Oct 11th, 2009 at 8:31 am
I Thought We Knew Too
Ta-Nehisi Coates expresses surprise at the apparent fact that most white people aren’t aware that African-Americans generally have some white ancestry:
I don’t raise it to highlight anyone’s ignorance, or to browbeat people, or argue for Black History Month starting in January. I raise it because this is as much about my ignorance as yours. Put bluntly–I thought you knew.
But you know what, I thought we knew this too. Certainly I knew and I didn’t consider this an obscure piece of trivia. How sure are we that white people are really that ignorant, as opposed to the press just being asinine in its coverage of Michelle Obama’s ancestry. There’s lots of asinine press coverage of lots of things.
57 Responses to “I Thought We Knew Too”
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October 11th, 2009 at 8:37 am
Uh, I think we know too. Certainly there is a wide variety of pigmentation among people classified as “black”.
October 11th, 2009 at 8:47 am
Um, yeah, I think we knew. Honestly, apart from the slavery apologists fringe (aka Republicans), this history is common knowledge.
OTOH, everybody also knew that Michelle Obama must have had ancestors who were slaves, but still, actually tracking them down and telling their stories is interesting stuff and definitely newsworthy in a human interest kind of way. That’s how I’ve been reading all the mixed race stories as well. Nobody’s surprised at her mixed-race ancestry, but it’s still very interesting because these stories aren’t told very often.
I’ve been reading THC’s comments, but they honestly haven’t really made any sense to me. Nothing in the Times article made me think this was supposed to be a rare story, except of course for the final chapter, which is what makes the story unique and interesting.
October 11th, 2009 at 8:59 am
Me personally, I’m more, like, pinko. And I’m pretty sure I have some australopithecus africanus folks among my ancestors.
October 11th, 2009 at 9:00 am
Ta-Nehisi extrapolating from a comments section to judge the ignorance of “white” Americans on ANY topic is what is surprising.
And ignorant.
And I don’t understand what is “asinine” about curiosity over Michele’s family, a curiosity I imagine she has shared.
American culture, high and low, is suffused with tales of the the White Massa and the comely house slave.
And the virile black field hand and the Southern white woman.
MANDINGO ring a bell?
And of course blacks themselves have contributed to what ignorance of “race mixing” exists with the relentless focus on AFRICAN Americans and BLACK Americans.
Martin Luther King didn’t speak of Cafe Au Lait Americans now did he?
What is surprising to me is the lack of awareness among Americans of the purposeful breeding of slaves.
And the suppression of “black” Americans’ history of color prejudice within their own community.
October 11th, 2009 at 9:55 am
Here’s what the state of the art in population genetic research early in the decade said about how white are blacks and how black are whites:
Among self-identified whites in Penn State molecular anthropologist Mark 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.
http://www.isteve.com/2002_How_White_Are_Blacks.htm
October 11th, 2009 at 10:26 am
It appears that 70 percent of whites have no African ancestors.
Everybody has African ancestors.
October 11th, 2009 at 10:32 am
Sorry Steve but we are all descended from Africans.
October 11th, 2009 at 10:33 am
Wow, I feel marginally better informed for having read a comment on race by Steve Sailer. I’m marking this day in my diary, for sure. That probably only happens, on average, once every 15,000 years.
October 11th, 2009 at 10:37 am
And technically, nothing is really solid, because most of the volume of an atom is empty space.
God, I’m so smrat!
October 11th, 2009 at 10:46 am
Whites, particularly Southern whites, were long well aware of the pattern of black-white parentage, but they worked really, really hard to hide and make sure everyone forgot.
This isn’t one of those ‘Oh I didn’t even remember that 3rd grade field trip’ sorts of historical absences.
October 11th, 2009 at 10:49 am
No, Joe, “solid” has to do with molecular structure, not with the space inside the atoms. And yes, we all have African ancestors, most definitely. What’s your problem?
