Mixed races

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The views expressed in this thread are awesome. I live in a community that's incredibly diverse, and I wish the whole world could be as open and accepting as my town. My family is inter-racial, and I can attest that love is truly color blind. I hope all of us can make an effort to bring more love into the world. Best wishes for the new year.

Of course, careful research can reveal some - well - irregularities in the ancestry of those who don't think that they are multiethnic ("racial" is a misnomer - there is only one extant race of humans, for all that we can look startlingly different). For instance, my wife's family are all very dark-skinned; to look at them, you'd never suspect that her father's ancestors included clan Murray of Athol, from Scotland, or that her mother's maiden name is Flemish in origin. (My own ancestors included members of clan Sumner, who were awarded some Murray land after one of the unsuccessful Scottish rebellions - I think it was the Jacobite, but don't have my research materials handy at the moment - because they backed the King of England. Thankfully, my wife doesn't believe in holding grudges for centuries...)

There's also the case of Japan, where genetic analysis reveals that the ethnic majority apparently emigrated from Korea to the islands, which they then seized from the now-minority Ainu population. Interestingly, this demonstrates some of the hypocrisy of bigotry, as Oriental bigots tend to look down upon Koreans (I've heard some "Korean jokes" from Japan that make "Polack jokes" look affectionate by comparison), even though their own ancestors would seem to have been Korean colonists.

So they say, but I question this and wonder if this is more of the scientific establishmen being politically correct in the post-Holocaust/WWII world vs. saying something that might be inflammatory or violate the "we're all the same" message, when in fact there is ample evidence in any direction, depending on your viewpoint. If we really are all the same, and if "race" is an artificial construction, how is it that coroners and medical examiners can tell the race of a skeleton (such as a body recovered from Vietnam that is suspected to be a downed pilot or a KIA soldier) post-mortem, using measurements like the depth of the palate, ect., to tell between an Asian, European, or African-descent skeleton? Clearly there is some substance to the "race" concept, no matter what the issues might be in how it fits into the official scientific classification tiers. I've yet to hear a convincing answer on this topic. It does distress me that science should ever be held to the whims of political correctness.

RE: researching your own ancestry -- I encourage this, and you can get some of these tests quite cheaply through sources like the National Geographic genographic project, for instance. It gives you quite a good feel for human migration, including those who crossed the Siberian land bridge and into the Americas. For info on this particular group, look up mtDNA Haplogroup A.

Bill, "race" is a sociological construct - there is no scientific definition of such a term. The best you can hope for, using scientific definitions, is species - and we are all definitely Homo sapiens. (Were this not so, of course, we would not be capable of crossbreeding with fertile offspring.) Using the term introduces an artificial separation among humans - which, of course, leads inevitably to one group insisting that it is just naturally "better" than all the others (most humans being socially hierarchical by nature). Thus, I object to such cheapening of the language - English is sliding downhill fast enough, what with text-speak, l33tsp34k, and people misinterpreting the linguistic rule of "common usage" to mean "whatever I decide to do, is 'common' and therefore correct".

Genetically speaking, there is less differentiation between human ethnic groups and breeds of dogs - Pekingese and Pomeranians are more distinct than, say, a Wall Street banker and a !Xhosa hunter.

I never have understood racism, and never will.

Halle Berry would look beautiful no matter what color she was.

Ok, but you're still dodging the question and spitting back rhetoric -- why is it is that we can tell differences in skeleton measurements (per my example above) between people who we lump chromatically and by region? Would this not indicate that in fact there are differences? And if there are differences in physical ways, why would this not apply to other measurements as well? Would this not in fact point to measurements that would make someone from Asia distinct in some reproducible measurement than someone from Europe or Africa? Does this not then make the comparison to dog breeds almost apples to apples? I don't care what you call it -- race, variation, etc., but something is clearly different in a large and consistent way across many groups -- how do we classify that? To stick our heads in the sand and say "race does not exist" does nothing to advance the dialogue.

My thought on this is that the scientific establishment will not touch this topic (or eugenics) with a ten foot pole because of the horrible events of the WWII and depression era medical establishments in Germany, Japan, and even the US and UK. Scientists are afraid to publish any info that says "X group has higher testosterone levels" or "Y group scores higher on certain kinds of aptitude tests, regardless of culture they were brought up in" because they know that the ensuing charges of racism and ostracism will cause them to lose their funding. There might even be bigger sociological effects at work - If it can be proven that X group in the United States is genetically predisposed to aggression and lower intelligence (and this is why they are overrepresented in our prison population, etc.), imagine the fallout from that group and from the groups of people who live side by side with them.

That being said, Science should never be held to the whims of PC-ness. This is what happened with Copernicus and the Church, Darwin and the Church (and the pro-Christian culture of the era in the U.S.), and countless other times where the "right" viewpoint or "correct" POV was allowed to trump science. I find statements like "there is no such thing as race" (and not singling you out, as you are just repeating what you have been taught) to be chilling to scientific dialogue in general, and to be obviously false in the face of anecdotal observations that all of us make daily.

