Posted: Mon 08 Sep 2008 16:42 Post subject: The U.S. Black/White Color Line
The U.S. Black/White Color Line
The United States is the only nation on earth that has preserved for over three centuries a genetically discontinuous enclave of mostly African ancestry within a larger population of European ancestry.
Unique in the Western Hemisphere
The U.S. endogamous color line is unique in the Western Hemisphere. After the New World’s aboriginal population was nearly wiped out by diseases to which they lacked immunity, it was re-populated by eleven million African slaves and three million European colonists. In every nation but one, the populations promptly interbred, yielding today’s unimodal genetic admixture scatter diagrams.
Where African slaves were few, as in Argentina or Chile, scatter diagrams show a single cluster skewed towards European admixture. The average Argentinean or Chilean has about 94 percent European and 6 percent African DNA markers. Virtually no long-established families look Black.
Where African slaves were many, as in Haiti, scatter diagrams show a single cluster skewed towards African admixture. The average Haitian has mostly African DNA markers and few European markers. Few long-established families look White.
Where colonial populations from Europe and from Africa were roughly equal, as in Puerto Rico or Brazil, the single genetic cluster centers on the 50-50 mark. About one family in ten looks Black, about one in ten looks White, and the rest look Hispanic or mixed.
Only the United States has a bimodal cluster diagram showing two genetically distinct groups. Most of the U.S. population has negligible detectable African DNA, while the enclave (about one-eighth of the population) is of overwhelmingly African ancestry.
Unique Around the World
The U.S. endogamous color line is also unique outside of the Western Hemisphere. Other former Euro-African colonies around the world officially recognize citizens of dual ancestry. Only in the United States do citizens of mixed Afro-European ancestry lack legal existence. Only in the United States do people say that someone “looks utterly White but is really Black,” in some invisible sense. In other nations, if you look White you are White. In other nations with populations from both Europe and Africa, the intermarriage rate is about 40 percent. This 40 percent exogamy rate is typical of ethnic assimilation of any immigrants everywhere. In contrast, U.S. Black/White intermarriage is under 4 percent and has been under 4 percent for centuries.
The only phenomenon on earth that approximates U.S. society’s harsh enforcement of its endogamous barrier is the Hindu caste system. Oddly, the latter is falling in importance due to efforts by the government of India to outlaw it. In contrast, the U.S. color line is increasingly enforced at every level of U.S. government, and any opposition to involuntary dichotomous “racial” classification by the State is usually deemed “racist” and often ruled to be illegal.
So Strange That it Demands Study
The U.S. endogamous color line is so strange that it demands study. Questions crying out for answers include: When was the unique U.S. endogamous color line invented? Where? By whom? Why? Was it the same in the many culturally distinct antebellum regions of the nation (such as Spanish Florida or the Francophone Gulf Coast)? Given the factual reality that one-third of White Americans and all Black Americans are of mixed Euro-Afro ancestry, by what yardstick do Americans shoehorn themselves into one side or the other of the color line? And, most importantly, why do Americans so tenaciously defend their dichotomy?
What makes it bizarre is that, to Americans, their dichotomous color line (which has somehow managed to preserve a unique genetically African enclave for centuries) is the norm. In their minds, everyone else on the planet is out of step. And so Americans seek explanation for their nation’s unique phenomenon in studies of slavery (historically ubiquitous), colonialism (globally ubiquitous), or “racism” (taking care to avoid defining the term). It is as though there were an odd smell in their own home but no one else’s, so they seek its source in every neighbor’s house but not their own.
Again, what is unique about the United States is not ethnicity, nor identity politics, nor White mistreatment of Blacks, nor Black hatred of Whites. What is unique and so demands explanation is the very existence of two genetically distinct endogamous groups within the same nation.
Race Now
Part 2: How White Are Blacks? How Black Are Whites?
by Steve Sailer
UPI, May 8, 2002
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. Bad History. 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 California from 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.
The basic reason for the lack of genetic blending, a la Latin America, would be the deliberate efforts of both the federal and state governments to both outlaw and stigmatize family ties between Europeans and Africans.
The Third Charter of Virginia (1611-1612) dedicates the colony to "the propagation of the Christian Religion, and Reclaiming of People barbarous, to Civility and Humanity." The Declaration of Proposals of the Lord Proprietor of Carolina (1663), the Charter of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (1663) all defined the mission of their colonies as the taking of land from "barbarous" natives and their conversion to Christianity and a European (specifically English) way of life.
These colonial documents do not use the word "white," Jacobson says, but between the charters of the early seventeenth century and the naturalization law of the late eighteenth, the word "white" did attain wide usage in New World political discourse, and it was written into an immense body of statutory law. In the colonies the designation "white" appeared in laws governing who could marry whom, who could participate in the militia; who could vote or hold office; and in laws governing contracts, indenture and enslavement. The term "white" was used to confer rights and freedoms (except limiting one's right to marry). Citizenship became inseparable from the idea of whiteness and maleness because a citizen's primary duty was to help put down slave rebellions and participate in wars against the Indians. In other words, colonial British elites first created "white people" as a social and political category to create a sense of European solidarity against slaves and Indian nations. The colonial European population, divided by class, religion and national origin, had to be united. People who had little land and no slaves themselves had to be made to feel a certain brotherhood with large landowners and slave holders. It is no accident that Congress established a Uniform Militia (1792) defined as "each and every free able-bodied white male citizen of the respective states." In return for this military obligation, "white" men received the franchise (with property qualifications), the right to hold office and other rights superior to women and non-white males.
Excellent article Frank. Do you think you have largely solved the mystery? I feel that you have though reading a few of your essays I am left with the impression that the answers are not alltogether clearly defined.
Well, I do not think that there is much mystery about the who, when, where, and how of actual events. I phrased the paragraph with all the question marks that way, in order to try to arouse reader interest in learning more about it for themselves.
On the other hand, the "why" of it will always be unanswerable since every event has many causes; and every cause has causes of its own, all receding into the mists of time.
Still, if I can lure a few readers into curiosity about the strange corner into which Americans have managed to paint themselves, I shall feel that I have contributed.
You ought to be heralded as one of the greatest scholars on American Race relations. Sadly, the greatest genius and most wonderful insights are largely overshadowed by the mediocre.
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