identity. If he’d never gone to Occidental, never fallen in with black culture, and kept going by “Barry Obama”, I don’t think people would be very hung up on his African ancestry. He’d just be seen as some sort of “mixed” and people wouldn’t dwell on the specifics.
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