I completely agree that political and religious correctness bar the work of science constantly, and currently, but race does imply species. However, to say differing breeds of humans would be correct in the same way different breeds of dogs is correct, as it is regional breeding that has caused the distinction among homo sapiens groups.

here's a "flip side" to that argument: why would skeletal or muscular differences imply hormonal differences (etc.)? i'm not a scientist. but that argument makes little sense to me, just from a logical standpoint.

of course people adapt to terrain and climate over time. you'd expect to see skeletal differences across regions. you seem to be implying possible differences in levels of aggression and intelligence. i'm not sure why this would follow.

I'm mixed and I don't really think I'm that handsome but I've heard from alot of people that I'm actually very handsome.


The picture of me and my girlfriend

Anyways, my mum is black and English while my grandma and my grandad on my mums side are Jamaican and my dad is white and my grandad on my dads side is Chinese while the other relatives are from muritus (if I spelt it wrong correct me) and weirdly they are dark so basically that's a mix there.

Unfortunelately racism is still around and especially from where I live and it's annoying some people see racism as it doesn't exist but it will seem to always exist but it's not as bad as it was less than 50 years...

Anyone IMO can be beautiful/handsome and lucky ones are lucky to be natural beatiful.

Last edited by superboyian on 06 Jan 2010, 11:21 am, edited 1 time in total.

The evolutionary geneticists I know personally look at genetic diversity among ethnicities of Homo sapiens, rather than the races.

Also, while there are physical differences between races as a whole, very generally and broadly speaking, there's a statistical distribution for all physical characteristics. You actually can't make a particular physical measurement of a skeleton (i.e. an individual) and then say with 100% certainty that the deceased belonged to a specific race.

Anyway back to the main topic of this thread, I'm mixed race and butt ugly, lol.

Reading the posts in this thread, I suppose I would be considered mixed race to a degree. I am Caucasian and part Cherokee / Chippewa American Indian.

My dad is 100% Nordic, pale complexion, curly blond hair and blue eyes, from his and his family size, likely viking ancestry. My mom is Mediterranean European and American Indian and has an olive complexion, straight jet black hair and eyes almost black. Some people in my moms family has an olive complexion and green eyes.

I think I am a good blend of them both.

Then why do they use measurements on the medical examiner level to determine race of the deceased in the cases where the body is otherwise unidentifiable? This is done on a daily basis, hundreds if not thousands of times a day. Are you saying they are wrong? Case in point -- there is a nice bounty in Vietnam right now on finding bodies of American servicemen lost in action during the war. However, the craftier/less honest folks have sometimes dug up a Vietnamese skeleton and tried to pass it off as a lost soldier. There are simple measurements they do, measuring the palate, to determine race/ethnicity and catch fraud in these cases. Are you saying this is inaccurate or false? If so, perhaps you should publish your opinion in a journal somewhere, as it is apparently working quite well for professionals in that field.


I'm no scientist either, but hormones clearly have a major impact on growth rates and other factors that would impact skeletal development and the development of the body as a whole.


Yes, and we label people according to what general region their ancestors came from (in the case where their ancestors can be shown to have been in a certain area for multiple generations). We also do this with animals that have minor physical differences (different coloring, smaller or bigger stature) but retain most or all of the same DNA -- yet for all non-human animals, we do split them into subspecies where relevant.

Also -- do we not make claims that certain dog breeds are physically or tempermentally more dangerous than others? (e.g. pitbulls) Are they not part of the same species as well? So what I see here is a double standard due to PC-ness. I understand why, but at the same time I can see that it ultimately limits scientific inquiry, and at the end of the day, limits the amount of knowledge we are really willing to share or publish regarding genetics. There's a big elephant in the room that no one wants to admit they see -- the Emperor has no clothes, but almost nobody says anything.

So back to the original topic -- I'm a mix of northern European ancestry, both UK isles and Eastern Europe. It seems to be a decent combo, and when I have kids with my wife, who is part a lot of things (hispanic, African, European), the results should be interesting. So just in case anyone thinks I have a racist agenda above, I don't, but I really hate to see political correctness, in any century, stymie scientific enquiry.

I'm English, Scottish, French and Native American.

There is a problem in that for any characteristic for any ethnicity there is a bell curve. When you say x group has more testosterone, people don't understand that the bell curve is shifted over only a little bit and there is still a massive overlap of people carrying the characteristic.
Also, even if you could say y group has a tremendous difference in some sociological affect from z group, that still will never ever tell you about the particular individual standing in front of you. There are good reasons (forensic and medical) for measuring physical differences but there are few good reasons for measuring other things. Since most people don't understand bell curves, the statistics end up being badly misused and people get hurt.

Pits aren't tempermentally more dangerous than other dogs. They're actually quite friendly, but their physical build leads them into ownerships where they are raised that way. Nuture vs Nature. Dachshunds, Yorkies, Chihuahua's and other small dogs actually tend to have some of the more tempermental breeds, but are affected by Nuture in the same way. The larger ones that are stereotyped as dangerous like Pits, Rotties and Dobermen, are actually some of the more stable breeds, though just as capable of savagery as any other dog.