Spaw, if an eskimo-French guy was the world's best cricketer, that would be a man-bites-dog story whichever way you described him.

Tunesmith is offbeam with this thread and Joe Offer dealt with it admirably (unlike someone who posted in the same minute as Joe).

It is a sad reflection on the Mudcat membership that tunesmith is able to say so confidentally "We might just as well call them white." He's right of course. With the exception of just one or two Mudcatters, this is indeed an us-and-them matter. Maybe that is why so much of the emphasis here is on what whites are comfortable with rather than on the terminology that blacks prefer.

In South Africa and Britain the term half-breed is derogatory, carrying the pejorative values mentioned by someone above. A widely acceptable term for someone of mixed parentage such as Lewis Hamilton is mixed-race. However colour-based terms are widely used as a kind of legitimate shorthand, but with no intention to be accurate in the literal sense. In this case it is quite usual for mixed-race people (and many Asians) to identify themselves as black rather than use precise colour-chart terminology such as (say) "caramel with a hint of magenta."

An explanation I have heard for this is that to use terms other than black can sound like an attempt to disown the black element, or to establish a favourable differential over people who are "more black." In other words it might be seen as conforming to an assumption that white is better. Certainly the term "coloured" is specifically avoided, this being a throwback to the apartheid era when it was an official classification and carried privileges denied to "blacks" (a blatant application of "divide and rule" which the Boers had learnt so assiduously from the Brits). Note I am talking only about South Africa and the UK.

My guess, based on the attitudes of my black friends and more particularly my mixed-race friends (who were officially classed as "Cape coloureds" within their lifetimes) is that Hamilton will be perfectly happy to be called black. I ciouldn't say about Woods as the terminlogy might have different nuances in America.