I haven’t been paying attention to your exchange with rat avatar, but this stands out at me.
How can you say the “one drop rule” hasn’t been used in decades? Upthread, you said this:
If someone has to have 90% European ancestry to never be mistaken for anything other than white in the US, seems to me that the other extreme must be defining black. Your WAG implies you can have as little as 9.9% African ancestry and still be perceived as having African ancestry. You may not be perceived the same as Kunta Kente. But you will not be perceived as white.
If that’s not a one-drop rule, I don’t know what is.
I’m afraid your cite proves exactly what I was saying. It’s right there in the abstract:
Emphasis added.
Further:
IOW, if you analyze enough locations, you break thru the paradox of there being more genetic variation within populations than between them, and are able to tell which people are more closely related to each other.
They do note that using race as a proxy for geographic origin is problematic, but that is because we have an odd system of race in the US. Someone might be mostly European in ancestry, but still be classified as black. But that is the opposite problem, not the one we are considering. I have never claimed that we can use race to determine what your DNA is going to look like. What were are doing is using DNA to determine your ethno-geographic origin. Something your paper acknowledges explicitly:
There was an episode of that show in which they tested a woman who fully identified herself as African-American and her family had been part of the African-American community for as long as she knew, but the genetic testing showed zero African ancestry.
I see your point. They are definitely racist and race obsessed, but this also seems like a new approach in the typical smear campaigns against black leaders and progressive politics in general, especially after Rachel Dolezal’s story got so much press.
It kills two birds with one stone.
Which is explicitly telling you that they are not assigning classification of individuals into races.
This is a completely bassackwards statement. You are arbitrarily redefining “race” as the “populations” chosen by the genetic testers and then saying that we have an “odd system of race.” The “odd system of race” is race for any application to race in the United States.
This story is relevant to Shaun King’s because this guy also went through the tragic side of the"black experience." If someone is treated like he is black his whole life and he has the scars to prove it, but he lacks the sufficient DNA markers…then what? Do we laugh in his face and deny him the only identity he’s known?
The odd concept is that we explicitly put people of mixed geographic origin in the same racial group. BUT WE KNOW THAT WE DO THAT, so it’s not a mystery when we look at someone’s DNA and see that they are 60% European and 40% African. We rightly conclude that this person is most likely going to be classified as black, but there is a significant possibility he will be classified as white. If the analysis shows 30% European and 70% African, we can state with high confidence that the person is will be considered “black”.
This is not rocket science. DNA determined “Geographic origin” correlates well with traditional races as long as we take into account the fact that “black” in the US might mean only a small percentage of geographic origin in Africa. If we didn’t know that, we’d be puzzled.
Before genetic testing was possible, it wouldn’t have been rocket science to look at a group of African-Americans and note that they had much greater variation than you’d see in a similar group of sub-Saharan Africans. We knew there was a lot of race mixing (European and African) even before we could actually measure it as we can today.
That’s being pedantic. Yes, we all derive from a population in Africa, but why stop there? It seems as though apes arose in Asia. So maybe we should say we’re all from Asia. For discussions like this, we usually mean tracing our origins back to a time long after humans left Africa and populated the other continents (except Antartica).
No you are just not getting it, outside of a social construct, which excludes the field of genetics the term race is to ancestry as:
firmament is to astronomy.
demonic possession is to mental health.
homunculus are to human reproduction.
Words and concepts have meaning, and as a theory in science the concept of “race” is fully debunked.
Lumping people into groups based on skull shape, nose shape, hair type and skin color do not map to distinct homogeneous populations and are useless for any modern study of ancestry. Genetic evidence has demonstrated this.
But I will let you win via attrition, in the hope that other readers will realize that general scientific consensus is that there is no valid way to scientifically categorize people by the historical concept of race.
For those other readers here is a better source than GD.
The 10% was referring to a percent of the population of the US, not the percent of African ancestry a person might have. What I was trying to say was that if you used DNA to classify people into races in the US, you’d end up with a group for which classification would be problematic. In particular, a good many African-Americans would be in that group. I was guessing that at least 10% of African-Americans would, but that was my lower limit. I expect the actual number would be higher.
