The headline is a bit overstated (i.e., someone of African-American race is almost guaranteed to have at least some African ancestry, admixed with a varying amount of European).
That being said, there are important differences within the traditional "races", such as the finding in this study that people with West African vs. East African ancestries have different genetic propensities for obesity.
Overall I would love it if medical research papers moved away from "race" and started getting more into the fine-grained genetic details. Regardless of the politics involved, this will lead to better medical treatments for everyone.
>That being said, there are important differences within the traditional "races", such as the finding in this study that people with West African vs. East African ancestries have different genetic propensities for obesity.
"Traditional races" as you call them have changed over time and space, and we are only in this predicament because we lump different ethnicities together today. 150 years ago people could tell the difference between someone of West African or East African descent. And Southern Italians, Irish vs Western Europeans vs Germans... etc.
It's harder now because a) there has been a lot more mixing since then; and b) socioculturally we consolidated many of those ethnicities
It's harder now because now you live in America and are used to seeing all these people as Americans, and then as members of whatever racial consciousness we have in America.
Back in those respective countries, they can tell everyone apart. When my wife (Irish/English by ancestry) visited Hungary, they were immediately able to peg her as a foreigner, and frankly, so was I. They look nothing alike aside from skin color. This is true of basically any country in Europe, Africa, Asia, where people have tended to remain in the same location for thousands of years.
I think even most Americans would be able to tell apart African and European races if they really tried.
It isn’t hard at all if you live in east or west Africa. Or if you live in Italy, or if you live in China, you can see local variations that are generalized in other places. It’s always been like, only recently have we made distinctions between Asians in say Iran and Japan (both are technically oriental by medieval European standards) .
> people with West African vs. East African ancestries have different genetic propensities
similarly, when working on genomes a few years back, it used to be said that the two most genetically distinct humans alive right then would both be from Africa, which was memorable because one might guess Inuit vs Africa or something like that naively.
Specifically they would both be of Khoi-San ethnicity. The vast majority of humans have been through two population bottlenecks which drastically reduced the genetic diversity of the populations. Most African populations have been through at least one of these bottlenecks, and every population group outside of Africa has been through two. The Khoi-San, however, seem to have broken off prior to either of the bottlenecks and so they retained much higher genetic diversity.
Is that specifically the case? This feels like an area where our language can fail to capture the nuance of what someone is trying to say and it gets misstated as something really similar but different.
To give an example, take 3 people named A, B, and C. A and B are both from Africa, while C is from elsewhere.
A and B have 9 genetic differences. B and C have 1 genetic difference. A and C have 10 genetic differences.
We can make the claim that the genetic difference between someone from Africa and from elsewhere (B to C, thus 1) is much smaller than the difference between two people in Africa (A to B, thus 9). 1 is smaller than 9, so this statement is true, but could easily be misunderstood to saying that the two most genetically distinct individuals are from Africa, which isn't the case because A to C is the most genetically distinct and C is from elsewhere.
The two statements seem nearly equivalent and the wrong one could accidentally be spread by someone who is really just trying to focus on expressing how much genetic diversity is within Africa.
It's used because, despite the fact that race doesn't really match with genetic ancestry, it still has impacts on people's lives and health.
For example, a study indicating that "black people in the US are X% more likely to have {some condition}" is useful, even if "black person in the US" doesn't tell much about an individual's ancestry. That's because health conditions are heavily influenced by environmental factors, and someone's race impacts the environmental factors they're exposed to.
This does get complicated, and requires digging deep into the data. Top-level statistics don't indicate root cause, which still needs to be researched. But top-level statistics can indicate that there's a problem that needs to be worked on, which is why medical studies tracking race are still useful.
It’s still correlated enough with ancestry that it can be a useful proxy for health issues related to ancestry—in addition to the environmental factors you pointed out.
A genetic test takes several days and costs a few hundred dollars.
The patient wants the best treatment right now. If race carries useful information that helps the doctor treat the patient, then the doctor should have access to it.
Is it? What race is someone who's Arab? What about someone who could look black with one haircut but white with another? What about half-Arab, half-Euro?
