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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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I think you're underestimating how much one can do with makeup. Among my siblings, me and my younger sister have brown hair, brown eyes, darker complexions, and at least with my sister I've seen her very convincingly go "mock Indian" with the right makeup/style/accessories (we're like around 5% Métis or whatever; multiple full-blood indigenous relatives from the early 19th century, by all accounts more than Ms Ste-Marie).

My older sisters are both fair, blonde, blue-eyed and would not pass muster as indigenous even though we all have the same parents and otherwise resemble each other strongly. Similarly Ste-Marie looks very much like her (fairer) brother

I feel like it's also a matter of accessories and context as well, for people of a kind of light-medium brown that could plausibly be from anywhere between Mediterreanean, most of the Arab world, most of Latin America etc.

If I see somebody who's about the right shade of brown dressed in an outfit that suggests an ethnicity, I'm generally not gonna fetch out the calipers and take them at face value

At least in terms of facial features, she looks like a lot of people in central Adriatic Italy or Albania.