Obama is half white – but as far as he’s concerned, he is 100% Negro. Though he was raised by his white mother’s family, and his black father abandoned him at an early age, he chooses to identify only with his father’s black heritage and ignore his mother’s heritage. While there are practical reasons for this – after all, it got him the presidency – nearly all mixed-race people have been doing the same thing for quite some time. While there are definite advantages to being black, due to black-privilege, there is clearly another factor at work here: A black heritage is considered a “heritage” while a white heritage is considered nothing.
In the State of Exile blog, there is a recent post claiming that Jews are 3-5% sub-Saharan African:
So Jews are a teensy bit African:
Reich’s team analyzed more than half a million DNA markers across the entire genomes of people from seven diverse Jewish populations — including Ashkenazim from northern Europe; Sephardim from Italy, Turkey and Greece, and Mizrahim from Syria, Iraq and Iran. They then compared the genetic data with DNA from 15 sub-Saharan African populations.
Reporting in the April issue of PLoS Genetics, the researchers found that modern day Jews can attribute about 3% to 5% of their ancestry to sub-Saharan Africans, and that the exchange of genes between Jews and sub-Saharan Africans occurred approximately 72 generations, or about 2,000 years, ago.
3-5% is about the same percentage of Neanderthal blood that the average non-African possesses. I have yet to encounter anybody who claims to be “Neanderthal” on this basis. The pro-white movement has been quick to tout the Neanderthal finding because it illustrates that we are not all the same. If not for that, and the mystique of the Neanderthal (whose true nature remains unknown), few would care if we carried Neanderthal genes.
If Obama can ignore 50% of his heritage, surely we Jews can ignore 3-5% of ours if we so choose. In any case, it’s not something I stay up at night worrying about. However… should I ever choose to run for president, try to get admitted for college, apply for a prestigious job or have a racial grievance where I could win the ghetto-lottery, that 3-5% might come in useful!
Now you should figure out what percentage of your slang is black ghetto slang. I personally say, “‘Sup?” instead of “Hi, what is going on?” all the time. I think that makes me 0.01% black.
The Neanderthal thing is pretty interesting. What it means to me is that above the “big five” races (IIRC Greater Asian, Caucasoid, sub-Saharan, Australopapuan, and indigenous American), there are two mega-races (sub-Saharan and part Neanderthal).
Abraham’s first person he reproduced with was a slave from Egypt called Hagar, it is likely that the Egyptian slaves were at least part black or maybe full black. Through that relationship Ishmael was born. Then Abraham finally manages to get his wife Sarah pregnant(she was having trouble getting pregnant) and through that union Isaac was born.
It is possible that jewish codes of conduct designed to keep them “a people apart from other peoples” originated because they lived in a heavily racially mixed area and did not want to experience further racial mixing with people who were non-white.
Another thing worth mentioning is that the word semitic does not refer to race, it refers to language. The middle east was one of the first racial “melting pots”. The middle east is a multi-racial area.
There is some truth the liberal academic mantra that race is a social construct. Unfortunately, that statement is usually used to obscure rather than elucidate the truth of the matter.
I’d recommend that you take a look at this rotating 3D PCA plot of the populations in the Human Diversity Genome Project (done by Professor Doug McDonald at University of Illinois and Urbana-Champaign, found via Razib Khan’s Discover blog, requires a browser that can handle the Javascript). It shows the three largest dimensions of statistical variation in the distribution of single nucleotide polymorphisms among the populations shown. The structure that emerges is very interesting and I’d recommend looking at the whole thing. However, for the purposes of this discussion, you can see the large cluster at the top which consists of west Eurasian populations and you can see that the Palestinians, Bedouins, and Egyptians (in order of increasing closeness to sub-Saharan Africans) are closer to the sub-Saharan populations than other west Eurasians. This isn’t particularly surprising since the opportunity for gene flow with Africans was greatest in those groups. Notice also how the Eithiopians, who had the greatest interface of interaction with those groups fall between the Bantus and the Egyptians.
It is worth cautioning that this is a map and maps are limited in how accurately they can reflect the territory they represent and many details are lost, particularly since 3 dimensions is conducive to human visualization but represents only the largest magnitude differences between groups and the differences in reality are much more complex. Regardless, Jews aren’t shown, so we have to guess where they would fall. I would suspect that Jews would center around where Palestinians are, but the different Jewish populations would appear to be pulled toward geographically near populations, so Ashkenazim would probably cluster near the Georgians and Armenians (halfway between Palestinians and Northern European groups), for instance.
