(NAME-MCE) How White Are Blacks? How Black Are Whites?

[Bill Howe]

How White Are Blacks? How Black Are Whites?



by Steve Sailer



UPI, May 8, 2002



http://www.isteve.com/2002_How_White_Are_Blacks.htm





How white are blacks? How black are whites?



Because African-Americans and European-Americans have been in contact,
sometimes intimate, since 1619, these questions are central to Americans'
collective self-understanding. In recent years, genetic techniques for
accurately determining the answers have finally become available.



Molecular anthropologist Mark D. Shriver heads a group of nine population
researchers at Penn State University who are going beyond the arbitrary "one
drop of blood" rule to answer these ancient questions about the family trees
of the typical American "black" and "white."



They have examined DNA samples from 3,000 individuals in 25 locations around
America, mostly self-identified African-Americans, looking for the gene
markers that tend to differ between Europeans and Africans.



Shriver pointed out that genetically tracking admixture is difficult because
differences even between subraces, such as Scandinavian versus West African,
account for only about ten percent of human genetic variation. "Thus, we are
all more alike than we are different," he noted.



Besides illuminating American history, Shriver hopes to use his ability to
determine racial admixture to locate genes associated with illnesses that
affect one race more than the other -- such as diabetes, prostate cancer,
and hypertension, which are more prevalent among African-Americans, and
dementia and osteoporosis among whites.



The subject of black-white admixture is particularly complicated because,
since the later 17th Century, Americans with virtually any visible
sub-Saharan African ancestry (the so-called "one drop of blood") have been
socially categorized as simply African. Only recently has society begun to
tolerate individuals like Tiger Woods (who is one-half East Asian,
one-quarter sub-Saharan African, one-eighth European, and one-eighth Native
American) defining themselves as anything other than as African. Indeed,
Woods was criticized by some African-Americans in 1997, following the first
of his three Masters' victories, for not submitting to the "one drop"
definition.



Is mixed race ancestry fairly typical for an American? In two ways, it is.
First, more than 50 million whites, according to his analyses, have at least
one black ancestor.



Another way to approach the question is to group together all the whites and
blacks in America and calculate their mean degree of admixture. Shriver's
data shows that on average, they would be about 12 or 13 percent African.



Yet, from another perspective, a sizable degree of racial mixing is highly
unusual. There simply aren't many African-Americans or European-Americans
who are mostly white but also substantially black. Shriver pointed out,
"There is a very small degree of overlap in the population distributions."
In America, most of the whites are extremely European and most of the blacks
are quite African.



Despite the notorious arbitrariness of the "one drop" rule, the actual
American population conforms to its strictures surprisingly closely.



Granted, the "one drop" rule would be laughed out of existence if anyone
attempted to impose it on a land with a more genetically blended population,
such as Puerto Rico (which Shriver has begun to study). Yet, it appears
possible that the rule survives in the U.S. because it's not too wildly
inaccurate. Only a small fraction of the population is more than half, but
less than 90 percent European.



Among self-identified whites in Shriver's sample, the average black
admixture is only 0.7 percent. That's the equivalent of having among your
128 great-great-great-great-great-grandparents (who lived around two
centuries ago), 127 whites and one black.



It appears that 70 percent of whites have no African ancestors. Among the 30
percent who do, the black admixture is around 2.3 percent, which would be
like having about three black ancestors out of those 128.



In contrast, African-Americans are much more racially mixed than
European-Americans. Yet, Shriver's study shows that they are less European
that was previously believed.



Earlier, cruder studies, done before direct genetic testing was feasible,
suggested that African-Americans were 25 or even 30 percent white. Shriver's
project is not complete, but with data from 25 sites already in, he is
coming up with 17-18 percent white ancestry among African-Americans. That's
the equivalent of 106 of those 128 of your ancestors from seven generations
ago having been Africans and 22 Europeans.



According to Shriver, only about 10 percent of African-Americans are over 50
percent white.



This genetic database is restricted to adults. Black-white married couples
quadrupled in number between the 1960 Census and 1990 Census, so the
admixture rates among children are no doubt higher than among adults.