October 11th, 2009 at 10:51 am
Technically – TECHNICALLY! – Arabs can’t be anti-semitic, because Arabs are Semites.
Ta-DA!!!
My problem is that you are offensively stupid, and you think that the little word games you play actually mean something in a discussion about substantive issues.
October 11th, 2009 at 10:54 am
Most white people have black people in their family tree, too. Humans are mostly all mutts. Americans moreso.
October 11th, 2009 at 10:58 am
And yes, we all have African ancestors, most definitely.
Well we’re talking about Steve Sailer here, and I’m not sure he believes that. (Although I’m sure he’s heard of the Out of Africa hypothesis.) But when we talk about “non-African” ancestors, it’s pretty clear we mean the folks who left Africa tens-of-thousands of years ago.
October 11th, 2009 at 11:05 am
Well Joe, I too think you’re stupid, so I guess we’re even.
What exactly is the “substantive issue” here?
October 11th, 2009 at 11:16 am
Matt Stevens,
It’s pretty clear, but there is a tiny segment who are working feverishly to muddy the waters.
People who are so horrified by efforts to understand how race works in our society and address the problem of racism that they want to wipe out the very terminology from our vocabulary, like the keepers of the dictionaries in 1984.
October 11th, 2009 at 11:31 am
Obama in fact noted this in his Philadelphia speech. When he talked about how his wife had the blood of both slaves and slave owners.
October 11th, 2009 at 11:33 am
So, how does race work in our society?
And how else can one address the problem of racism other than to wipe out the very terminology from our vocabulary? As long as you see individuals around you as “whites” and “blacks” and believe that it tells you something about them, racism is not going anywhere.
October 11th, 2009 at 11:36 am
he talked about how his wife had the blood of both slaves and slave owners
She doesn’t have any blood of slaves or slave owners, unless she received blood transfusions from slaves and slave owners. Talk about word games.
October 11th, 2009 at 12:38 pm
As abb1 says, what is the substantive issue here? Coates was responding to people from his own comments who apparently didn’t know that most African-Americans are not of “pure” sub-Saharan African descent. Noting that Michele Obama has both slave and “white” ancestry is a good human interest story, but should not be controversial in that regard.
It just turns out a lot of people never gave the matter much thought. That’s unfortunately common with all matters historical.
Of course, the racial fringe types like Sailer have to chime in to insist that there IS such a thing is race, and their mostly irrelevant gotcha points that “prove” it exists. And you patiently point out to them that race defined by genetics is not the same topic as race defined by law and culture, which is the issue that troubles America.
October 11th, 2009 at 1:17 pm
abby, If I thought you had even the slightest good-faith interest in understanding the answers to that question, I’d be happy to answer you.
But you don’t.
By working to demolish the structural problems that maintain racial inequality – none of which have the remotest connection to recognizing that people of African ancestry have African ancestry.
Whey you get to heaven, you can lecture Martin Luther King about how he had it all wrong.
OK, I will. Pretending not to understand that the phrase “blood of X running through your veins” is a reference to one’s ancestry is a shoddy little word game, played by people who are too ignorant and terrified to discuss issues of race forthrightly.
October 11th, 2009 at 1:20 pm
Midland,
It is exactly what you say later in your comment: race defined by genetics is not the same topic as race defined by law and culture, which is the issue that troubles America.
There are people who think that racial distinctions are determined by biology, rather than by culture. The lack of knowledge about the ancestry of most African-Americans helps propagate this error.
October 11th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
Popeye the Racist Man is descended from pond scum.
October 11th, 2009 at 1:37 pm
There are no such things as “racial distinctions” or “racial inequality”.
There is a thing called “racial discrimination”, but, as a structural problem, it can only be demolished by removing the conceptual framework where it can exist. And that means: wiping out the terminology from our vocabulary.
October 11th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
You are a fucking moron.
Once again, you can explain to Martin Luther King where he went wrong when you meet him in heaven.
