It was, yes. Public statements she made before getting fired include:

> A Black woman can't survive around here doing any type of research let alone research thats designed to make those in the majority uncomfortable. And guess who can apparently unilaterally order you to do things without even thinking you're someone they should converse with. (https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1331757629996109824)

> [The VPs in her org] are very useful for gaslighting and marginalizing Black women to eternity. They're very useful for blocking any upstream work that needs to be done to change the status quo. (https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1331772727615602690)

While we are at it, she also called out Jeff Dean 6 months ago to have Jeff Dean say "personal attacks are not okay".

https://twitter.com/JeffDean/status/1278571537776271360

The whole interaction is so cringey and screams toxicity.

To be clear, he wasn't saying that to her. He was weighing in on the "saga".

She's Eritrean-born and identifies as Black. Races aren't an exact science but social constructs. There's a gradual continuum in people's appearance along geographical areas, linking Sub-Saharan west Africa where most slaves were taken from in the Atlantic slave trade, to East Africa, to North Africa and the Middle East, to the Mediterranean coast, to central Europe to Scandinavia to Siberia to Central Asia to East Asia to Inuits to Native Americans etc. No sharp borders.

It doesn't mean that a person cannot genetically belong to a well defined group with little admixture.

The question is how geographically localized that "well defined group" is. Are Eritreans in the same well defined group as Ghanans or as Lebanese? Are Cypriots the same as Lebanese or Italians? Are Italians in the same well defined group as Greeks or as Germans? Are Germans like Slovaks or like the Sami?

You can surely say that the overlap in a Ghanan and a Sami person's ancestry is quite small regarding recent millennia. But I don't see well defined groups at all. The reason it seems so in the US is because of the huge Western European (German/British) immigration early on and the large population of descendants of West African slaves. These two are sharply distinguishable (discounting for intermixing effects) but there are no "well defined groups" such as "black" and "white" when looking at it globally, not just in America. They are linked continuously via North/East Africans/Arabs/Turks and Mediterraneans.

OK. Data for well defined groups here: https://rosenberglab.stanford.edu/papers/popstruct.pdf

Advice to not interpret any genetic data in a divisive manner here: http://www.ask-force.org/web/Golden-Rice/Yudell-Taking-Race-...

This is an old paper. A lot more work has been done on Japanese and on Kalash (see Reich) and the Altaic language family is on the backfoot these days. Reich himself is also very sloppy with attributions about Dravidian language.

I've studied a wider range of literature, and I suggest to not discuss this question one way or another. Let's leave genetics to geneticists.

So what, someone being born in Europe does not automatically make them white. It just seems fishy to me. When she’s getting this amount of privilege from “being black”, saying that she identifies as black when she is clearly not black should not be enough.

Well, seems like other black people recognize her as black too, so I don't know what else can you expect. A person identifies as part of a group and the group agrees.

It's kind of like asking if Obama is really African American/Black. Races aren't sharply divided, it's a social grouping thing based on history, culture, etc.

Blacks of the tech liberal elite consider her black. That’s not representative.

Obama has clear facial features of a black person. This woman does not have them. She even looks like she got a perm just to look more black.

Let’s agree to disagree ;)

Haile Selassie is also quite commonly regarded as having been Black despite not looking like "stereotypically black". Edit: although seemingly he did not self-identify as "negro" (term of the time), but is looked up to as a black emperor by rastas.

Race isn't straightforward.

> A black woman? How is she black?

She's not “black” nor was that claimed; she’s “Black”. The first is a common adjective that never really applies to humans except very loosely, the second is a racial identity group formed by and defined largely through oppression by European and (in US usage; usage and identity elsewhere has evolved through different local forces and experiences) later European-descended American bigots, that has only loose correlation to complexion, ultimately starting with the division of humanity (by people in the last of these groups) fairly arbitrarily into the three broad racial groups of Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid, which later evolved into White, Black, and the last split into Asian and Native American.

> She's not “black” nor was that claimed; she’s “Black”.

You must be deep inside some cultural bubble not to see how hilarious this sounds.

Hey, look, I'm not the engineer of the European oppression that created the modern racial identities (largely through shared experience of oppression, except White identity, which was created through shared experience as oppressors) and shaped most of the language around those identities. If you want to argue that the categories make no fundamental sense, you aren't wrong in their original delineation; they are groups of shared experience (which is also why even when the terms are the same or deeply etymologically linked, they have different concrete meaning in places where the historical experience worked differently; places, for instance, where the “one drop rule” [0] was a major historical force will, all other things being equal, have a far more expansive concept of “Blackness”.)

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule

White people aren't white, either[1]. Maybe I'm sitting at the bottom of a deep cultural abyss, too.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Luschan%27s_chromatic_scal...

That’s a lot of words and I don’t really understand what you’re saying, but she is Black and identifies as Black. Or is she just a tool of the patriarchy for adopting such grossly over simplified self-descriptions?

Do you really mean that?

They are getting downvoted but may be genuine. I as a European person also didn't immediately see her as black, just based on appearance. Closer to North African / Arab / Middle Eastern. Given that Eritrea is right next to the Arabian peninsula, it's not surprising.

It wasn't necessarily meant as an insult. Perhaps in America it's clear she's black, in countries with more North African and Middle Eastern immigration, it may not be.

The geographic distance from Eritrea to West Africa is the same as to Denmark (like 5000 km) and the terrain isn't easy to traverse. If someone imagines all black people "must" look the typical West African way (Ghana, Ivory Coast etc), they may be legit confused when seeing someone from the other side of the continent. The reason that both are considered black is social.

Edit: for example, when seeing her photo she reminded me of the Syrian-Hungarian reporter Hesna Al Ghaoui: https://hesna.hu/gallery#media So precisely what skin tone qualifies you as black is hard to say. Somewhere between Al Ghaoui and Gebru I guess: https://c.files.bbci.co.uk/B817/production/_115872174_gettyi...

good point!

She wasn't fired. She resigned, because of a her-way-or-the-highway mentality.

FTA: In later tweets, Gebru clarified that no one at Google explicitly told her that she was fired. Rather, she said Google would not meet a number of her conditions for returning and accepted her resignation immediately because it felt that her email reflected "behavior that is inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager."

She didn't offer to resign immediately.

That's true but irrelevant.

Google cut off her access and paid her through her notice period.

She didn't give notice.[1]

[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/12/17/947719354/ousted-black-google...