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California has lots of hispanic groups from South and Central America, as well as Mexico. It also has lots of asian immigrants due to its proximity to Asia. Lots of whites and there are blacks as well. Combine that with worldwide pull in entertainment, electronics, software, agricultural industries, people of all sorts come there.
Probably due to the fact the place is so BIG too (very big state that is, north to south. My recent road trip from Seattle to Phoenix spent three days in Cali).
Actually, 30% of White Americans have recent African ancestry in their background. So, the US is more mixed than people realize. 75-80% of the genes of African Americans are African too. There are Native American groups like the Lumbee, Seminoles and the Ramapo Mountain Indians with both White and Black ancestry. Actually, Seminole is a take off of a Spanish term that means runaway. So, there has been way more mixing in the US than people know. I'm not even going to get on the Hispanic population here on those terms.
1/3 White Americans Have Recent Black Ancestry « The Postnational Monitor (http://pmsol3.wordpress.com/2007/07/25/13-white-americans-have-recent-black-ancestry/ - broken link)
What determines if a gene is "African", "European", etc.? If race isn't a reality, as some suggest, how are these figures like "80% African" arrived at?
(This is an honest technical question. Trying to understand the apparent paradox of "race doesn't exist" along with the idea that "haplotypes" can be used to determine the percentages of someone's racial makeup.)
Domincan Republic for sure I am not as familiar with other Caribbean countries
Dominican Republic and Cuba are majority Mulatto islands. Puerto Rico is less so, being 80% white (according to the CIA factbook). Then the others like Haiti, Jamaica, Barbados etc are overwhelmingly black.
When I was a kid I had no idea there was even a difference. There are many people here in nyc who are totally blind to this garbage. My daughter was once SHOCKED to find that her hand was darker than her friend's hand. but it still never occured to her that it was an issue. it was just her looks. like some have skinny legs, some are short and fat, some have long lashes, some are curly-haired, etc. so if racism is such an issue in other places there would be less mixed marriages, while the NY kids grow up looking at people differently, there might be less "mixed" marriages between fat and skinny people then between different races.
Argentina and Chile seem to be exceptions however. For whatever reason, they seem to have an abstence of indigeneous population, and lacking mestizo as well...I don't know the history as to why. Same with Costa Rica. those three seem to be the Latin American exceptions.
Yup, Argentina and also Uruguay are whiter than many European countries. Most likely, the indigenous people were killed off prior to mass immigration?
uhm, thanks to the fall of apartheid, mixed-race marriages (slightly more polite a term than miscegenation) actually exist now. thats only coz you dont get arrested for it now...so i'd say we're a bad example, coz they've only really existed for the past mmmmm.....14 or so years now....
Right, but if there was so much taboo against racial mixing in SA, how did all of those millions of "Coloureds" come about?
What determines if a gene is "African", "European", etc.? If race isn't a reality, as some suggest, how are these figures like "80% African" arrived at?
(This is an honest technical question. Trying to understand the apparent paradox of "race doesn't exist" along with the idea that "haplotypes" can be used to determine the percentages of someone's racial makeup.)
It's all about probabilities.
Say there's an allele that's 10% prevalent in self-identified African Americans and 70% prevalent in Asian-Americans. The allele become more associated with Asian-Americans, and population probablities of racial mixes are computed based on this. So one can still see race as a social construct and see this as being applicable. While race may be a cultural/socially-based category, there still may be general sub-ethnicities and such in each race that can drive racial differences. For example, Eastern European Jews are more likely to have a genetic disease, Tay Sachs. They are included as "White", so it's possible that "Whites" are seen as more likely to have this gene.
Unfortunately people have taken this to the individual level and sent their genetic samples for analyses for their racial make-up. So people have family histories that say one thing, then get a piece of paper that say "I'm 5% Central Asian! wow!". Given the historically high-degree of human genetic mixing, and the bottleneck that occured, humans in general are actually quite similar genetically. Trust your individual family history before you trust a process meant to predict population estimates.
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