For my part, but obviously not yours, I believe that people of diverse backgrounds and identities can live together as equals, in an atmosphere of mutual respect. We don’t actually have to be indistinguishable little drones crammed into Mao suits in order to have a just society.
October 11th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
Is it now official that Steve Sailer is a self-hating (partly) black man? Can I get a second for the motion? I am proud to admit my own admixture of African roots and genes.
October 11th, 2009 at 1:58 pm
What’s with Martin Luther King, you little racist prick? Didn’t the man say something about judging people by the content of their character, rather than color of their skin?
October 11th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
Steve Sailer’s studies are less than meet the eye. Because the genes for skin pigmentation among Africans are quite dominant, half black/half white children will almost invariably be identified and identify themselves as black.
When you are looking at the genes of “whites”, you are by definition looking at the genetic background of people who have few black ancestors. If they had more black ancestors, they’d be black!
October 11th, 2009 at 2:06 pm
Just to put in my 2 cents here: I don’t think ‘wiping out the terminology’ of race without replacing it by more descriptive/reality based terminology is a viable path to solving the problem of ‘race’ in America and, even if for some reason possible, far from the ‘only’ available path. Race (or whatever it is better called) is part of how we got where we are and putting your head in the sand about this isn’t going to fly with many people. Yes, for some people this does work and may, for a subset of them, not cause any real problems. But as a global solution applicable to all people…well, no. Some people, and I count myself among them, want to know what really happened to understand what can and should be done now. Putting ‘don’t look here’ signs doesn’t inspire confidence.
October 11th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
Putting your head in the sand about what, exactly – the fact that your skin color doesn’t define who you are? That’s not putting your head in the sand, that’s a fact.
Unless, of course, you’re joe from Lowell or Steve Sailer.
October 11th, 2009 at 2:25 pm
abb1:
Isn’t ‘color of your skin’ part of the banned terminology?
More seriously, if you want to ‘wipe out terminology’ as the only solution, you need to be clear what you mean by that. I just don’t see how a blanket ban on racial terms and references, as I read your comment, would work. And going after terminology and not the unrealistic referents of terminology seems like a side issue that’s going to just sidetrack the discussion. It also tends to suppress and trivialize history. See this thread…
October 11th, 2009 at 2:52 pm
Well, my objection is to race-based government statistics, census data, etc. It’s banned in France, for example; government is not allowed to collect any information (even anonymous) about your race, ethnicity, and (I think) religion. Because it’s just not their fucking business.
Outside that, well, I find race-based generalization rather tasteless usually, and of course I would like more people to see it that way. But of course it’s much more profitable for the elite to have this crusade for “diversity” and against “racial inequality”, rather than against just inequality, so of course this is going to continue.
October 11th, 2009 at 3:05 pm
abb1:
So we ought not to have data that shows that black men without high schools degrees have a 60% chance of going to prison by age 34? No, not the sort of things we should know…I think if the criminal justice system does this it should at least collect the data. Otherwise it is easy to declare the people who think the number of black men in prison is a problem are just crazy.
Is this the sort of statistic that should never see the light of day? That’s what you’re demanding.
October 11th, 2009 at 3:14 pm
Is this the sort of statistic that should never see the light of day? That’s what you’re demanding.
“If we make it illegal to measure effects of racial discrimination, then it won’t exist!”
October 11th, 2009 at 3:18 pm
Ah…
One thing:
Most white people from Western Europe–and going all the way to Asia Minor on the SE side have *some* kind of african blood a whole helluva lot sooner than 10k years ago. You’d have to be of some long-running noble/middle-class inbred linneage not to have had at least one african grandpappy somewheres in the 16th and 17th century (or a bit earlier). People pretty much will fuck anyone.
