If I’m using the “one drop rule” used historically in the States, I’ll say that’s a black baby.
If I’m Brazilian or Haitian and phenotype is all it takes to make a judgement, I’ll say, “Well, what does this baby look like? What’s his hair texture like? Skin tone? Is the baby from a wealthy family or a poor family?” In other words, a genetic test would be meaningless to me, because I’m missing the criteria that I would normally use.
Most people would not guess that this man has equal parts European and African ancestry. He didn’t even know. So what race is he? If you saw him walking on the street, would you say, “Ah, a mixed man!”
I answered your question. Now will you answer mine?
Race is a social construct, based on rules we come to learn as we grow up in a particular society at a specific time. What we see as racial phenotype is the result of a social filter.
A person who’s determined to be a certain race based on genetic markers may or may not be determined to be of the same race based on phenotype.
If my society says a black person is anyone with known recent African ancestry, and I call Mariah Carey “black”, I’m not wrong because she matches up with my definition (I know one of her parents is black). If my society says a white person is anyone with 50% European ancestry based on genetic markers and I call Mariah Carey “white”, I’m not wrong because she matches up with my definition (I don’t know if she does for real, but let’s pretend). But if I’m going to say unequivocally and uncategorically that Mariah Carey is black or white, which datum do I choose to ignore? Which should get more weight and why? Does it change things if people like Henry Louis Gates or Halle Berry obtain identical scores on their genetic test? If not, then what’s the point?
My objection is not, “You can’t tell the race of a foetus any more than you can tell the race of a person you see walking down the street”. It’s, “Defining race by blood type requires just as many arbitrary criteria as required for defining it by phenotype, the two types of examination will frequently produce non-corroborating results, and ultimately phenotype is considered more important anyway when it comes to race, because we don’t walk around with our genetic profiles stamped on our foreheads. So why don’t we wait till the baby is born?”
To distinguish our differences even more, you’re presuming a thing called “race” that exists outside of a social framework. I’m not.
And if that person had been born, say, on an Indian reservation, he or she might very well self-identify as Native American. And the tribe might very well think of that person as a member, too.
But we have to deduct a few points since he left out the Americas in the his second sentence, which probably ranks above East Asian now with the large number of Hispanics in the US, most of whom have some Native American ancestry.
Repeating that is not going to make it correct. Whether or not you can know the race of an individual depends on how you define that term. Also, given this post by the OP:
your attempt to stifle the discussion appears to be counterproductive. I’m sure if this turns into too much of a debate, **Colibri **will either lock the thread or move it to GD.
Good: Means it works most of the time. So if you do a DNA test, and it says that the person is black, most people will look at the person and say “yeah, he’s black” most of the time.
Race: The "common ‘racial’ categories (e.g. black, white, Asian, etc.) " referred to in Post #2.
We do not yet have a DNA test that can determine the exact skin tone. We do not yet have a DNA test for hair type. We do not yet have a DNA test for the epicanthal fold. We do not even yet have a DNA test for future penis size. We most certainly do not have a DNA test to determine what race the person will self-identify with, but that can usually be inferred from the parents. The answer to your question is then “No, there is no such test.”
Those are social categories partially correlated with a combination of biological features (skin tone, hair type, epicanthal folds, height, body hair, sweat glands, etc.) We do not yet have a DNA test that can determine any of those features specifically with any degree of certainty. We can theoretically test for one particular gene that partially accounts for skin tone, but it is unlikely to be able to tell race at all.
The answer is a qualified “yes”. Geneticists have characterized a number of populations by identifying markers in the genes (usually these are non-coding sections of the DNA, sometimes called “junk DNA”) and have found clustering of certain markers among people whose ancestry is native to certain geographical areas. You can use this technique to locate the continent from which the person’s ancestry is from, which corresponds roughly to what those “common racial categories” are. (White Americans are lumped in with Europeans, even if your ancestors came over on the Mayflower.)
For most people, this works pretty well. But if your ancestry is mixed, from border areas, or areas that have not been well studied (eg: certain parts of Asia, some island populations), then the technique doesn’t work as well. Of course, it would be possible to collect more data and make the process better and usable over larger areas, and some of that is going on now. The thing is, though, what used to be relatively isolated populations are mixing at a faster and faster rate, so we’re kind of shooting at a moving target. Where I live in CA, lots of people are of mixed racial backgrounds and it’s not uncommon to find someone who describes himself as mixed asian/european/hispanic (and that doesn’t even address the idea that “hispanic” is mostly a very mixed population to begin with). A large percentage of the population of Central and South America is also of mixed racial origin, so you’d probably run into unique problems there.
Let’s be careful, though. It’s true that we can’t identify the specific genes that cause the specific phenotypical features of a given race, but if we can identify the population from which the individual derives (which we often can), then we can, with a high degree of certainty, infer what racial characteristics the person will have. If you DNA says your ancestors came from East Asia, then we can be pretty certain you have dark hair and dark eyes with an epicanthic fold.
One thing to be cautious about wrt genetic ancestry testing is when people talk about determining the specific region your “ancestors” came from, as was done in that recent PBS show “African American Lives”. In that show, Louis Gates had a number of prominent Black Americans’ DNA analyzed to determine which tribal region in Africa they came from. The thing is, though, the tests were done by tracing either the mtDNA or the Y chromosome DNA, and that test only tells you where one of your distant grandparents were from. In all likelihood each of those individuals were looking back at least 5 generations or more, in which case that ancestor contributed only about 1/32nd or less* of that individual’s DNA-- which is pretty meaningless biologically, even if it gave them a sense of connectedness that had been lacking before.
*assuming no inbreeding had occurred, which does become increasingly likely the further back in your ancestry you go.
Will tell you nothing about a persons race without additional information! Two people of different race can easily have the same test results. Two people of the same race can easily have different results. Look at their accuracy and precision article. Look at their experiments to see how the ‘simulated’ numbers were derived.
No test is perfect. The question is if it’s good enough to be right most of the time.
Your claim seems to be that there are certain traits that people associate with each traditional race, and that since we can’t test for the specific genes (alleles, really) responsible for those traits, we can’t do a genetic test that determines peoples’ race.
However, as another poster pointed out, “if we can identify the population from which the individual derives (which we often can), then we can, with a high degree of certainty, infer what racial characteristics the person will have.”
