Backintyme Essays

Some people mistakenly think that only Black Americans were slaves, and that all Whites were free. In fact, tens of thousands of White folks were slaves. Two points explain this odd fact.

Some African Americans have few European DNA markers and some have many; but overall, about 17 percent of the collective African-American gene pool comes from Europe. What fraction of that 17 percent comes from European females? Can DNA tell? The short answer is “no”.

An opportunity recently arose to collect autosomal admixture mapping data for three generations of one family, a family that has European, subsaharan African, and Asian admixture. The results are educational. They exemplify the heredity of ancestry-informative DNA markers. They show, on the one hand, that the transmission of ancestry-informative markers from one generation to the next is predictable. On the other hand, they also show that each transmission is random, so that predictions must rely on probabilities. Such blending of randomness with predictability is usually hard to explain. The following case history makes it clear.

The mainstream media (MSM) continue to ridicule and villify Sarah Palin for saying that Paul Revere also warned the British. Palin is factually accurate.

I just added four new animated cartoon lectures to my Youtube channel. They comprise a four-part series on the origin of the U.S. endogamous color line in the late 17-century Chesapeake.

G. Reginald Daniel, More than Black?: Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order (Philadelphia: Temple University, 2002). Endnotes. Index. Pp. xviii, 258. Cloth $69.50. Paper $22.95. — Book reviewed by Frank W. Sweet. This book review was originally published in Interracial Voice magazine in 2002.

This essay presents little-known, recently uncovered facts about the U.S. Black/White net-worth gap: It has been worsening at an accelerating rate for four decades. It is unrelated to income, lack of generational nest egg, overall inequality, depreciating homes, or single families. It is related to higher interest rates (which are caused by loan higher default rates). It may possibly be related to supporting poor relatives or to some aspect of oppositional culture.

The U.S. federal census was founded to apportion congressional representation among the states. In order to achieve additional goals, it switched in 1850 from recording households in summary, to recording individuals in detail. It became self-administered in 1960 to reduce costs. It has always been a political instrument of the administration in power. Today, the census encourages identity politics and so wavers between the goal of capturing “race” as a form of ethnic self-identity, and the equally desired but conflicting goal of capturing “race” as involuntary physical trait.

A question often asked by folks interested in the history of the “race” notion is why Northern Whites fought for a “race” that they considered inferior. The answer is that they did no such thing. A mirror-image question is why Southerners fought to preserve slavery when so many of them were biracial. Again, the two issues are skewed.

Shows several ways to compute the 0.10-0.14 percent per year rate at which European-looking youngsters born into the African-American community switch their self-identity from “Black,” to “White” or “Hispanic” after high school. Session C5 of a series of molecular anthropology topics discussed in lectures on “The Study of Racialism.”