This might sound like nitpicking, but most black people in the US have significant European ancestry and the admixture can vary wildly even for people with similar skin tones. Our naive view of "race" is not always backed by genetic reality.
It's pretty low quality information. If you're taking a genetic test you want something that returns susceptibility to sickle cell amenia, cystic fibrosis, tay-sachs, et cetera. Race is a very low quality signal that is used when you lack something better, like a genetic test.
Genetic differences across Africa shouldn't be surprising when you consider how huge Africa really is. Africa is about as big as the US, China, and Europe combined.
The effect is much larger than that. For most of the evolutionary history of humans, everyone* lived in Africa. Then only quite small groups left, taking with them only a small fraction of the genetic diversity of humans. Even today, the great majority of genetic diversity among living humans is inside Africa.
(* who mattered. There were earlier migrations of hominids, but the mark they left on our genetics is much smaller than the influence from later migrations.)
I was under the impression humans migrated from Africa so the rest of the world is all african-X, where the african- part is some subset of the original african population.
> Overall I would love it if medical research papers moved away from "race" and started getting more into the fine-grained genetic details. Regardless of the politics involved, this will lead to better medical treatments for everyone.
More precision is better, but we don't have rapid genetic tests that can distinguish West vs. East African ancestry on the spot, so race is the only proxy available when you're, say, treating a patient in the ER.
“Race” is only reliably visible based on skin color for a single generation. You can be a green eyed redhead with a black West African grandparent.
Americans obsession with “race” and racial superiority means that families both lie about their ancestry (turning African ancestors whose features are passed on into “Native American Princesses”) and misidentify themselves by using skin tone as a proxy for nationality.
Even the idea that people can trust unscientific racial indicators is wrong. Ask a Guyanese person where people think they hail from? And before people say that their have distant African ancestors why does that matter? How many generations count and why must we look further when skin colors are dark than when they are fair?
I.e. King Charles is considered English although his recent forebears were German and Churchill had an American mother and is likewise considered fully British. Yet someone of West African descent whose family has lived in the USA since the founding of Jamestown will still be considered “African” in a way more recent pale skinned immigrants are not.
Any discussion built on an unscientific foundation like “race” will lead to ridiculous and contradictory conclusions based solely on skin tone.
The notion of race and ethnicity in biology has been politicised by ideology. Jerry Coyne and Luana Maroja clarifies this in point five of their piece [0] in the Skeptical Inquirer.
I don't know what Jerry Coyne is talking about because genetic vs. environmental causation of behavioral and physical traits, broken down "racially" and otherwise, is a very active field of study.
"In biological taxonomy, race is an informal rank in the taxonomic hierarchy for which various definitions exist. Sometimes it is used to denote a level below that of subspecies, while at other times it is used as a synonym for subspecies."
Incorrect: somewhere Ali g the way in your life, someone deeply lied to you.
Race isn’t a subspecies. It’s an artificial social construct created by European elites in the beginning of the last millennium. Its purpose is to sow division. And to other groups of people to make it more palatable to commit crimes against the objectified folk.
On one hand, science tells us race as defined in western countries is not backed by actual biological differences. On the other hand, scientists use "race" in their research as if it is a legitimate means of categorizing people.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying there are no differences between ethnicities, just that those differences are based on ancestry not race. People of a specific "race" don't share the same ancestry all the time, some times they have more in common with a different "race" than their own. Race as we know it today is a means of classifying humans that came about at a time when colonial expansion was booming. Classifying people based on their outward appearance was all too convenient. It's like someone learning how to code who found out there are thousands of programming languages and categorized them using terms like "curly brace language","lots of parenthesis language","indentation oriented language". It's lazy and childish. But once you learn more about the languages you should abandon the old ways of classifying things.
> scientists use "race" in their research as if it is a legitimate means of categorizing people
The journal Nature Human Behaviour published ethics guidelines in Aug 2022 which touch on this:
> Race and ethnicity are sociopolitical constructs. Humans do not have biological races, at least based on modern biological criteria for the identification of geographical races or subspecies.
> Studies that use the constructs of race and/or ethnicity should explicitly motivate their use. Race/ethnicity should not be used as proxies for other variables — for example, socioeconomic status or income.