I was not referring to the percent admixture that would tip the scales from black to white. If you look at the graph that **Mearsure-for-Measure **provided upthread, the point where about half the folks self-identify as white and half self-identify as black is at about 25% admixture (meaning 25% African, 75% European or other).
As we know, the “one drop rule” did not depend on what you looked like, but about what people knew (or thought they knew) about your ancestors.
Just to be clear, I never said there was. In fact, I explicitly agree with that. What you are missing is that there is an entirely different concept of dividing humans into any number of arbitrary ethno-geographic groups, and our increasing ability to identify those groups by DNA analysis. ARBITRARY, and hence not meaningful.
Then change your word sir, race is fully arbitrary.
The word literally has no scientific appropriate use outside of the study of the social problems it’s eugenic, racist past handed to us.
Read the link on my previous post on why.
BTW The traits used to group people into races were arbitrary, not the groupings like in your quote. The traits used to classify as Caucasian, negroid etc… were fully based on bigoted intent.
May I remind you that this thread was started to evaluate the nigritude of a politically active person in reference to his “right” to affect change relating to very real social injustices?
Well your previous post was written 20 years ago, before we had the technology to determine someone’s ethno-geographic origins using DNA so it’s not surprising that it doesn’t address that. And why do you think I’ve been using that term “ethno-geographic” origin in the first place? It’s a term that, in most parts of the world, just means “where you live”. It’s Americans who look overseas to where we came from-- in it’s simplest form, from Europe or (sub-Sahara) Africa.
And when we use DNA to trace our ancestry (please don’t continue the fiction that this is something impossible to do), we can see into our past and see how many of or ancestors came from where. Within limits: We can’t go back arbitrary far in time, and we can’t pinpoint the geography to any arbitrarily small region. The latter is pretty easy for us to improve as we collect more data. The former has some inherent problems because after some point, some of our ancestors drop out of the record.
If anyone seriously doubts the science behind genetic genealogy, the NIH website gives some good information.
You only get a good analysis if you use single nucleotide polymorphisms as the more common mtDNA and y-Chromosome analysis only covers your matrilineal or matrilineal line, respectively. The SNP analysis looks at your entire genome, and thus all your ancestors back to the point where they stop to drop off.
But determining your genetic origins doesn’t really go too far toward telling you what “race” you are. I’d guess most Americans have some level of mixture. I did a genetic test, and found two complete wildcards mixed in. My husband found similar surprises.
Then there are all kinds of thing that muddy the water further. Adultery happens. We, for whatever reason, call “Hispanic” a race. Some of us use other racial schemas (like Brazil’s, mentioned earlier). There are dozens of little conflating factors that make it hard to sort people neatly into “races” based on genetic origins.
Frankly, the whole system kind of breaks down when it comes to mixed-race people anyway.
When have I said it is impossible to trace ancestry?
But if you claim that my cite is out of date, and that more modern techniques have validated the concept of race answer me a few questions.
Do people who trace their roots to traditional caucasians demonstrate a beauty in form?
Do the nigroid, the lesser of the races according to the theory, share features that demonstrate that they are closer to chimpanzees? The genetics should be quite clear (despite it shows that they are not)
What genetic markers can I find as a white male in my own genome to ensure I am not of one of the lesser races?
How do the peoples from the indian peninsula map to the sub saharan African stock?
They have the “Beautiful form” of a Caucasians but darker skin, are they the transitional form between the nigroids, and should we still classify them as nigroids despite the fact their skulls, hair and other traits don’t map 1:1?
How about the Australian aboriginal people, are they still classified as nigroids while ignoring their mongoloid genome?
Or are you just sticking to white/black/asian/hispanic, which were categories that were produced either to restrict immigration or to justify slavery.
Is a person from modern day india good enough to rally for BLM?
How about hispanic, they weren’t even a race until the 1930s when we wanted to restrict immigration, does their genome stop at that point in time?
Or could it be that a physical description we developed to define a “race” in order to restrict asian immigration happen to very loosely map to people who are from Asia because that is who we were trying to keep out?
I look forward to your amazing mapping of genomic evidence to 19th century bigiotry, it is amazing that they got everything so correct :rolleyes:
