Close date updated to 2024-01-01 10:59 am
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seems like either 50% or n/a. n/a is bad, so i'm leaning towards 50% @traders - this seems v ambiguous.
O3's take:
Short answer:
The current pope is Pope Leo XIV (Robert Francis Prevost). Genealogists have documented African-descended, Louisiana-Creole ancestors on his mother’s side, so he does have Black ancestry. However, he has generally been perceived—and appears to identify—socially as white. Whether you call him a “person of color” therefore depends on how you define the term:
Why the answer is nuanced
Race is socially constructed. In many U.S. contexts “person of color” refers to how someone is perceived or identifies today, not simply their DNA.
“Passing” history matters. Like many Creole families, his ancestors re-identified as white after migrating north; that shaped how later generations—including the future pope—were seen.
Self-identification counts. Pope Leo XIV has not publicly embraced a non-white identity, so most media still describe him simply as the first American-born pope.
Bottom line
If your yardstick is ancestry, then yes—Pope Leo XIV is a person of color. If your yardstick is contemporary social identity, most people (and the pope himself) do not treat him that way. Both statements can be true depending on which definition you use.
@ian I have a stake in this market, but I oppose a 50% resolution. For me it boils down to the fact that literally no one treats Pope Leo as a person of color or mentions it.
Additionally, I feel as if the most significant downside of an N/A resolution (punishing people who volatility trade) doesn't apply here, since the market was silent when you would volatility trade (when the "who will Pope" market was moving a lot)
@copiumarc hmm okay yeah i agree ancestry doesn’t seem so important as o3 makes it out to be. resoling to sth like 10-25% seems reasonable as well
From the left: if he bears no social burden of expected or actual discrimination (since nobody can tell he's visibly not white euro (euro name, accent, appearance, culture etc.) AND people who use the term from the left don't believe race is a biological reality, and he has never claimed to be a PoC, then I don't see how they can claim he's PoC. Also: the left tends to believe in something like the (racist) one drop rule, that any percent african ancestry somehow overrules everything else, so if the parents are black, so are the kids, regardless of if one parent is white. To that view, 50% PoC wouldn't make sense. Even discussing this would verge close to forbidden topics to them; I don't see how a conscientious holder of that view could ever support a 50% resolution
From the right: PoC is a recently invented political term used to push the polarized view that the world is primarily divided into two groups: white/non-white, and that non-white should naturally ally among themselves to oppose white. The pope doesn't seem to have adopted this worldview at all (i.e. he's a Christian, bible says god doesn't see sex, gender, race, age, nationality etc.) so is unlikely to take this bait.
In neither case does it make sense to consider him PoC.
Logically, if someone can be PoC who, from the left, has no detectable PoC traits, doesn't claim PoC, and the left handwaves away genetics, then how can we ever reliably answer this question in the future?
@ian I think even 10%, much less 25%, is much higher than the "amount" people view him as a person of color. It would be improvement over 50% though, which I think is pretty much indefensible.
@ian I'm okay with NA, or any number. It's my fault for betting in a market like this, I thought we would skate through easy yes or no, even though all along I believed the term PoC had definitional problems
@ian doesn’t the fact that it’s obviously debatable mean it’s n/a ? Neither yes nor no are a solid answer.
@yeeta most things are debatable to some degree. he doesn't identify as poc, nor does he look like it. in the spirit of the market this resolves no. technically being somewhat black is not good enough
@mods can someone clarify resolution or NA I kinda don't like having 5k mana locked here just doing nothing
I bought NO shares believing that this question was asking if one of the obvious POC cardinals like Tagle or Turkson would become Pope, not whether a pope who has never claimed to be a POC has two mixed-race grandparents. Strongly oppose a YES resolution.
@Keepcalmandchill Are you even active?
Should resolve YES:
1) The creator already specified that they consider Maradiaga to be a POC lower in the comments. Prevost, emphasizing the cultural construction of race, rather than explicitly the color of one's skin.
2) Credible sources such as the New York Times (below) refer to Prevost as "descended from Creole people of color".
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/08/us/pope-leo-creole-new-orleans.html
3) From wikipedia:
"His mother was the daughter of Louisiana Creole parents, Joseph Martínez from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic,[14] and Louise Baquié from New Orleans, who were of African, French, and Spanish descent. Martínez was of mixed Afro-Haitian descent, and Baquié was a mixed-race Black Creole.[12][15][16][17]"
In the US, someone with this genealogy is commonly understood to be a "POC", and he could absolutely claim "POC" status on, say, a job application or college application.
4) He has lived the majority of his life in the country of Peru.
@bens I have a stake here, but
1) Very different case to Prevost
2) Article says very specifically the family didn't identify as black, did not discuss Creole roots
3) Think what you mentioned in (1), that race is something which is cultural and socially constructed, is important here. Family didn't discuss Creole roots, we have no indication he sees himself that way, everyone recognizes him as white. I don't think him not passing an arbitrary one drop rule matters here.
4) Big distinction: none of his childhood life. Even if it was though most people would not think that makes him ethnically Peruvian.
Would be very happy to put this up for poll.
@bens If this kind of circumstantial evidence counts, I've made ~3.5k mana by buying "Light Brown" at absurdly low prices in this market: [https://manifold.markets/itsTomekK/skin-color-of-the-next-pope] because everyone was rushing to buy "White," not reading the description :P
(fill my exit order if you want)
@copiumarc I'm like 40% being silly but 60% I do in fact think that due to there being zero criteria on this market, the current pope may indeed count, especially in light of the NYT reporting
@bens I think the fairest way to resolve the market if mods don't want to N/A or come to a joint decision is probably just to make a poll w/ no description and let it sit for awhile.
Hopefully people will learn their lesson w/ ambiguous markets
@copiumarc I don't like the poll idea because it still won't determine the truth. I.e., it won't answer the question "Is Leo XIV actually a POC?", but instead "Does Manifold think, according to their category of POC, that Leo XIV is a POC?"
And there just isn't a true or false answer to the question "Is X a POC". So I'd go with N/A.
But I definitely was overconfident in thinking that my category of POC is universal :-) Well, I'll be smarter next time...
@SqrtMinusOne It's largely culturally/socially determined I don't see the issue with using a poll seems like a good way to resolve that.