Talk:Sonya Curry

Lead
Regarding the edit summary of your revert, can you point me to the "lead standard of WikiProject Women" that you referred to? My objective is to expand the lead as to what makes her notable. While I have seen "media personality" used in other articles, that alone only impplies that she's famous without explaining why. Thanks in advance.—Bagumba (talk) 14:54, 29 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Incidentally, looking at the page history just now, I didn't recall my making a similiar edit two weeks back. Apologies for inadvertently warring. Looking forward to your response.—Bagumba (talk) 15:23, 29 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Fine I'll just agree to disagree on this. As this article falls under WikiProject Woomen there is a standard of writing that we are expecting to follow and that isn't wrapping women as relatives for notability purposes when that isn't their career; it's an archaic concept. Yes, she's in a famous family, but it's rare that on corresponding male pages that you can barely get their name out before saying who they are related to. Trillfendi (talk) 17:48, 29 May 2019 (UTC)
 * As I was one who removed "media personality" (sorry, I don't know if it happened multiple times), I thought I would now comment here. I get the sense that there is some perceived bias here. I honestly don't think so. Now one example doesn't disprove anything, but I present Philip May. And I selected Theresa May because she was the first woman I could think of where I don't know the husband. I don't know if I was lucky, but Philip shows some things. Three years after article creation, he's still just a banker and Theresa's husband. All of the sources are dominated by Theresa's name. If you browse the early history of the article, there were calls for deletion as he was just the husband of 'the real May' who of course is Theresa. So, I hope we can agree, Sonya Curry is first and foremost known for her family, but notable for being who she is. Cheers, --SVTCobra (talk) 19:02, 29 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Someone who gets interviewed practically every week by various media organizations at some point becomes a media personality.... Trillfendi (talk) 19:07, 29 May 2019 (UTC)

Problematic Sentence in "Early Life"
In the section entitled "Early Life" we find this sentence:


 * Due to her physical traits of blue eyes and dark blonde hair, Sonya Curry experienced colorism of white passing from the Charlotte Hornets former-owner George Shinn, who believed she was a white woman but held racist views of miscegenation with team players.

"Colorism of white passing" means "discrimination or prejudice because of shade of skin color of white passing," which is nonsense. A person who can pass for white need not pass for white, and a person who is believed to be white by someone who does not know she is black is not indeed passing for white. Nowhere is it established that Sonya Curry was passing for white.

More importantly, you cannot be prejudiced against a black person you know to be black because of the "shade" of their skin if, in fact, you do not know that the color of their skin is in fact a "shade" of someone black because anybody and everybody who sees the person automatically takes for granted that they are white. If I believe you are white, I cannot be prejudiced against you because I believe you are a light-skinned black. That is a contradiction.

Additionally, if you believe that someone is only passing for white, and you have good reason to believe that they are having sex with someone you know is black, then you cannot accuse the one you know is really black and only passing as white of miscegenation; that, too, would be a contradiction.

"Due to her physical traits of blue eyes and dark blonde hair" is wordy, for it means nothing more than that she had blue eyes and blonde hair.

But is a contrasting conjunction, e.g., "He drank a lot, but never woke up with a hangover" or "He was considered the best college player of the year, but no one drafted him" or "He didn't just hit a home run, but showed everyone he was a player to be reckoned with." But therefore makes sense only when the matter in the first clause is usually associated positively, in expectation, with the matter in the but-clause, or is not usually associated but allows for an occasional positive association worthy of remark. Thus it makes no sense to say that GS believed SC was white but held racist views, for believing someone is white is not usually associated with not holding racist views of anything.

Moreover, believing somebody to be white and holding racist views against miscegenation are utterly unrelated—it is like saying that X believes Y to be a basketball player but holds Communist prejudices against marketing oneself as a commodity: to believe Y to be a basketball player is not to have reason to think that basketball players market themselves as commodities. Believing somebody to be white does not entail that the person believed to be white is engaged in reproductive sexual congress with a person of another race.

"Racist views of miscegenation with team players" is garbled: miscegenation is reproductive sexual congress between a man and a woman of different races—there can be no such thing as miscegenation with team players, for the phrase team players does not denote anyone's race. And even if all the CH team members were black, SC would have to have born several children fathered by several team members in order for her to have committed miscegenation with them; and a woman who did such a thing would have to be a whore. No evidence whatever is given that SC had had sexual congress with even one man of another race, let alone with several men, and that she bore several children by several men. The ugly implications of an assertion made without evidence make the statement potentially libellous.