Sheeeeeeeeiiit, there are probably many *Koreans* who would hate to know that they have African mercinary blood from the regional conflict in the late 1500’s. So not only will people fuck (or rape) anyone, pretty much everyone in the northern hemisphere has been so far from home they may as well *be* home! So everyone is from everywhere else, and by 600 CE, everyone is *related* to everyone else.
October 11th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
Whatever else may be said of Sailer, his numbers for Black admixture in random American White populations is much too low. Nor is the argument to racialisation-by-skin pigment very convincing. Before tanning booths, we had malaria, “hereditary jaundice,” and coal mining.
October 11th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
So we ought not to have data that shows that black men without high schools degrees have a 60% chance of going to prison by age 34?
That’s right, I don’t see any use for this statistic. What do you find useful in it? Are you implying that the judges and juries are racist? It’s not clear from this statistic at all.
It’s a piece of completely useless data. Moreover, this kind of statistic is used by right-wing racists to prove that the black men are prone to violence. So, what do you get from this statistic?
October 11th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
“black daddy, white momma, black baby. White daddy, black momma, black baby”
=Public Enemy
October 11th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
This whole “wiping out the terminology” is pure bullcrap. abb1, you’re like the people Stephen Colbert caricatures when he says things like “as a white man — well, I mean, people *tell* me I’m white, but I don’t see race, so I take their word for it”.
When has a real societal problem ever been solved by linguistic intervention? Is they key to solving sexism to stop having the separate words “he” and “she”?
October 11th, 2009 at 4:11 pm
Not just by linguistic intervention, but by changing the conceptual framework, though language is certainly a part of it. Linguistic interventions are used to solve real societal problems all the time. You don’t call people “Negro” anymore, you don’t call your secretary “honey”. You don’t even call her “secretary” anymore, it’s “office manager”.
October 11th, 2009 at 4:26 pm
BTW, who are these people Stephen Colbert caricatures? I don’t get much of the US media these days, so I have no idea. I’m curious who they are; do you have a name or two, a link maybe? Thanks.
October 11th, 2009 at 8:16 pm
The low figures for African ancestry among Americans self-identified as white are correct: historically, this is a consequence of the ‘one-drop’ rule and relatively recent (Ellis Island) European immigration. The situation is substantially different in Brazil.
October 11th, 2009 at 8:18 pm
This reminds me of the bit in Richard Pryor Live at the Sunset Strip where he talks about going back to Africa and realizing that someone in his family had been lying to him.
As far as Coats assertion that white people don’t know this, I am reminded of the adage not to argue with a man whose job depends on not being convinced. His career depends on finding some level of racism in every story.
October 11th, 2009 at 8:52 pm
To his credit, Eric Lund, unlike the other commenters, actually cites a scientific report in denouncing me:
“Whatever else may be said of Sailer, his numbers for Black admixture in random American White populations is much too low.”
http://www.funpecrp.com.br/gmr/year2007/vol2-6//pdf/gmr0330.pdf
Unfortunately, he misinterprets his 2007 citation, which, in truth, comes up with a very similar finding for Americans to what my interviewee, Mark D. Shriver of Penn State told me in 2002, and which he published in 2003.
“we found 31 Amerindian/Asian (2.2%) and 13 African mtDNA lineages (0.9%) among the 1387 American Caucasian individuals catalogued in the FBI mtDNA population database. Even if we allow for imprecision in these figures, it is clear that the proportions of African and Amerindian ancestry in US Caucasians are commensurate with the estimates obtained by Shriver et al. (2003) with autosomal markers (3.2 and 0.7%, respectively) and are certainly not in large excess as we would, in principle, expect from knowledge of the sex-biased gene flow observed in African Americans and in Latin American
countries.”
Shriver, my source, found 0.7% black ancestry in self-identified American whites participating in a medical study, while the Brazilians looking at an FBI database come up with 0.9% black background in self-identified whites along the maternal line.
October 11th, 2009 at 8:58 pm
Moreover, the Brazilian geneticists whom Lund cites came up with the exact same explanation in 2007 as I did in my 2002 article for why racial admixture levels in America are much more dichotomous than in the Latin American world.
I wrote in 2002 in “How White Are Blacks? How Black Are Whites?:”
Advocates of the 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.
October 11th, 2009 at 9:03 pm
Similarly, the Brazilian geneticists explain why American genetic structures aren’t much like Brazilian ones with the same argument I made five years before. In Brazilian, among people who are not wholly of recent immigrant stock, the correlation between ancestry, appearance, and social identification is lower than in the U.S. The paper cited by Lund explains:
We propose an explanation based on the understanding that elevated genomic contributions from European males and Amerindian or African females depend not only on directional mating, but also on the “racial” and social category of the children born from these relations. In this respect, social practices in Brazil and in the United States diverge considerably. In Brazil, socially significant “races” are particularly categorized by the physical appearance of the individual (Harris and Kotak, 1963). There seems to be no descent rule and it is possible for two siblings differing in color to belong to completely diverse “racial” categories. Let us take as an example, the historically common Brazilian mating of a white European male with a Black African slave woman: the children with more pronounced physical African features would be considered Black, while those with more European features would be considered White (Parra et al., 2003). This created ample opportunity for the introgression of African mtDNA lineages into Whites and of European Y-chromosomal lineages into African Brazilians. Mutatis mutandis; the same would have occurred with Amerindians.
In the United States, descent appears to be much more important than physical appearance (Harris and Kotak, 1963) as shown by the “one drop rule” and other hypodescent stipulations (Hickman, 1997). Thus, all the offspring of the historical mating of a White European male with a Black African woman would be considered Black regardless of physical appearance. This allows the introgression of Y-chromosomal lineages into Blacks, but not of African mtDNA
lineages into American Caucasians.
We believe that our analysis helps demonstrate how molecular genetics has become an important tool for historians and social scientists, because of its capacity to provide objective, unbiased information about social phenomena.
October 11th, 2009 at 9:11 pm
Here’s another interesting pattern:
Have you ever noticed how, when the conversation turns to race, the people who are best informed about the facts and calmest and most penetrating in their judgments are the ones who are most vehemently denounced as ignorant haters by rage-filled people who have no statistics to cite?
October 11th, 2009 at 11:33 pm
BTW, who are these people Stephen Colbert caricatures? I don’t get much of the US media these days, so I have no idea. I’m curious who they are; do you have a name or two, a link maybe? Thanks.
Colbert is referring to a common point of view among white conservatives. It became unfashionable back in the 70s for everyone except Mr. Sailer’s fringe element to actively insist that racial differences are important and inherent and that deliberate segregation is normal and positive.
The standard trope since then has been to say that you don’t make judgements based on skin color, and most people never did, and the only real racists are Liberals. They get blamed for encouraging identity politics among racial minorities and for proposing proactive action against white racism–which conservatives insist doesn’t exist any more, if it ever did.
Colbert’s take on the issue is a direct satire on personalities like Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, who flog this point whenever race comes up in the national conversation. You can check them out on Youtube, if you like.
October 11th, 2009 at 11:35 pm
Have you ever noticed how, when the conversation turns to race, the people who are best informed about the facts and calmest and most penetrating in their judgments are the ones who are most vehemently denounced as ignorant haters by rage-filled people who have no statistics to cite?
Yeah, I get reminded of that whenever a right-wing shock jock or cable news host starts venting on the topic.
October 12th, 2009 at 12:16 am
We can also roughly estimate the scale of interracial mating in American history, which is useful for gaining perspective.
Let’s try some back-of-an-envelope calculations.
Mark D. Shriver’s team at Penn State has found DNA evidence that the influx of white genes was fairly constant over the centuries. From that, we can roughly estimate the fraction of African-American women’s babies who were fathered by white men (assuming all the admixture was from white man-black woman matings, which isn’t true, but it’s close enough).
