[ExI] Race Biology

[Lee Corbin]

Damien writes

> Rafal wrote:
> 
> [Stuart:]
>> Race is almost entirely cultural so it is more the
>> purview of anthropologists, ethnographers, and
>> other social scientists rather than of biologists.
>>
>>### Race is not in the least determined by culture. It is a property 
>>related to common descent.
> 
> Oh, the innocence.

Damien, they're discussing the *scientific*, oops, *biological* concept.

> Sally Hemings' mother, Betty Hemings, was the daughter of the English 
> Captain Hemings and a black slave woman brought from Africa 
> (Wikipedia says), so her kids by Jefferson were three-quarters 
> "white." That surely made them white, eh? Oh yeah?

No, in the U.S. they'd be called black, because that's their relative
coloration compared to the rest of the people here.

> Obama's mother was a "white" USian from Kansas and his father a 
> "black" Kenyan, so he's--what? How does the US culture refer to his "race"?

If he went to Kenya, they'd probably call him white. After all,
compared to the rest of them he would be.

> Arbitrarily-chosen phenotypic markers are determined by biology, 
> obviously; the "race" of Hemings and her children and Barack Obama is 
> determined by--what?

That depends on whether you are more interested in the scientific,
more precise biological concept, or the societal one. As far as
the biological concept goes, they really were 25% African and
75% white.

Now socially, it is not too surprising that it may be a different story.

For example, in Brazil there are a lot of well-to-do people that you
or I would unhesitatingly refer to as "black", because of the way that
we  perceive their much darker skin color compared to many other
rich and influential people in Latin America, most of whom are white
(both culturally and biologically).

But those particular well-to-do Brazilians will not simply be faking
indignation were you to describe them as black.  They'd be truly
offended, because in the Brazilian mind, alleged coloration is subtly
(to us, anyway)  correlated with social status, or wealth, or I don't
know what.

But any honest geneticist who doesn't have a political axe to grind one
way or the other will tell you what proportion of their genes are African
dervived, what proportion are indigenous Indian, and what proportion
are European.

Lee