How can a white woman have a fully black kid.

Thank you. I appreciate you showing these photos. I hoped these would be the exact pictures you posted. Paula Patton and her son with Robin Thicke meet the criteria, although I realize he looks like both his maternal and paternal grandmothers.

C'mon now. Yes, it's possible for a white woman to have a child who looks 'completely black' but it's not particularly likely. Letty's son could also have come out albino in theory but why not simply cast a child who looks stereotypically mixed and/or somewhat like Michelle Dockery? He is supposed to obviously be her child and it's remarked on more than once that they look alike. There wasn't even an attempt to get this right...

Patton and Rowell are described as 'black' because of the one-drop rule, to have blonde blue-eyed children both mothers would have to possess the apparently recessive traits for those things which would make them pretty mixed themselves. So what has happened in those cases is that a family has been getting progressively 'whiter' and there is a visible continuum and gradation within the family... they don't drop off a cliff edge from one race to another, as with Letty's son... People can only claim the situations are analogous because of the collective illusion which permeates American society wherein people are conditioned to describe as 'black' a person who does not look black simply because that person has a parent who was also described as 'black'. Furthermore, to add to the confusion, the label 'black' represents a cultural identity as well as an external appearance, which means that sometimes people who don't look black, or who look mixed, identify, or are identified, as black on the grounds of shared culture or for reasons of political expedience. There is thus a large category of 'completely black' people, euphemistically described as 'light skinned blacks', who appearance-wise look to be descended from both white and black people. To illustrate, if a white mother had a child who looked like Vanessa Williams nobody would be surprised notwithstanding the fact that Vanessa is 'completely black' because her parents are both 'black'. The actor who played Letty's son is not 'light skinned' though, IMO...

Barack Obama is potentially an example of the white mother-black child dynamic But this dynamic is not simply the flipside of 'black' mother-white child dynamic, it is completely different. Because as I have said, American society is much more flexible with the black (or 'black') category than it is with the white category so a lot of supposed black mother-white child situations are really 'almost white' mother-white child situations and not comparable to what is happening on the show. That being said, I think Barack looks mixed race, albeit not particularly in the photos you have linked. Kimora Lee Simmons is the only well known example I can think of where her child has arguably be come out looking completely black although his mother does not look black. The caveats are a) the Dad is Djimon Hounsou, one of the blackest black men on the planet b) Kimora herself is part black although it is not obvious (I consider her son what is called a 'throwback') c) Kimora is not mixed with white but Asian (supposedly Japanese). I haven't watched the season to the end but if Letty's ex-boyfriend turns up and is also at the extreme end of the black person continuum then I will be satisfied that consideration was given to what tends to happen in real life, which is that, all things being equal the child's shade will be somewhere in-between the parent's. Or of course the explanation could be that Letty is part black herself but I see that as unlikely as I am sure it would have come up as part of the plot by now (also for reasons mentioned in my penultimate paragraph).

A lot of what I have said is subjective, the main point to make is that fiction does generally attempt, to show and not tell us, information of this nature (e.g. all the Weasleys are ginger, Malfoy father and son have white hair, Targaryens all look like *this*, Lannisters all look like *that*) . We are not all genetics scientists but we have all seen that children tend to resemble their parents and actually, in fact, yes, where skin pigment is concerned, the process is much like paint being mixed. I am not sure how comprehensive your links are but I wonder if people who have seen the fathers of the children in question, as well as the mothers, would really have been that surprised about how the offspring ended up looking.

I was about to make a point that if Javier were originally identified as Argentinian in the story that they could have cast a blonde, blue eyed person or a Japanese person but that they chose not to because the show is not interested in subtleties or outliers. But I don't know if in this case they made the character Argentinian to fit the actor. I think as a general point it's a fair one however, actors onscreen are usually representative of a type unless their unusualness is a plot point.

There are some people all over this board moaning about 'PC' casting, it makes no sense. The reason this kid was cast was the same reason that Chicken George from Roots, who was obviously supposed to be mixed race, was more black looking than his mother who was obviously supposed to be close to fully black. Because white people do the casting and normally they do not pick up on this stuff because they do not obsess over skin shade and 'exotic' looks the way black people do, I mean they do suffer from colorism but I think less consciously and not as much as non-whites. I'm fairly surprised that any white person (for sure the 'PC gone mad' complainer) noticed this kid. But mostly because the fact that Letty has a mixed son who is played by a black actor is nothing to do with political correctness.

The actor appears to be fully black because the casting director was not sensitive to the diversity of appearance within the black community and what tends to trigger that(it's not because he was 'the best actor for the job'! How many lines does he have? pfft). This happens all the time Chicken George is an egregious example but also pretty much any show with a black family, like the Cosby Show (where Bill has two obviously mixed race daughters). Based on my experience, the character is mixed not to fill a diversity quota but rather as tangible proof of how low Letty sunk in her life. She had sex with a black dude and probably more than once. Same thing in Traffic and Requiem for a Dream - you know the white girl's drug addiction has hit rock bottom when she starts messing with a black guy. Couldn't be less PC in intent, honestly. In one episode I saw the beginnings of an attempt at subversion of the trope, when Letty's friend says that Letty 'likes black guys' but isn't that just saying being with black men is still a deviation but just one more specific to the character rather than the circumstance? Although I will say, I was looking up the Letty Dobesh novels when I was trying to establish if Javier was always meant to be Argentinian and I saw that in the book the son lived with his paternal grandparents in Oregon? My gut feeling from that info is that he is not mixed race in the books. If so, this was a regrettable change because I am absolutely convinced it was done for the most retrograde reasons.

They also shouldn't have cast a woman who had had such an obvious nose job as Letty's mother but I guess the pool of such actresses in Hollywood is shrinking by the day...

Time for some people to move on from their obsession over the kid's 'blackness'.

Jaan Pehechan Ho

A lot of white people have never noticed that black people do tan and fade. He was probably cast in the winter, as announcements for several other cast members went out in January, and may have been darker by the time they started filming in spring or summer in North Carolina.

These people who obsess over the skin pigment of actors aren't worth arguing with. I just block them and at least improve my conversations on this website.

^ Agreed.

" it's the acting i have a problem with. it's just ok."

Yeah, the concerns raised by the OP seem pretty ridiculous. Having said that I think the actor playing the kid is kind of mediocre. In an otherwise great show I am having difficulty with his character in terms of persuasiveness.