What this map show is statistical variations in genes reflecting the ancestry of different groups and ultimately, some of those same determinants go into our definitions of race, so it should conform pretty well to your intuitions of race (except where your intuitions aren’t properly informed). But what is white? Where is the line drawn? The terminology is going to be fuzzy because there are multiple factors that go into that single word. There’s ancestry, culture, and an implicit understanding of where to draw the line.
I’d say that in the U.S., anyone from a west Eurasian background would probably qualify on the ancestral (racial grounds) for intuitive assumption of whiteness and only barring a cultural variable (very strong devotion to a conservative form of Islam, for instance) would the average American change their assessment on that question. There isn’t a central committee that gives legitimacy to a particular definition, so I think the intuition of the average American is what we’ve got to work with.
I come from the midwest, and I’d say that most midwesterners if asked would say that Jews are white, so that’s my judgment as well.
I agree, and your comment reminded me of an incident from my childhood. There was a brief exchange of words between myself and a badly-behaved white kid in school. The white hooligan, noting my brown skin, commented that I’m closer to being a nigger, or something to that effect. I retorted, noting his bad behavior, that it was he who was closer to being a nigger, or something to that effect.
I prefer to use the historical definition of White (check your OED) which basically means native European (“the fair-skinned inhabitants of Europe”).
Which means that some Jews (Ashkenazi Jews) are part White, just like Obama is part White. (All Jews are, obviously, Caucasians. White is just one sub-group of Caucasian.)
And now we find out that Jews are part sub-Saharan Black. But, as someone mentions below, so are a lot of southern Europeans (Greeks, for instance) and, presumably, other Middle Easterners and Arabs as well.
Fuzzy borders. =)
Fuzzy borders and arbitrary borders. A few other groups that are on that border are the Armenians and Georgians. Armenians speak an Indo-European language that broke from the trunk around the same time that Greek did and they historically lived in Anatolia, though they’ve been largely displaced or assimilated by the Turks and the Georgians are Caucasians (in the actual sense of being from the Caucasus, which I think is a more legitimate use of the word). Are they white? Both are Christian and have had close interactions with unequivocally European cultures for years. The European Union considers both countries as theoretically able to join despite geographically falling in Asia (on account of being south of the highest ridge of the Caucasus mountains).
Jews, and Ashkenazi Jews in particular, have lived in Europe for over a millennium and Ashkenazim genetically look like they are a bit more than 50% descended from those living in Europe, with the balance being Levantine in origin. They are as white a Steve Jobs (whose biological father was a Syrian Muslim). With biological races, clear boundaries don’t exist and there isn’t any one attribute that is “essentially” white–the similarity results from a statistical distribution of many genes that is ulitmately tied to ancestry, but it’s difficult to parse because there have been massive currents of gene flow.
Are the Lapps (Saami, if you want to be politically correct) more European than the Swedes, since their ancestors have lived in Europe longer? What is the cut-off for being considered “native European”? How many millennia is it? Generally my rule of thumb is to use white for people who look and act vaguely European. I would unequivocally call Steve Jobs white. However, if I wanted to get specific about ancestry, then I would say European, or even more likely break it down to regions of Europe. Northern Europeans tend to have genetic differences with Southern Europeans, etc. and if I wanted to be really specific, I’d refer to ethnic groups.
Just to wrap up this comment, I did look up what the OED had to say (at least its online form) and the relevant definitions are:
(also White)belonging to or denoting a human group having light-colored skin (chiefly used of peoples of European extraction):
a white farming community
of or relating to white people:
white Australian culture
and
(also White)a member of a light-skinned people, especially one of European extraction.
They’re somewhat open-ended definitions that take into account the vagueness of the word when referring to race. I feel that given that white is typically used in opposition to other racial color words like black, yellow, and brown, we should treat it with the vagueness it deserves.
