Tiger Woods and His White Women

Haha, well my point in the other thread was that whatever he is, he’s not exactly White but seems strangely (or perhaps predictably) drawn to only White women. Imagine that! It seems that I’ve seen this kind of preference expressed somewhere before… don’t tell me… I’m sure it will come to me eventually.

But again, not to be a stickler but I must respectfully disagree with this quotation:

“According to wiki, Woods is “one-quarter Chinese, one-quarter Thai, one-quarter African American, one-eighth Native American, and one-eighth Dutch.” He’s about as Black as Malcolm X was White–err, actually, he’s exactly as Black as Malcolm X was White. So he’s not really all that black, and the article correctly points out that he declines to call himself black.”

I hate to argue with the Wiki, but what’s with all of the tidy ethnic percentages? I mean, 12.5% Native American, 12.5% Caucasian? 25% Black? 25% Chinese, 25% Thai?

I think that this is a common mistake that people make. They often think that you can divide a person’s ethnicity by taking the racial label applied to each parent and dividing by two. So if you have an Asian mother and a Sub-Saharan African father, then you simply divide 1 person by two ethnicities and come up with 50% of each. That is incorrect.

Mixed ethnicity does not depend on taking two parents and splitting the child down the middle, but on the genetic markers that are transferred to the child from each parent—and that rarely comes out as an exact 50% / 50%. On a genetic level, traits are passed from parent to offspring, and even though you have one parent from either ethnicity, the child will almost certainly inherit more genetic traits from one parent than another. In other words, Tiger Woods might look the way he does because, GENETICALLY, he’s 70% Black. And that’s the real measure of mixed ethnicity, it’s based on genetics, not just broad percentages based on ones family tree.

Tiger’s hair texture, skin color, and many of his facial features indicate a very high transference of African genetic traits. Sure, you can see that he’s also mixed with Asian, (especially once somebody tells you) but his features are predominantly Sub Saharan African - at least to my eyes.

However, be that as it may, he seems exclusively drawn to White girls, and mostly blondes at that.

Missing the forest for the trees.

The topic is about his choice in women, not splitting hairs about his biracial mix.

two things
the link to the sfgate blog said this:

In a time when interracial dating is common, and black women with white men in commercials are more common than the opposite,

I call bs on this whenever you see a stock picture on a website or brosure it is usually white woman and a black man.

second to “defend” Tiger he is probably exposed to a heck of a lot more white woman then black, asian, etc. He is rich athlete, and the sport is golf for god sakes, most places he goes are not going to have that many african americans. (that being said there are a lot of Asain/Korean women golfers, he could have probably got on one of those at some golf thing)

uRB4N–

I addressed that in full at the end of my post, because Tiger’s self-loathing is so blatant that I felt a single mention in passing at the very end was the most he should get.
If you can’t keep up with the conversation then don’t weigh in.

“It seems that the more successful, wealthy, and influential the individual, the more likely he/she will seek racial validation by pursuing white partners. This seems to be true with respect to black men and Asian men. You would think the opposite would be true, but it appears that no amount of acquired social standing can quite match racial standing. Seriously disturbing.”

Great observation.

This trend certainly bears some looking into. It certainly has implications to the root cause of the disparity as well. I have a feeling that understanding such behavior is important.

obviously.

I think I can agree with much of your theory, Jaehwan. In fact, I think it to be a very perceptive observation. Thanks.

However, my own main objection was to the use of simple race-of-parent data in determining ethnic percentage in mixed offspring. I realize that this method is used a lot, to describe ethnic admixtures, but it’s hopelessly inaccurate.

Ethnicity is based on genetic marker transfer. If you have a White parent and a Black parent, the child is not really 50% White and 50% Black. Which race he is, and in what percentages, would be determined by the uneven genetics he inherits. That was my only observation. There probably really is no way to divide Tiger Woods (or anybody else) neatly by ethnic percentages%—I doubt if we have the scientific precision to do so.