No evidence is given that George Shinn knew anything at all about SC's romantic life, nor that he held racist views against—not "of"—miscegenation (e.g., actually said something to the effect that he believed miscegenation to be evil). Nor is evidence submitted for the claim that SCE "experienced colorism," i.e. that GS took some action against her (such as demoting or firing her) only because, as some material expression (like a recording or written document) of his justification showed, he could not countenance the employment in his organization of a person he believed to be guilty of the evil of race-mixing. Hence this statement, too, is potentially libellous.

And again, if GS fired SC because he believed her to be a white woman committing the evil of having sex with a black man, then he could not be guilty of "colorism"—the claim is a contradiction. If he had learned that SC was not white, but in fact just a light-skinned black, then he had no reason to accuse her of miscegenation—that would be a contradiction, too. If he believed that a light-skinned black should not have sex with a dark-skinned black, his belief would have nothing to do with miscegenation, for the two people having sex don't belong to different races.

Thus if he did indeed fire or demote her because she was a light-skinned black, his disapproval of miscegenation would be irrelevant, and to mention it would be a bad faith attempt to increase his guilt by exchanging, for a bad reason most people aren't familiar with (disapproving of people of different shades of the same race having sex) for one with which they are more familiar, but which has not been shown to have had anything to do with the case.

The link to the article containing Sonya Curry's claims is no evidence, since her claims are hearsay evidence of hearsay evidence.

This sentence is therefore ill-written syntactically, is filled with nonsensical phraseology, rests upon several contradictory presumptions, and makes several assertions that, without evidence, might be actionable as libel. I believe these considerations show that the author or authors not only do not understand English well, but that they have no understanding of or do not care about the rules of evidence; the fact that they have made wild claims in confused English on the strength of what looks like bad faith justifies removing this sentence from the section. I intend to remove it.

And, after all, even if someone submitted the proper evidence and expressed themselves in proper English, a report of the incident does not belong in a section entitled "Early Life." Wordwright (talk) 20:29, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

Some further remarks:

It occurred to me that a reader might think my dismissal of the article to which the statement was linked was unjustified, so I will submit the only two paragraphs of the article that have anything to do with the title to examination:


 * Sonya Curry: Ex-Hornets Owner George Shinn Warned Team of Interracial Marriage


 * Sonya Curry, the mother of NBA guards Seth and Stephen Curry, said former Charlotte Hornets owner George Shinn mistakenly believed she was white and used her relationship with Hornets legend Dell Curry to discourage interracial marriage by other members of the organization.


 * On Monday, Marc J. Spears of the Undefeated provided comments from the Curry matriarch about learning of Shinn's alleged racist remarks in 1988:


 * "The owner called in another player, a white guy player who dated black women, and said, 'We drafted you. We know who you like to date. But we just want to tell you to really be careful about letting people see because Dell Curry is married to a white woman and we don't know how people are going to take them either.' The player was like, 'You are not going to believe what they just said.' I was like, 'What?' Just the assumption of what I look like and all that."

The first thing that strikes me is the vagueness of the statement and the childishness of some of the locutions. “A white guy player”? That "guy" is redundant. Who? Is this SC speaking in 2019 and recalling the conversation between herself and this player in 1988? If so, is this a 53-year-old woman—SC was born in 1966—using the locutions—"and I'm like, and he was like"—of young adults who were born in the 1990s? I was born in 1957, and by 1988—when SC would have been twenty-two—had been a teaching assistant for two semesters in graduate school to twenty-year-olds, and they did not speak like that.

But this unidentified player’s report of what the owner said to him does not show that Shinn made any racist remarks (as the author of this article states) or that he discouraged this unidentified player from interracial marriage, let alone that he discouraged “other members of the organization” or “warned the team” against interracial marriage—not “of”; if had "warned them of interracial marriage,” he could have said simply that it exists and it is a problem for some people, and need not himself had considered it wrong at all. Only someone who harbored prejudices against whites themselves would have leaped to these ideas in defiance of the plain meaning of the reported statements.

What is the plain meaning of GS’s reported statements? He didn’t warn this unidentified play against anything, but said only that he had to be careful about letting people—he did not specify the race of the people—see because “we,” a reference I suppose to upper management, did not yet know how people were going to take them. GS is not reported to have said one word that expressed any dislike of black people or dislike of race-mixing in dating or in marriage.

Let me say it again: this unidentified player did not say that GS said to him that he should not date black women—he said that the player should be careful about what people he let see them together. This unidentified player is not reported to have said that GS spoke to the whole team or to other members of the organization.