We use breeds for other species, like cats, dogs, horses, etc. Humans could probably be categorized by breeds —breeds of course would not parallel ‘races’ but could still subdivide our species in new ways like we do with other animal species.
> We are learning that while race may be a social construct, differences in genetic ancestry that happen to correlate to many of today’s racial constructs are real.
My summary would be that race is a heuristic. It's not perfect but it's a broadly accurate and often useful category. For example, whether someone has dark skin says quite a bit about their propensity for skin cancer. Whether someone is Jewish says a lot about their propensity for certain rare genetic diseases.
> In a recent study, published in Lancet Digital Health, NIH-funded researchers found that AI models could accurately predict self-reported race in several different types of radiographic images—a task not possible for human experts.
ethnicity is what you mean. unless you are claiming, the AI's model didn't have the concept of "race" in it's training data but was able to come up with a novel classification scheme that aligns with society's concept of race.
AI confirming human bias because it was trained on it doesn't mean much.
x-rays don't measure purely innate, genetic factors, they reflect things that are influenced by nurture as well as nature (and might, in principle, even have detectable difference based on differences in how technicians treat and react to the patient.)
> Race as we know it today is a means of classifying ...
That's it. It's a classification system, a taxonomy, a social construction, a coarse categorization (all these things). But it's a bad one that only loosely correlates with a small handful of phenotypes. There isn't zero correlation which is why I disagree, as a matter of precision, with people who say race doesn't exist. The quality of a given taxonomy exists on a spectrum and race is a pretty damn bad one when you consider how inaccurately it separates the phenotypes it claims to care about, and how many genotypes/phenotypes (the vast majority) it fails to separate at all beyond a coin flip.
There are bunch of unrelated people that do research with vastly different opinions and methods. (Thing in common: scientific method and review,publications)
When it comes down to layperson, research results are averaged out and de-nuanced by jounalists.
I have the impression that a lot if these talks about race being an entirely unscientific idea are related to the US dividing the entire world in four "races" as such: white, black, asian, and latino. Which is comically imprecise and arbitrary, and yet Americans seem to be obsessed with it.
> the US dividing the entire world in four "races" as such: white, black, Asian, and latino.
The US government scheme has more than four top-level racial categories, and "Hispanic or Latino", in that system, is an ethnicity, not one of the races.
it's not the US alone, this concept originated from the UK. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was used by the ruling class (think, east India company directors and such) to divide humans into sub-species with different levels of evolution. This would allow them the moral justification they needed to continue their conquest. There is a reason "all people are created equal" is the phrase used to abolish things like slavery. people focus on the "created" part, but the equal part is just as relevant.
This concept of race is designed so that one race can claim better evolution than the other, as a whole that is. People with specific ancestry might be better at specific things (provided they pursue those things to their potential), but associating that with an entire race was only useful at the time of this social constructs' creation because Europe needed to conquer the world and what do Europeans have in common the rest of the world doesn't have? Skin color. Which due to the latitude of Europe as a continent, people whose ancestors are from there have less melanin in their skin to account for lesser sunlight (You can see the same effect with north-east Asians). If you think about it, the western classification of "race" has more to do with geography than genealogy.
I recall a newspaper story about a Black writer who did not know his ancestry. He took a genetic test to find out he was more native American than black. He told his mother who responded "I'm too old to stop being a black woman."
I think that is an understandable feeling and I think that says a lot about the concept of race. Her statement doesn't make race any less real, but it does indicate what race IS.
There are hispanic creoles, native american creoles, german creoles, italian creoles, so forth and so on. Because to be a Louisiana creole isn't to rely on any racial marker at all. It just signifies that your ancestors lived here at a particular time.
So if someone says that they're Cajun, not creole, they're lying to you. ALL cajuns, without exception, are creole.
And most people who claim to be Cajun are either not Cajun at all or they've mistaken their surname for being Cajun. Like a guy who told me I was wrong about a food item and he knew better because he's a Cajun, being a Champagne from Golden Meadow.
Only problem is that Champagne isn't a cajun surname. The Champagne family came over directly from France.
You might have seen Isaac Toups on TV hawking a cookbook. The Toups surname is actually German (originally spelled Dubs but the French authorities did their thing), and they landed in the US in 1718-19 in Biloxi, MS.
And so on, and so on...
I think that some "cajuns" would be more willing to call themselves creole if they knew that in addition to the native americans, the other group that saved their asses when they came to the territory were the German creoles. Those people had it far, far harsher than the Acadian disapora ever did. When they got to the territory, they were not allowed to use beasts of burden for a full decade. This means that when they were dropped off and told to go farm rice (which none of them had ever done before), they had to till their fields and deliver their product to New Orleans from the River Parishes, up to 60 miles away without horses. By the time the Cajuns got here, there were plenty of horses for working the land and other livestock that you were legally allowed to eat.
Anyway, that's just one little speck of a much larger ethnic pie.
You beat me to it. I definitely know Cajuns from Breaux Bridge with the last name Rees for example.
The registrar of births in Orleans Parish used to essentially blackmail several prominent families about how far back the black was in their birth certificates and lineage.
Coonass is a pejorative that Cajuns from Louisiana received during WWII when they were asked to be translators for the French resistance. The language in Louisiana diverged into cajun French and Kouri Vini (creole French) over the 200 years since Louisiana was first colonized, so modern French didn't line up and there was still a bit of a language barrier. The French called these people connasse, which basically means stupid because of this, but the cajuns took it as a kind-hearted nickname and brought it back home with them. Many cajuns were and still are upset that the term is ever still used to refer to them because it's a coarse word they feel belittles their culture, so if you're in the company of them and you don't know how they'll react, you might want to wait until they bring it up.
> Rather than fitting into clear-cut genetic clusters based on self-reported racial or ethnic labels, most participants’ genomes revealed different gradients of ancestry spanning continents, the team reports today.
I assume this refers to figure 7 of the study [1]. Figure 7C shows 63/124,341 self-identified Whites had predicted African ancestry from their genome, 45,206/45,761 Blacks, and 19/7,419 Asians.
Figure 7D shows predicted European ancestry, which was 120,127/124,341 for Whites, 110/45,761, and 39/7,419 for Asians. This seems like remarkably good correspondence to me?
> Race, ethnicity don’t match genetic ancestry
The title is missing "self-reported" at the start. Without that, the article isn't even self-consistent - "race is meaningless, it does not perfectly match genetic ancestry from historical geographical groups"? You haven't done away with race, you just renamed it to "African ancestry", "European ancestry", "Asian ancestry", etc.., and found that they have somewhat intermixed in the US. But it has been known since literally ancient Greece that races can intermix, and that their variation is geographically gradual, so the study hasn't discovered or disproven anything new.
It's amusing to contrast this with science's findings on non-human animals: there are 16 subspecies of brown bear, 38 subspecies of wolf, 46 subspecies of red fox, 9 subspecies of tiger, and 12 subspecies of house sparrow.
I seem to recall (but cannot find) a variant of the Weinreich witticism[1], which goes something like, "a nation is a language with an army and an origin story". (Meaning 'nation' in the sense of "a people" rather than "a state".[2])
> Geneticists have long established that race and ethnicity are sociocultural constructs and not good proxies to describe genetic differences in disease risks and traits among groups
I’m Asian and I grew up in the U.S. and for years I didn’t realize the stomach problems I was having were from drinking milk when most asians cannot drink milk, while most European Americans can: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/16jcecc/map_of_lac.... Is race a rough proxy? Sure. But it’s an easy proxy to administer which in the medical context gives it a certain value for making people aware of differences that may be salient.
It's very rough, though. I know many (East, South, Southeast) Asians who can drink milk just fine. But I -- white with European ancestry -- am lactose intolerant. Not a really useful rubric from my perspective, and I think if a doctor (re: your "medical context") were to say something like, "you're Asian so your stomach distress is probably caused by dairy" or "you're white so we should look deeper for some unusual cause of your stomach distress", I would look for a new doctor immediately.
Think about the probabilities. Lactose intolerance in the UK (as a proxy for British Americans) is under 10%, while in my home country it is over 85%. Meanwhile, drinking milk is universal among white American children (it’s served in schools). If a white kid has stomach problems, there’s a 90% chance it’s not lactose intolerance. But if an Asian kid presents with stomach problems, lactose intolerance is probably the single likeliest explanation. And it can be assessed by asking a couple of simple questions.
Our kids are half white so we were unsure if they’d be lactose intolerant. At the first sign of stomach problems in the youngest, we switched him to lactose free milk and the problem went away immediately. If we took him to a doctor we might’ve gone down a whole rabbit hole of dead ends. And if we weren’t aware of the issue and looking out for it, we may have not done anything and just let him deal with the discomfort. After all, kids get tummy aches for a million reasons.
Readit News
That being said, there are important differences within the traditional "races", such as the finding in this study that people with West African vs. East African ancestries have different genetic propensities for obesity.
Overall I would love it if medical research papers moved away from "race" and started getting more into the fine-grained genetic details. Regardless of the politics involved, this will lead to better medical treatments for everyone.
"Traditional races" as you call them have changed over time and space, and we are only in this predicament because we lump different ethnicities together today. 150 years ago people could tell the difference between someone of West African or East African descent. And Southern Italians, Irish vs Western Europeans vs Germans... etc.
It's harder now because a) there has been a lot more mixing since then; and b) socioculturally we consolidated many of those ethnicities
Back in those respective countries, they can tell everyone apart. When my wife (Irish/English by ancestry) visited Hungary, they were immediately able to peg her as a foreigner, and frankly, so was I. They look nothing alike aside from skin color. This is true of basically any country in Europe, Africa, Asia, where people have tended to remain in the same location for thousands of years.
I think even most Americans would be able to tell apart African and European races if they really tried.
Dead Comment
similarly, when working on genomes a few years back, it used to be said that the two most genetically distinct humans alive right then would both be from Africa, which was memorable because one might guess Inuit vs Africa or something like that naively.
To give an example, take 3 people named A, B, and C. A and B are both from Africa, while C is from elsewhere.
A and B have 9 genetic differences. B and C have 1 genetic difference. A and C have 10 genetic differences.
We can make the claim that the genetic difference between someone from Africa and from elsewhere (B to C, thus 1) is much smaller than the difference between two people in Africa (A to B, thus 9). 1 is smaller than 9, so this statement is true, but could easily be misunderstood to saying that the two most genetically distinct individuals are from Africa, which isn't the case because A to C is the most genetically distinct and C is from elsewhere.
The two statements seem nearly equivalent and the wrong one could accidentally be spread by someone who is really just trying to focus on expressing how much genetic diversity is within Africa.
For example, a study indicating that "black people in the US are X% more likely to have {some condition}" is useful, even if "black person in the US" doesn't tell much about an individual's ancestry. That's because health conditions are heavily influenced by environmental factors, and someone's race impacts the environmental factors they're exposed to.
This does get complicated, and requires digging deep into the data. Top-level statistics don't indicate root cause, which still needs to be researched. But top-level statistics can indicate that there's a problem that needs to be worked on, which is why medical studies tracking race are still useful.
A genetic test takes several days and costs a few hundred dollars.
The patient wants the best treatment right now. If race carries useful information that helps the doctor treat the patient, then the doctor should have access to it.
This might sound like nitpicking, but most black people in the US have significant European ancestry and the admixture can vary wildly even for people with similar skin tones. Our naive view of "race" is not always backed by genetic reality.
It's pretty low quality information. If you're taking a genetic test you want something that returns susceptibility to sickle cell amenia, cystic fibrosis, tay-sachs, et cetera. Race is a very low quality signal that is used when you lack something better, like a genetic test.
(* who mattered. There were earlier migrations of hominids, but the mark they left on our genetics is much smaller than the influence from later migrations.)
Humans originated in Africa, so populations there have had more time to evolve and become more diverse.
200,000 years of genetic drift versus 20,000 years makes a big difference.
More precision is better, but we don't have rapid genetic tests that can distinguish West vs. East African ancestry on the spot, so race is the only proxy available when you're, say, treating a patient in the ER.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajhg.2025.02.003
Deleted Comment
everyone from everywhere has african ancestry
“Race” is only reliably visible based on skin color for a single generation. You can be a green eyed redhead with a black West African grandparent.
Americans obsession with “race” and racial superiority means that families both lie about their ancestry (turning African ancestors whose features are passed on into “Native American Princesses”) and misidentify themselves by using skin tone as a proxy for nationality.
Even the idea that people can trust unscientific racial indicators is wrong. Ask a Guyanese person where people think they hail from? And before people say that their have distant African ancestors why does that matter? How many generations count and why must we look further when skin colors are dark than when they are fair?
I.e. King Charles is considered English although his recent forebears were German and Churchill had an American mother and is likewise considered fully British. Yet someone of West African descent whose family has lived in the USA since the founding of Jamestown will still be considered “African” in a way more recent pale skinned immigrants are not.
Any discussion built on an unscientific foundation like “race” will lead to ridiculous and contradictory conclusions based solely on skin tone.
Tribes from the Horn of Africa have more common with Swedes than they have with East African tribes.
[0] https://skepticalinquirer.org/2023/06/the-ideological-subver...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subspecies
"In biological taxonomy, race is an informal rank in the taxonomic hierarchy for which various definitions exist. Sometimes it is used to denote a level below that of subspecies, while at other times it is used as a synonym for subspecies."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(biology)
Deleted Comment
Race isn’t a subspecies. It’s an artificial social construct created by European elites in the beginning of the last millennium. Its purpose is to sow division. And to other groups of people to make it more palatable to commit crimes against the objectified folk.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying there are no differences between ethnicities, just that those differences are based on ancestry not race. People of a specific "race" don't share the same ancestry all the time, some times they have more in common with a different "race" than their own. Race as we know it today is a means of classifying humans that came about at a time when colonial expansion was booming. Classifying people based on their outward appearance was all too convenient. It's like someone learning how to code who found out there are thousands of programming languages and categorized them using terms like "curly brace language","lots of parenthesis language","indentation oriented language". It's lazy and childish. But once you learn more about the languages you should abandon the old ways of classifying things.
The journal Nature Human Behaviour published ethics guidelines in Aug 2022 which touch on this:
> Race and ethnicity are sociopolitical constructs. Humans do not have biological races, at least based on modern biological criteria for the identification of geographical races or subspecies.
> Studies that use the constructs of race and/or ethnicity should explicitly motivate their use. Race/ethnicity should not be used as proxies for other variables — for example, socioeconomic status or income.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01443-2
There was a furore here in the discussion of it on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32595083
Dead Comment
One quote from that:
> We are learning that while race may be a social construct, differences in genetic ancestry that happen to correlate to many of today’s racial constructs are real.
My summary would be that race is a heuristic. It's not perfect but it's a broadly accurate and often useful category. For example, whether someone has dark skin says quite a bit about their propensity for skin cancer. Whether someone is Jewish says a lot about their propensity for certain rare genetic diseases.
That’s not true. AI can determine race from even from x-rays: https://www.nibib.nih.gov/news-events/newsroom/study-finds-a...
> In a recent study, published in Lancet Digital Health, NIH-funded researchers found that AI models could accurately predict self-reported race in several different types of radiographic images—a task not possible for human experts.
AI confirming human bias because it was trained on it doesn't mean much.
That's it. It's a classification system, a taxonomy, a social construction, a coarse categorization (all these things). But it's a bad one that only loosely correlates with a small handful of phenotypes. There isn't zero correlation which is why I disagree, as a matter of precision, with people who say race doesn't exist. The quality of a given taxonomy exists on a spectrum and race is a pretty damn bad one when you consider how inaccurately it separates the phenotypes it claims to care about, and how many genotypes/phenotypes (the vast majority) it fails to separate at all beyond a coin flip.
There are bunch of unrelated people that do research with vastly different opinions and methods. (Thing in common: scientific method and review,publications)
When it comes down to layperson, research results are averaged out and de-nuanced by jounalists.
The US government scheme has more than four top-level racial categories, and "Hispanic or Latino", in that system, is an ethnicity, not one of the races.