If interracial mating has been going on for, say, 300 years, that’s 12 generations. If African-Americans are 18 percent white, you can divide that by 12 generations to get a 1.5 percent influx of white genes per generation.
Multiply that by two to get the male contribution, and you come up with this estimate: on average, three percent of African-American women’s babies were fathered by white men — about one out of 33. This is a very rough estimate, but it’s probably in the ballpark. Conversely, 32 out of 33 times the father of a black mother’s baby was a black man.
If the ratio of whites to blacks in the South was, say, three to one, and the birthrates and death rates of blacks and whites were similar, then only about one out of 100 babies fathered by white men in the South were with African-American mothers.
This estimate is very rough. But the real number probably isn’t more than, say, three times greater (or smaller).
So, this suggests that while white male sexual exploitation of black women certainly existed, it was tended to be more limited in scale than is widely believed.
October 12th, 2009 at 12:30 am
I’ve done Sailer’s computation myself recently and he is, I belive, in the right ball park, except that it’s an open question to me if children with white fathers and black mothers survived at the same rate as children with black fathers and black mothers. Do we have any evidence on this? Infant mortality was high and in many places, 19th century Germany is one, unwanted children didn’t do well. No active killing is required, you just have to know how the handle the situation and the kid isn’t going to make it. And it may not be just the mother’s choice.
October 12th, 2009 at 2:13 am
@48 No, I don’t think that the only real racists are Liberals.
Although I understand how someone might get this idea.
October 12th, 2009 at 2:15 am
Racial differences are not limited to skin color. There are skeletal differences, enough so that a forensic anthropologist can determine a victim’s race almost every time. There are differences in eye color, average visual acuity and incidence of myopia, bone density, muscles (fast-twitch versus slow-twitch, for example), levels of corticosteroids, the immune system, age of menarche, etc. etc. In some cases we understand the genetic basis of these differences. There’s a red blood cell variant (Duffy) that is extremely common in sub-Saharan Africa (~99% frequency in West Africa) but essentially nonexistent outside Africa, except for the recent African diasporas. This one allele drops the white count (leukocytes, germ-fighting blood cells) by one standard deviation, and also seems to give complete protection against vivax malaria. Inside Africa, looks good – outside, probably has some disadvantage. There are only a few race-specific alleles like this. But less dramatic racial differences in the frequencies of a number of alleles can also cause differences of a standard deviation or more in a trait.
Skin color seems to be shaped by differences in something like 10 genes, while height is significantly affected by many more than 10 – at least in the populations examined thus far.
October 12th, 2009 at 2:33 am
Stefan says:
“I’ve done Sailer’s computation myself recently and he is, I belive, in the right ball park, except that it’s an open question to me if children with white fathers and black mothers survived at the same rate as children with black fathers and black mothers.”
Thanks.
Hard to say. Offhand, I would guess that there could be social and financial advantages to having a white father — Zora Neale Hurston’s first novel starts off with an example of this. Strom Thurmond’s half-black daughter had her way through college paid by Thurmond, I believe. Much of the traditional African American middle class tracks back to the offspring of affluent whites who set them up in businesses in cities, where they wouldn’t be such a cause for gossip around the plantation.
There could be disadvantages, too, such as less immunity to warm climate diseases such as malaria.
On the other hand,
October 12th, 2009 at 9:54 am
I didn’t know that. I mean, I suppose I should’ve, especially after “Pudd’n head Wilson”.
I wish people in my family would do more geneology, because I’m rather curious. Though unlike Bob Barr, I have some pretty think lips, so we’ll see.
October 12th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
Have former Congressman Bob Barr and Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. ever been seen in the same room together?
I thought not …
October 12th, 2009 at 2:44 pm
Back in the stone ages when I was younger, there was a book and a mini-series called “Roots” that was quite explicit on the subject of mixed ancestry.
I thought “you all” had seen it too, but perhaps not.