I saw this article and it got me to thinking about interracial children. I’ve had high school biology, but I have some questions about the probabilities of what interracial children will look like.
I’m a mulatto myself, but very very few can ever tell just by looking at me, my skin color is like a slightly browned white person (think latino), I have white hair, and I have a somewhat “blacker” nose than usual, but still most people who look at me assume I am white.
My questions:
Does it matter which color the father is and which the mother is? Almost immediately upon learning I am half black, 90% of black people will say “Your mom must be white”, because they seemingly think that mixed race people will take their skin tone from their mother (in fact, my mom is a typical African American). My guess is that it is 50/50 and the mother’s genes contribute no more or less than the father’s in determining skin color.
Say I had a child with a Filipina. The child would be half Filipino, quarter black, and a quarter white. I strongly suspect it’s impossible for me to make a black-skinned child unless my wife was black as well, just because of how I look like. But is there a chance that the child could look completely black, even a small one? Does it matter that I don’t look black or not? (i.e., do I carry around less “black” genes in my sperm than a mullatto equally black as me, 50/50, but who is darker?)
Also welcome any anecdotal evidence about what mulatto/filipino children look like, it’s not a combination I see every day and I am pretty curious.
From everything I learned about genes, it makes no difference who is the male or the female in any genetic combination. Anecdotally, my sister is biologically 50% Jamaican black (father) and 50% English white (mother), but she looks completely “black” - and passes as such in the black community in Tennessee. She has married a black man, and my nephew also looks 100% black.
I have also heard that “throwbacks” can occur, so that several generations down the line, certain genetic features of an ancestor can crop up in new offspring.
Can’t speak about Filipinas, but about 10 years ago in Nha Trang I met a Vietnam War baby from a relationship between a black American GI and a Vietnamese mother. He looked, I suppose, as one would imagine a mix of the “races” to be: “black” nose and lips and skin a shade darker than his compatriates, but with Vietnamese eyes, and straight hair. (Incidentally, I thought he was very good looking, but he said because of his looks he bore a social stigma, and could never get married.)
So could anyone tell me, as a person who looks white to 99% of people black and white (I have had maybe…5 times in my life someone ask me if I was mixed or part black), do the genes I will give to my children contain the same amount of black features as every molatto, or do they contain less black tendencies because I seemed to inherit more white features?
Well you said you would take anecdotal evidence, so here goes. My second cousin is half white (mom) and half black (dad). He looks black. He has been married twice, both times to Fillippinas. His children by his first wife look black to me, though I haven’t seen them since they were little, maybe 5 or 6 (we don’t live anywhere close to each other). I wonder if my grandma has any more recent pictures?
Anyway, his daughter by his second wife was the most beautiful baby I had ever seen in my life. She seemed to take after her mommy’s more Asian looks, but who knows what she looks like now! I’d love to see a recent picture of her, as she’s around 5 years old. Hmm, I’m getting ready to send a pic of my baby to my great-aunt (her grandma), maybe I can ask for pictures of them back.
What do you mean by “completely black”? You mean, black as in straight outta Africa, skin so black it’s blue? Or black as in recognizable African ancestry?
Skin color is a dictated by multiple genes and their interaction with other genes AND the environment. So the coloring of your offspring will not be very predictable. Just look at a “typical” black family (don’t know what that would be, but I’m assuming you do since you used that term). Even if the parents have similar complexions, their children can be along a spectrum.
I have a brother who’s adopted. His mother was white and his father was black. While “red bone”, he’s still darker than his adopted siblings and parents–none of whom are biracial. Our cousins are a real hoot, though. One set is totally white-looking, the offspring of a light-skinned mother and a white father. None of their kids look particularly black either. At the same time, another set of cousins demonstrates the unpredictability of any phenotype, let alone “racial” ones. A light-skinned aunt (a different one from before) has a totally white-looking child with white man. The same aunt then has a “straight outta Africa” child with a darker-skinned black man. Looking at the two children, you’d never think they were next-door neighbors let alone half-siblings (think Scarlett O’Hara and Buckwheat). Genes are an extremely funny thing.
Your phenotype may be “less” black than a darker-skinned person of similar ancestry, but that doesn’t mean much as far as your genes go. Your “African” alleles may be fully present in your genome, but for whatever reason just don’t affect your phenotype that much (gene-environment interactions are very complex). It may also be the case that your mother has Euro heritage and you inherited copies of Euro genes from her as well as your father. If your mother is “typical” African American, this may be more likely than you think.
So yes, it is quite possible that you will have a cafe au lait or darker-skinned child.
More anecdotes. I have two good friends in interracial marriages.
One, white mother, father black (mother) & Cherokee Indian (father). He looks African American. They have two teenage daughters. The youngest is light skinned African American looking. The eldest looks very Native American. In both cases I’m referring to facial features, and what your average person would identify them as. If that makes sense.
FWIW, both daughters self-identify themselves as black. Maybe because their school is very suburban-white
I also have a Chinese friend whose husband is 6’3", pale freckley blue eyed carrot haired dude. They have a daughter who simply looks exotic, quite beautiful! She has light brown hair and dark eyes.
I am a mousey-haired green-eyed white European, and My husband is a very dark heavy-bearded Japanese with black eyes. One kid has European features and dark brown hair with ginger highlights, and the other kid is blond with Japanese features! (Though he is now five and his hair is slightly darker than it was last year, so who knows what he will end up looking like?) Both our kids tend much more to the “western” look but we recently discovered that the Japanese grandmother may be half Ainu, in which case it isn’t so odd, as Ainu had more western features and light gold eyes (as are the grandmother’s eyes, though in all other respects she looks Japanese.)
My Japanese/English friends have four kids, one of whom is absolutely completely Japanese looking, one is absolutely completely English looking, and two of whom are what you would expect and are a mix of both parents.
It’s often said in our bi or multi racial circles that our mixed kids tend to be extremely good-looking but that is probably rose tinted spectacles, because whoever looked at their own kid and saw an ugly, funny-looking creature (beyond the first few days when you’re getting used to them and they are still “unfolding”?!)
Two instances stand out in my mind. A Canadian guy in my area married a Japanese woman and has two boys. He’s tall, with curly brown-gold hair, pretty solidly “white” in appearance. I call his boys The Golden Children because of their coloring: light-brown to blondish hair and darker skin than either of their parents. The darker skin color might be due to the little hellions spending almost all of their waking hours outdoors, but the hair is straight from the genes. His wife has just about no chance of having any direct inheritance of light hair in her makeup.
The other is from the days when I was working in the office of an outreach program. Some clients came in with their daughter one day. She had bright-red afro-curly hair and green eyes with medium-dark skin. Her facial features were mostly negroid. They both looked “black,” though the mother was a bit light-skinned. We all know that there is a lot of mixing in African-American bloodlines, so her coloring is not that much of a surprise, but it was pretty startling for me at the time since I was a lot more naive then.
I think the perception that mixed-race people are more attractive than the average probably is due to two things. First, they’ll look a bit unusual, which many people interpret as exotic. Second, features that tend to stand out in one parent’s makeup will often be tempered by the other parent’s, making the kid’s face look a bit more like an ideal or archetypical face.