Loe is a rare English surname, via 1634 England to Virginia in my family. See here:
http://gbnames.publicprofiler.org/Map.aspx?name=LOE&year=1998&altyear=1881&country=GB&type=name

An historical example of a Loe would be Thomas Loe, converter of Penn to Quaker faith:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Penn

In the little Midwest country town where we live, they like to play up their Asian side. Teasing their Swedish-German classmates with dumb blond jokes. So far no one has ever asked me about their relationship to me, though in Japan these conversations were common.

Sophistry.

Black/White marriage rates may not be as high as Hispanic/White or Asian/White, but if you live in a highly multi-racial area as I do in Brooklyn, you see them a lot. In the local playground (“tot lot” for toddlers), there are 5 such couples, in each case it is a Black male and White female, in 3 of the cases the females are English, and the males are Jamaican, in one it’s Scottish female and African-American male, and I’m not sure of the last one.

So when I see a White woman and darker kid, I assume it’s hers. When I see a Black woman and a lighter kid, I assume she’s the nanny.

BTW, the place I saw the highest number of Black/White pairings – always Black male/White female – was actually Paris, France.

In Ireland we say “sallow” to describe a Mediterranean skin tone, and in the US that’s usually called “olive”, so I’ve always used both terms interchangeable – is this incorrect?

BTW, my wife has a college friend, last name “Khan”, who is 1/2 Pakistani, 1/2 English, she has brown eyes and brown hair and olive skin, and her husband is Jewish with blue eyes and brown hair and olive skin, while their 5 yo son has olive skin and the blueest of blue eyes, and almost bleached blonde hair color.

This seems perfectly logical to me, as Hispanics are generally a mix of Native American (originally Asian) and European, so it’s easy to see how a mixture of White and Asian would produce children that could pass for Hispanic, although I suspect that the mixed White and Asian children would likely be slightly lighter than the Hispanic kids.

However, I think one could make a pretty strong argument that all humans are “mixed”.

When my children were younger, my wife got the “nanny” assumption often. She also got complements on her English (she was born in Buffalo, NY )and questions about “where she was from” from older people fairly regularly. I can’t ever recall having been asked the same thing about my paternity of my children. We are in a neighborhood where there are many nannies (the local library storytime starts with the song “Hello to all the mommies. Hello to all the nannies.”) who are often foreign born of a variety of ethnicities so a dissimilar looking young woman and child will often be a nanny and charge. Men rarely accompany unrelated young children (especially children other than their own during working hours), so even if the children look different, the inferrence doesn’t follow as naturally.

Of course, pure Asian children with white parents are generally assumed (usually correctly) to be adopted, while my kids could never be assumed to be foreign adoptees.

Another interesting variant is that where I live (in Denver) a white woman with a dark skinned child is much more likely to be assumed to be the mother (whether or not it is true) because there are a fair number of black male, white female, mixed race child families in the region, but it is very rare to see a black nanny and white child in our area.

Now, as tweens, my own children are more easily seen as part-Asian when in the presence of their mom, frequently pass for white when seen only with me, and are often miscoded as Hispanic when alone (particularly given the fact that my daughter is reasonable facile in Spanish and my son often plays soccer with Hispanic children). They seem to be chameleons when it comes to how they are perceived racially, with people picking up on whomever they happen to be around.

I was wondering about the origin of the surname “Loe.” I hadn’t noticed it before this week when I heard about the 6’8″ Milwaukee Brewers pitcher Kameron Loe.