Political conservatives have taken to denouncing the "one drop" rule --
George Will recently called it "Probably the most pernicious idea ever to
gain general acceptance in America" -- perhaps because it is used to
determine who qualifies for affirmative action for blacks. Many opponents of
racial preferences now argue that it is absurd to award benefits based on
this arbitrary definition. This view is embodied in Ward Connerly's upcoming
Racial Privacy Initiative, which would partially ban the state of
Californiafrom demanding citizens categorize themselves by race.



The number of mostly white but a little-bit-black young people -- the kind
who cause confusion for affirmative action classification schemes -- is
growing as interracial marriage becomes more popular. On the other hand, as
Shriver's data shows, there aren't yet all that many adults who fall
genetically in the "gray zone" between the races. Perhaps at present the
"one drop" rule, for all its theoretical folly, still is indeed good enough
for government work -- assuming that government work should include racial
preferences, which are now illegal in California.



The admixture rates vary by region. The African-American populations with
the highest average numbers of white ancestors found so far are those in
California and Seattle. They average a little over one-quarter European
ancestry.



In contrast, according to a recent article published by Shriver's team in
the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, the Gullahs of the
long-isolated Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia, who are famous for
speaking a pleasantly African-sounding dialect, are only 3-4 percent white.



In the rest of the rural South, African-Americans tend to be not as black as
the Gullahs, but still blacker than the national average. Shriver's team
found that the white admixture percentage in four Lowland farm
counties in South
Carolina was 12 percent.



Cities, whether Northern or Southern, tend to be about average. In terms of
white ancestry among African-Americans, New York is a little above the mean,
while Philadelphia is a little below. Jackson, Miss., is near the norm.



The African-Americans of New Orleans average 22 percent white. This fairly
high number reflects the influence of Spanish and French mores in Louisiana.
Latin cultures have no "one drop" rule, so intermarriage was somewhat more
socially acceptable there.



Advocates of the growing popular idea that race is merely a "social
construct" with no biological reality point to the artificiality of the "one
drop" rule as evidence for their view. Yet, it's possible that the "one
drop" rule itself helped to construct the genetic reality that Shriver has
uncovered.



Latin cultures, which lack the one drop rule, create more evenly blended
populations, as Shriver has helped document among Mexican-Americans. He and
his colleagues found that Hispanics in certain New Mexico and Colorado
locales averaged 58 percent white ancestry, 39 percent New World Indian, and
three percent African.



In contrast to the "bimodal distribution" of blacks and whites in America,
Mexican-Americans clustered around their average admixture level of 58
percent European.



For centuries, however, American whites defined anyone with visible black
ancestry as ineligible to marry a white. (It wasn't until 1967 that the
Supreme Court overturned the "anti-miscegenation" laws that were then still
in force in 19 states.) This meant that mixed race people could seldom marry
white people.



Unless, that is, they were white-looking enough to pass for white, and were
willing to pull up their roots and move to a different part of the country
where they could assume a white identity. This happened not infrequently in
American history. For instance, one of the slave Sally Hemmings' one-eighth
black sons (who, according to geneticists, was fathered by either Thomas
Jefferson or one of his relations) moved to Madison, Wis., after he was
freed and founded a family of socially identified whites. Nonetheless,
Shriver's data suggests that well over 90 percent of the African genes in
Americans are still found in people who call themselves black.



Over the generations, mixed-race lineages would tend to either pass into the
white population and become more white with each generation's marriage to a
white person, or stay in the African-American population. If the latter, the
families would normally become more genetically African over time as their
offspring married African-Americans.



Thus, the "one drop" rule helped make African-Americans and
European-Americans into two social groups whose members -- despite sometimes
being highly varied in ancestry -- are perhaps more distinct on average in
their family trees than the arbitrariness of the "one drop" would lead you
to initially assume.




-- 
Bill Howe
http://www.billhowe.org

JoIn me this summer in China - Multicultural Educators to China Summer 2007
Trip - http://billhowe.org/China2007.htm

Past-President
National Association for Multicultural Education (NAME)
http://www.nameorg.org