Remember how in Hound of the Baskervilles Sherlock Holmes is able to identify the murder based on his facial resemblance to portraits of ancestors on the walls at Baskerville Hall.

This evidence is not enough to take to court, but Holmes sets a trap and the villain flees the hound at night and falls into the Grimpen Mire and drowns.

My family is like that too--not murderous--but based on portraits of my father's male line--a marked facial resemblance to most of us can be traced back as far as 1830, based on portraits, engravings, and photos even though statistically there is not much reason to think these ancestors would look like us.

For example, my paternal grandfather was dead long before I was born, but in photos at the age of 50 we are almost identical. And my half-cousin--just one grandparent in common-looks just like me too.

This well-known man also looks like a member of my family. My wife and daugher actually thought this was an old photo of me with a slightly altered nose. I do not believe there is any relationship at all, though perhaps we have a common ancestor or two in the last 1000 years. His ancestors included settlers from Devon, England in Connecticut in 1637, a county in southwest England where some of my ancestors also originated, as did the fictional Baskervilles.

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/50/53/0f/50530fbd58d3ab81aba0d30bf2b3b8d0.jpg

I also once noted, when I was waiting for a bus at Swansea bus station in south Wales, very early in the morning, that all the bus drivers and ticket operators seemed to look like Richard Burton, who also hailed from those parts.

Replies: @BB753, @Sherlock Holmes, @Anonymous, @Hypnotoad666

In September 2017, Delmar Fears, a 19-year-old junior at Cornell, walked up to the office of President Martha E. Pollack. As co-chair of the group Black Students United, she was accompanied by hundreds of chanting students who had all come to deliver a set of demands. The list mostly included administrative and curricular changes, from the creation of a “minority-liaison-at-large” position to the hiring of psychologists and physicians of color. But the ninth demand, sandwiched between the creation of a “student honor board” and a “permanent presidential task force,” set off an unexpected maelstrom.

“We demand that Cornell Admissions to come up with a plan to actively increase the presence of underrepresented Black students on this campus. We define underrepresented Black students as Black Americans who have several generations (more than two) in this country. The Black student population at Cornell disproportionately represents international or first-generation African or Caribbean students. While these students have a right to flourish at Cornell, there is a lack of investment in Black students whose families were affected directly by the African Holocaust in America. Cornell must work to actively support students whose families have been impacted for generations by white supremacy and American fascism.”

Fears and her group received weeks of blowback from conservative websites, and Black Students United later said it regretted the wording of its statement. But that year Fears wrote a final paper on the issue titled “Who Makes Up the 7 Percent of Black Cornellians?” which detailed some of the demographic change that had taken place on exclusive college campuses. In a 2004 New York Times article, Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chairman of Harvard’s African and African-American studies department, and Lani Guinier, a professor in the law school, pointed out that while Harvard had increased its black undergraduate population to 8 percent, a majority of those students — up to two-thirds — were international students, first- or second-generation immigrants from Africa or the Caribbean or the children of biracial couples. What was rare, Gates said, was the black student whose four grandparents lived through slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow. Mary C. Waters, the head of Harvard’s sociology department, told The Times, “You need a philosophical discussion about what are the aims of affirmative action. If it’s about getting black faces at Harvard, then you’re doing fine. If it’s about making up for 200 to 500 years of slavery in this country and its aftermath, then you’re not doing well.”

In 2007, Camille Z. Charles, a professor of sociology and Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and three co-authors, Margarita Mooney, Douglas S. Massey and Kimberly C. Torres, published a study in The Journal of Education titled “Black Immigrants and Black Natives Attending Selective Colleges and Universities in the United States.” Charles, Mooney, Massey and Mary J. Fischer followed up that research with a 2009 article, “Affirmative Action Programs for Minority Students: Right in Theory, Wrong in Practice.” Both papers reported an “overrepresentation” of black immigrant students at highly selective colleges and universities compared with black Americans whose ancestors were enslaved.

Charles’s study drew on data from 28 schools, going back to 1999. Nearly 20 years later, she is confident that the proportion of black immigrants has increased, but she can’t say exactly how much, because schools do not make that information accessible to the public. “It’s a way to have some plausible deniability,” Charles told me. “The schools are purposefully not paying attention to the backgrounds of the black students they admit. In the ’80s and ’90s, low-income black students could talk about overcoming obstacles in their essays, but over time, that narrative has worn thin. But the immigrant narrative, which is also an American narrative, in some ways might have become a more appealing story for admissions officers. A student can write, say, ‘My parents were doctors in Nigeria, but they had to start all over in the United States,’ and that story doesn’t invoke white guilt. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/magazine/affirmative-action-asian-american-harvard.html?action=click&module=Editors%20Picks&pgtype=Homepage
 

Replies: @L Woods, @istevefan, @Nicholas Stix, @black sea, @Charon, @Sherlock Holmes