Varieties of BLACK

Resting yesterday alongside 819 Ramona St. on an afternoon walk, my helper Isaac and I noted once again that the building started life as Palo Alto’s first Black church. Black meaning African American, one of a number of uses for the racioethnic designator BLACK. As it happens, Isaac, from Fiji, is a Polynesian black person, with BLACK used to refer to people from the Polynesian islands (Tonga, Fiji, Samoa, etc.) with dark skin, curly hair, and broad facial features. It then occurred to me to wonder if Isaac was misidentified as African American on the basis of his BLACK features, as I am misidentified as JEWISH on the basis of my prominent nose and my body language. So this morning I asked him. The short version of his answer was “Yes, until I talk” (he’s clearly not a native speaker of English), and I admitted that the misidentification of me as JEWISH only got much worse when I talked, especially here in California. And I discovered the wide plain of Isaac’s ignorance of Judaism,…