What GS seems to have intended to say, but did not say fully, was that, in 1988, he and upper management had not had enough experience of how whites or blacks in Charlotte, NC, react to seeing black men married to white women or white men dating black women, and that there was good reason to believe that there might be some people in some places who could conceivably create trouble for them.

I’m a black man who dated white women while living in Atlanta in the early 80s, and believe me, the news that someone had shot Vernon Jordan in 1980 because of his association with a white woman troubled me; when in about 1981 or 1982 my white girlfriend wanted me to drive with her from Atlanta to Oberlin, Ohio, to visit the school, we were not yet out of Georgia before I realized, with a jolt, that although nobody in Midtown Atlanta and at Georgia State University paid any attention to us, there might be plenty of whites in small-town and rural southern states who might feel so outraged that they might shoot me. I didn't think it was likely to happen—I just couldn't rule it out.

So in 1988 it would not have been at all unreasonable for anybody, black or white, who themselves did not object to interracial romance or marriage, to believe themselves to have good reason to suspect that a goodly number of small-minded whites and blacks might not just disapprove, but try to hurt interracial couples. GS need not have thought it was likely to happen; but since he thought he could not rule it out, he thought it advisable for this unidentified player to exercise care.

Just to put that in context, my wife is white, and when I moved to a city in the south in 2006 to teach at an all-black college, I asked the chairman of my department if he thought it was likely that someone might give me flak about that; I asked that because I had had black people give me flak about that.

And if you think that some blacks don’t approve of interracial dating, just look up what black people had to say about Jermaine Jackson, Clarence Thomas, or others. For empirical evidence, see "How Racial Minorities View Interracial Couples,” in Psychology Today, March 20, 2020.

So you would have to be bigoted and historically ignorant to think that, in 1988 in a southern city, only one generation removed from the world in which a good number of young whites believed themselves justified in harassing or beating blacks in broad daylight and with cameras rolling, GS had no good reason to talk to this unidentified player at all about interracial dating or to mention the fact that Dell's wife was white, and that he did so only because of a racist view that nothing in his reported statements suggests that he held.

But to get back to SC's statement, GS did not make any “assumptions” about what SC looked like, and he is not reported by her that to have made statements to her to the effect that, because she was a light-skinned black woman, she was not a social or moral equal of other blacks or what. The author of the claim that SC "experienced colorism" again acted upon what seems to be a prejudice against a white man.

But in saying that GS made "assumptions" about what she looked like, SC was being villainously disingenuous, for she cannot have failed to have had many encounters with people, black and white, who were surprised to learn that she was not white, as her blue eyes and dirty blonde hair seemed to indicate, but black. And that is because the overwhelming number of light-skinned black women don’t have blue eyes or dirty blonde hair.

Hell, when I first saw her, I thought Frederika Whitfield was white; I thought Maya Rudolph was white. I didn't think that because of any "assumptions"—I thought that because they look white, and I didn't care enough about their looks for the possibility that they might not be ever to have occurred to me.

And beside the fact that SC's light skin would have been enough for anybody who just looked at her to think she was white, another reason that GS could not have made any "assumptions" about what SC looked like in looking at her is that there have been many women, according to reports you can find easily, who thought all their lives that they were white only to learn that, on their birth certificates, their race was indicated as “Negro.” The people who thought they were white were not making “assumptions.”

Lastly, thinking that someone is white who is not, and speaking about them in observations in which their apparent race is of import, is not to commit any sort of wrong against the person who looks but who is not white. Black people thought that Timi Yuro, the blues singer, was black—and reasonably so because she sang in a voice and with a style typical of black blues singers, and in those days a great many people would not have seen photographs of her. These people did not do Yuro any harm and did not insult her. Neither did people who thought that Iggy Azalea was black.

I can’t know the nationality of anyone who has contributed to this article, but I would like to say that, in America, everyone has a right to face their accusers; it is wrong and un-American to accept hearsay testimony of hearsay testimony given by someone who is not identified, and so whose credibility cannot be established.

It is also dishonest morally and intellectually to use morally-charged terms in one’s summary of innocuous comments. If I were George Shinn, I would most certainly sue SC for slander and the newspaper who reported her comments for libel.

I have also reported the statement in the article to the NoticeBoard as being potentially libellous.Wordwright (talk) 00:07, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

Family photos?
This article could benefit with the addition of public domain family photos, including of the Rivers family. Activist (talk) 00:05, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

Notable?
WP:INVALIDBIO says relationships do not confer notability. Is Sonya Curry herself notable? — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 22:04, 22 July 2023 (UTC)


 * There was no consensus when last discussed at Articles for deletion/Sonya Curry. —Bagumba (talk) 01:53, 23 July 2023 (UTC)