Now, having said that, Tiger is basically the result of an Afro/Asian mixture of genes. I will assume that nobody here cares very much about what the exact formula is—I know, I don’t. But one thing we can probably all agree on is that he’s nowhere close to being White. However, when asked to describe his ethnicity Tiger calls himself a

Canablasian: No, no! Not a “Cannibal Asian!” see below

Ca (Caucasian)
NA (Native American)
BL (Black)
Asian

Notice how far down the made-up word you have to travel before you actually get to the Black and Asian part… Suspicious, but perhaps forgivable. So Tiger marries a very White wife… no problem, love crosses color lines. But then, for the first time, we have an opportunity (through Tiger’s indiscretions) to glimpse into what kind of women he is attracted to. And when we do, we find a very long list of mostly blonde, White women—no Asians, no Blacks, no Native Americans, no Hispanics. So, it seems that it’s not just that he happened to fall in love with a Swedish wife, he seems to have pursued a strict “Whites only” dating policy.

Now, my argument is not now, and never was, that Tiger is Black, because I’d also find this behavior to be questionable if he was 100% Chinese, 100% Thai, or 100% Native American.

The point, as uRB4N so eloquently put it, “is about his choice in women, not splitting hairs about his biracial mix.”

[...] You think I should be even MORE embarrassed cause all the women I’ve hooked up with are White, Blond, tall, and blue eyed? Need I remind you that I’m Tiger Woods? Come on! My two years at Stanford are worth 3x as [...]

“Maybe someone with a better grasp of genetics can answer this, but don’t you get a 50 mix either way between two parents? Meaning that if Seal has a child with Heidi Klum, the child will have dark hair because of the dominance of the dark haired genes, but the child still carries the allele for blonde hair with him. I think they symbolize it “Bb” or something. So if Seal’s son also finds a blonde wife, the offspring of that relationship could be blonde.”

Long week! Sorry for the delay.

OK, lol! ? Yes, you’ve busted me at speaking in genetic shorthand because I thought to avoid the awful burden of complexity. However, I should have known better, remembering how relentless you are! But maybe I can still take a stab at a somewhat simplified explanation.

True, all humans posses the human genome, there are no traits that any of us have that can’t be found within that human genome. Therefore, of course, race is not a matter of the actual “genes we possess” but rather it’s based on what genes are turned “on” and “off” within the genome. This produces a variety of phenotypes which we have translated (along with their corresponding cultural identities) as ethnicity.

So, when we are talking about say, a Scandinavian and an Asian, we may consider them to be two different ethnicities, but in reality, more than 90% of their active genetics will be identical (as human beings) and the differences are based on the minority of genetic variance. In other words, only say… 7% of the active genetics may be different as a result of specific genes being turned off or on. So when we talk about inheriting genetic differences, we’re only talking about inheriting a relatively small phenotypical variance within the whole of genes that we all possess.

But based on this obvious complexity of definition, it becomes even harder to break up a human being into neat, genetic, percentages. It is almost impossible to divide genetic variances into comprehensive ethnic bundles, especially since many of the ethnicities share common variances. For instance, East Indians are of Caucasian ancestry, and yet may have the same hue of dark skin as persons of Negroid ancestry. Try figuring out who “owns” that specific genetic trait?

Therefore, I would argue that the assertions than Tiger Woods is 1/4 or 1/8 of anything is probably meaningless. It’s like mixing two reactionary chemical compounds together to make an explosion, and then trying to divide the smoke, by percentage, back into the two original chemicals. It doesn’t work after the reaction has happened.

—So, the obvious question is, if this is all really true, then how can we strictly define any race on a biological basis. The answer is that we can’t. Race/ethnicity is not primarily a biological construct, so much as it is a social one. However a social reality is just as binding, in its consequences, and in its requisite implications to privilege as a biological one. “Race” still exists, even if it’s traditional definition is an illusion.

Haha,

Sig makes me laugh. Sometimes.

King,

I definitely agree with you because as you said, it’s impossible to say who “owns” which genes. Some Chinese people, for example, have big noses. It’s not supposed to be a typical Chinese trait, but there it sometimes exists, in the middle of China.

I think for shorthand, some people like to say, for example, “I’m half Chinese and half German.” It’s hard to say who is what…I, for example, think I’m 100% Chinese, but I know it’s likely that I have other stuff coming in from way back when. Still, maybe it offers an approximation so that people can make sense of Olivia Munn, Apolo Ohno, and Tiger Woods.

So…I agree.