[Foundation-l] A question for American Wikimedians

[George Herbert]

On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 2:18 PM, Strainu <strainu10 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2010/11/17  <WJhonson at aol.com>:
>> Obama is exactly half-black and half-white.
>> Funny how he is "African American" but of course he is equally "Caucasian
>> American"
>
> Which shows only hot dangerous "political correctness" can get. I
> wonder if in 2050, when the white population will no longer be be in
> majority, such a person will be called an European-American...

This is rapidly going off topic, but...

"Hispanic-American" is European-American, too - just from Spain (and
some Portugal) rather than England.

Except where the native american population intermixed with the
Spanish (and Portugese), which was pretty much everywhere.


Actual lesson -

It's easy to get hung up on people's skin color or other arbitrary and
fuzzy labels.  What matters more is that we're not as attractive a
project to volunteer in for various social, economic, and (the
preceding sentence notwithstanding) "racial" groups.  Regardless of
how we label them, we need to attract participation from
internet-savvy members of all the populations we don't represent well,
over time.

Our international flavor helps with that, in that overall as a
Foundation and wider project we do have widespread inclusionism of
disparate peoples.  But introspection into underserved communities
within big countries (the US particularly) and into underserved
nations would be wise.  The latter is open to new communities but not
actively attracting them; the former, a US chapter with teeth could go
after.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com