This concept of race is designed so that one race can claim better evolution than the other, as a whole that is. People with specific ancestry might be better at specific things (provided they pursue those things to their potential), but associating that with an entire race was only useful at the time of this social constructs' creation because Europe needed to conquer the world and what do Europeans have in common the rest of the world doesn't have? Skin color. Which due to the latitude of Europe as a continent, people whose ancestors are from there have less melanin in their skin to account for lesser sunlight (You can see the same effect with north-east Asians). If you think about it, the western classification of "race" has more to do with geography than genealogy.
Deleted Comment
I think that is an understandable feeling and I think that says a lot about the concept of race. Her statement doesn't make race any less real, but it does indicate what race IS.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9mtCLL8rI0
Culture is definitely the major part of 'race'.
Dead Comment
There are hispanic creoles, native american creoles, german creoles, italian creoles, so forth and so on. Because to be a Louisiana creole isn't to rely on any racial marker at all. It just signifies that your ancestors lived here at a particular time.
So if someone says that they're Cajun, not creole, they're lying to you. ALL cajuns, without exception, are creole.
And most people who claim to be Cajun are either not Cajun at all or they've mistaken their surname for being Cajun. Like a guy who told me I was wrong about a food item and he knew better because he's a Cajun, being a Champagne from Golden Meadow.
Only problem is that Champagne isn't a cajun surname. The Champagne family came over directly from France.
You might have seen Isaac Toups on TV hawking a cookbook. The Toups surname is actually German (originally spelled Dubs but the French authorities did their thing), and they landed in the US in 1718-19 in Biloxi, MS.
And so on, and so on...
I think that some "cajuns" would be more willing to call themselves creole if they knew that in addition to the native americans, the other group that saved their asses when they came to the territory were the German creoles. Those people had it far, far harsher than the Acadian disapora ever did. When they got to the territory, they were not allowed to use beasts of burden for a full decade. This means that when they were dropped off and told to go farm rice (which none of them had ever done before), they had to till their fields and deliver their product to New Orleans from the River Parishes, up to 60 miles away without horses. By the time the Cajuns got here, there were plenty of horses for working the land and other livestock that you were legally allowed to eat.
Anyway, that's just one little speck of a much larger ethnic pie.
The registrar of births in Orleans Parish used to essentially blackmail several prominent families about how far back the black was in their birth certificates and lineage.
I assume this refers to figure 7 of the study [1]. Figure 7C shows 63/124,341 self-identified Whites had predicted African ancestry from their genome, 45,206/45,761 Blacks, and 19/7,419 Asians.
Figure 7D shows predicted European ancestry, which was 120,127/124,341 for Whites, 110/45,761, and 39/7,419 for Asians. This seems like remarkably good correspondence to me?
> Race, ethnicity don’t match genetic ancestry
The title is missing "self-reported" at the start. Without that, the article isn't even self-consistent - "race is meaningless, it does not perfectly match genetic ancestry from historical geographical groups"? You haven't done away with race, you just renamed it to "African ancestry", "European ancestry", "Asian ancestry", etc.., and found that they have somewhat intermixed in the US. But it has been known since literally ancient Greece that races can intermix, and that their variation is geographically gradual, so the study hasn't discovered or disproven anything new.
It's amusing to contrast this with science's findings on non-human animals: there are 16 subspecies of brown bear, 38 subspecies of wolf, 46 subspecies of red fox, 9 subspecies of tiger, and 12 subspecies of house sparrow.
[1] https://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-9297(25)00173-9
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with...
2. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/nation
I’m Asian and I grew up in the U.S. and for years I didn’t realize the stomach problems I was having were from drinking milk when most asians cannot drink milk, while most European Americans can: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/16jcecc/map_of_lac.... Is race a rough proxy? Sure. But it’s an easy proxy to administer which in the medical context gives it a certain value for making people aware of differences that may be salient.
Our kids are half white so we were unsure if they’d be lactose intolerant. At the first sign of stomach problems in the youngest, we switched him to lactose free milk and the problem went away immediately. If we took him to a doctor we might’ve gone down a whole rabbit hole of dead ends. And if we weren’t aware of the issue and looking out for it, we may have not done anything and just let him deal with the discomfort. After all, kids get tummy aches for a million reasons.