Say a man’s great-great grandfather was black, but his great-great grandmother was white, they had interracial children, which would be his great grandparents.
Now, his great grandparents mated with all Caucasian people and in turn, his grandparents were born. His grandparents mated with all Caucasian people, who are his parents. His parents, who obviously mated, were both white and had him. So basically, the only black person in his family is his great-great grandfather.
OK, now, he meets a woman who has the same exact scenario, her great-great grandfather was black, but the rest of her family mated with all white people during the years.
Is it possible for these two to some how pop out a black baby? Can that gene skip generations? Has this ever happened?
Reason I ask is because the other day a Latino couple had twins, but one was white (all the characteristics of a white person) and another was Latino looking and she had all the characteristics of a Latino.
I’m almost positive this just happened within the past several months. There was a BBC article on it, but I can’t seem to find the right search terms. Anyone?
Yeah, I didn’t see that one, but I did see the BBC article on the other story I mentioned, the one with the Latino couple having one white kid and one latino.
There is a continuum between “White” and “Black”, so there is no reason the scenario in the OP couldn’t happen. It’s not like you can do test on someone and say “you are white” or “you are black”. You are what other people perceive you to be, when it comes to race. And to complicate things, what other people perceive you to be can depend on just how you want to be perceived.
Will Tiger Woods’ child be considered “Black”? Her African ancestry makes up only 25% of her DNA (at most). But if she wants to be “Black” can look the part at least to some extent, then she’s “Black”. Most likely, though, she will be raised to appreciate her multi-ethnic/racial background, much like her father.
It wouldn’t be so much that genes “skip generations”, but recombine in certain ways that they didn’t in previous generations. Having said that, the whole genotype to phenotype process is a lot more complicated than the simple Dominant/recessive state that we learned in HS biology.
Maybe the person tans real easily, and looks “Black” in the summer and “White” in the winter. Maybe they tend to look like whatever group they are seen with. Maybe the guys look “Black” if they grow their hair out, but “White” if they crop it short.
There is no such thing as “characteristics of a Latino”. That group is a linguistic group, not a racial or even an ethnic group. If you mean the characteristics of a Mexican Mestizo, then you might be closer, but even then, there is a broad range of phenotypes in that category. “Latino” can be anybody, of any phenotype whose ancestry comes from Spanish speaking countries, mostly in Mexico, Central and South America.
Here’s a rather dramatic example of differing skin color in twins. The twins are completely naturally conceived from parents of mixed caucasian-asian heritage.
There’s a book called When She Was White that tells the story of Sandra Laing, a woman who looks very black but was born to white parents. There’s a wiki page about here here.
That sounds like the basis for the story Mitchener incorporated into his book on S.A. in that story, though, it turned out that one of the parents was suspected of being secretly Black and passing as White. When genetic test were done, however, it turned out the other parent (whom no one suspected of having African ancestry) was the “culprit”.
Note that they are not identical twins, they are fraternal, which just means that the mother was pregnant with them at the same time and they were born at the same time. Two different eggs and two different sperm.
I’ve wondered about this scenario. My maternal grandfather was black, but you’d never know from my family - my Mom looks more Native American than anything (and she’s half Irish, half black!), and me and all but one of my siblings have blonde hair and blue eyes (one of my sisters has black hair but otherwise looks completely white). When I found out my wife was pregnant, we joked that the baby might end up looking nothing like either of the parents - she is blonde haired and blue eyed, but her grandfather on her father’s side was an “Eggplant Italian” - I’ve seen pictures and he’s darker than most black people and had some black features. Our baby ended up blonde haired and blue eyed too, though.
Is it possible that your maternal grandfather was part Native American? It’s fairly common among African Americans to have Native American ancestry mixed in. And keep in mind that most American Blacks are part European, too. I think the average is about 20%, but it can easily be 50% (or higher) and the person is often still considered Black.
So, although you may think of yourself as being 25% of African descent, it’s unlikely that you are. It could easily be as low as 10%. What we call race in the US is not the same as genetic lineage.
As John Mace astutely pointed out, looking black versus looking white is based on a whole bunch of subjectivity. Answering this question also depends on how you define your racial categories. Just because someone looks white to one person’s eye doesn’t mean they really are white.
If the OP is asking whether any couples that appear to be lily white has ever produced children that look less than lily white, then the answer is an unsurprising yes. The cases of the chocolate babies twinned with the vanilla ones make the news because of the stark contrasts in color. Butterscotch beige babies don’t make the news because they’re not shocking enough, but they’d look black to many people.
That was poorly worded… I think the average European ancestry found in African Americans is about 20%. I did not mean to imply that 20% of African Americans have European ancestry. In fact, most do. And I’m sure the average is going up over time, as interracial couples become more common.
Going back to Tiger Woods… His father, Earl, is considered Black, but his heritage is 50% African American, 25% Native American and 25% Chinese. If you look at him closely, this won’t be surprising. Keep in mind that the 50% “African American” is bound to have some European content, too. This makes Tiger (at most) 25% African, and yet most Americans would automatically assume that he was Black. Yet he has more Asian ancestry (50%) than African ancestry. Again, if you look closely at his facial features, the East Asian ancestry is very noticeable (His mom is 75% East Asian, 25% Dutch). Talk about your mutt!! That guy is a veritable United Nations of DNA.
As has already been suggested, it depends on what exactly you mean by “black.”
If you mean that the offspring would show enough features associated with sub-Saharan Africans to be classified as “black” in the US, that is certainly possible though it would very rare. It doesn’t take very much in the way of African-type features to be classified as black instead of white in the US, even if the majority of ancestry is white.
If you mean that the offspring would actually resemble an actual pure sub-Saharan African when all his or her recent ancestors had all been classified as “white,” that would be virtually impossible. Many of the features associated with an “African” appearance are genetically either dominant (offspring resemble parent with dominant phenotype) or co-dominant (offspring are intermediate between the phenotypes of both parents). Therefore a parent or other ancestor who was classified as “white” would almost certainly not have had any of these alleles. So there is a limit to how “African” a child could appear, given the information that all of his or her recent ancestors had been classified as white.
Which is why the examples offered here are of “White” babies being born to “Black” parents, not the other way around. One has to wonder how “White” the parents of Sandra Laing looked (click on the picture to enlarge it). Or if her father was actually her biological father. In the US she would unquestionably be considered “Black”, although they claim she looked less “Black” as a child. Note that the blood test “did not exclude” her father’s paternity, but that’s not the same as confirming it.
Tiger’s father Earl Wood’s ancestry is half African, a quarter Chinese, and a quarter Native American, making Tiger’s ancestry a quarter African, and his daughter’s ancestry one-eighth African.