Weasley hair (was:Truths in the Wizarding World

[Ebony]

No: HPFGUIDX 7304

--- In HPforGrownups at egroups.com, "Rita Winston" 
<catlady at w...> wrote:
> 
> The Weasleys are English.... <snip>

Thanks, Rita, Neil, and Scott.  You'll be duly thanked in the next 
chapter.  :)

> I'm inclined to think that the Weasley red hair goes with the 
name > rather than by genetics. Altho' I imagine that Angelina's 
children > have a somewhat darker shade of red.

When doing Malinda's descrip. I went for chesnut brown with red 
highlights, with a texture that's closer to her dad's than her 
mom's.  Interracial kids seem to follow no hard and fast rule... 
they break family phenotypic patterns.  

I had the perfect real life example for describing a child from a 
Fred/Angelina pairing.  My childhood best friend's 
French/German-Canadian minister dad is white, has flaming red    
hair and beard (which is now graying) and blue-gray eyes.  He 
was slightly tall and wide... sort of what I think Fred might look 
like in his 50s.  I've met some of his relatives and seen 
pictures... they're much the same, but a few do have brown hair.  

Her mother is black, *much* darker skinned than I expect 
Angelina is, with very kinky or "nappy" hair (she wore it in an 
attractive natural when we were in middle school).  My buddy has 
very curly, bushy dark brown hair, ivory skin, and hazel-green 
eyes.   But her brothers and sisters (there's six of them) run the 
gamut from phenotypically white to phenotypically black to the 
"you can't tell" category my 'girl falls into.  Her older sister has 
chesnut brown, straight hair with red highlights.  That's where I 
coined Malinda's hair color from.

Charlie's wife is "Hispanic", but phenotypically white.  Lizeth is 
Argentinian (yes, I know that's not a proper Spanish name... 
leave me alone!)  but is a Draco type... maybe they're somehow 
related.  The model for Lizeth is an Argentinian exchange student  
that graduated with us... one of my buds' parents were her host 
family.  Natalia was platinum blonde, had the palest of ivory 
skins (she sunburned something awful) grey eyes, and delicate 
features.  (Isn't Argentina where a lot of SS/Nazi refugees hid 
out?)   Yet she said that she wasn't white... she was Argentinian.  

(Sidenote:  A little known historical fact is that in 1859, African 
slaves made up a substantial minority percentage of the 
Argentinian population... according to records from that year, 
35% or more of Buenos Aires' population was black.  Today, the 
percentage of Argentinians that are phenotypically black is 
statistically negligible.  I can't recall offhand the ethnographer 
whose work I read this in... I'm at work.  But the conclusion, 
barring genocide or deportment (I know absolutely nothing of 
Argentina's history) is that they were absorbed into the gene 
pool.)

Charlie and Lizeth's daughter has strawberry blonde hair in my 
fic.  Authorial prerogative, but probably wrong.  As far as I know, 
the genes that indicate blonde hair are recessive.  Elizabeth 
Molina should probably have hair just as red as her cousins 
born to Percy and Penelope.

It's interesting, but interracial folks are very underrepresented in 
fiction.  Those who find their way into the spotlight usually follow 
a convention that we litereuses call "the tragic mulatto".  Of 
course, that goes back to my soapbox about the modern 
conception of race being a social construct that was ideologically 
convenient for indoctrination purposes.  Most people will believe 
anything that's comfortable. 

We've said it before, but I think it's beyond cool that the magical 
world mentions race as an aside of no more import than eye 
color or hair texture.  Culture and nationality are completely 
different matters... I do like JKR's characterization of Seamus as 
Irish, for instance.

--Ebony