Regarding the DNA markers, that’s not the DNA clustering that makes us what we are correct? If I understand we’re 95% chimp anyway. At least according to the DNA markers. So, if having a 5% difference can make us INCREDIBLY different from chimps, why is it a surprise that a 1% difference makes me better than the rest of you bastards 😀
Well, in terms of genomes, there is quite a bit of information to compare, so a 5% difference affords quite a bit of information for analysis, and in terms of genome differences 5% is rather large. Humans as a whole share a good deal more of their DNA with each other than we do with chimps. For the most part however, at the gene level, there’s not much different about being a chimp. You still need to break down sugars, have the right cells divide at the right time, etc. Looking at a chimp cell of some tissue and a human cell, you probably couldn’t tell the difference on sight. But the small differences add up to something pretty significant at the macro scale.
Now, looking just at humans, it is true that we are all very close genetically. Obviously it must be that way or we would have trouble breeding and we’d definitely qualify as different subspecies on the way to speciation if not separate species altogether. However, our genetic code is shaped by our ancestry. Some genes are more common in some regions than others and the sum total of all those variations in distribution is the biological races we see today.
So, I’d say that clustering isn’t what makes us who we are…it’s merely a reflection of the distribution of genetic differences that make us who we are (biologically) and how they relate among different people of different ancestries.
I determine who is white based on who black people call white
I’ve always rejected the One Drop Rule, if only for practical reasons.
We whites have enough problems with low birthrates and declining numbers as it is. Why limit our tent even further?
Your average Greek is also around 5% black in ancestry. That doesn’t mean your average person would ever label Greeks black.
My policy regarding who’s white is very simple: If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. White looking Middle Easterners and Hispanics are therefore welcome in my book.
I think the lesson we must learn from Obama is that rigid definitions of who’s white can lead to consequences.
Seed of Japeth once wrote a post called “genetic theft,” where due to the tendency of part white/part non-white people to identify with their non-white race, interracial marriage between whites and non-whites amounts to genetic theft, which is bad for us.
I recall JAY writing a post called “provisional whites.” Well, I say that unless these “provisional whites” actively reject their whiteness, we ought to make them/encourage them to be full members of the club.
Half white/half Asian people who look mostly white, white looking Middle Easterners, white looking Hispanics with tiny amounts of Indian ancestry, etc.
Let them all in, I say!
While JAY might object and say quality is better than quantity (for that reason, he’s not exactly big on converts to Judaism, or the influx of Ethiopian Jews into Israel), I say that having a bigger tent/bigger family has its long term advantages.
I’m a lot more selective about who should be considered a Jew than I am about who should be considered white. I don’t think this is a double standard; “white” is, by nature, a much more inclusive category than the tribal category of “Jew”.
As for quality over quantity, I’m with you on that. Races don’t get to pick and choose based on behavior. If a lot of whites misbehave, or convert to Islam for that matter, this is an issue we must deal with. We can’t take the easy way out and define them out of our race. That’s a cop out. If blacks were to do the same thing, and redefine all their criminals and bigots as “non-black”, I don’t think many of us would accept that.
I’m a lot more selective about who should be considered a Jew than I am about who should be considered white. I don’t think this is a double standard
I think its a double standard. Non Jewish White is only more inclusive if one chooses to define it as more inclusive. There is no valid reason why White Gentiles should be less selective about their members than White Jews.
Similarly, there is no reason why non Jewish whites shouldn’t disown other whites who violate their standards. Jews do it. It doesn’t change the facts of one’s birth. But ex communication is valid.
Being a jew is very specific though, it is based on a single religion. Wouldn’t this fact alone mean that it is more selective about who is a member than the identity of being a white gentile?
Being white is not a religion and so excommunication is impossible. Plus who would decide what is “white behavior”? Being white is biological.
soj-
Being a jew is very specific though, it is based on a single religion.
That’s interesting. Because I know jews who are messianic as well as atheist.
Being white is not a religion and so excommunication is impossible.
It’s my religion. Who are you to say otherwise?
Plus who would decide what is “white behavior”?
I would. Blacks certainly talk about “acting white” now don’t they?
Being white is biological.
So is being jewish.
Like I said, it all depends on how one chooses to define it.
Being jewish is based on halachic law which is a religious law, although since halachic law is a religion then if someone chooses not to listen to halachic law then they don’t have to be defined by it. But yes jewish identity is based on a religion because it is based on halachic law and that is why atheists can define themselves as jews(they have jewish mothers). But if an atheist doesn’t believe in halachic law then they don’t have to let it define them.
A person can make a religion out of being white but even if you make a religion out of being white that doesn’t mean that your religion defines what white is.
As far as acting white goes there is no such thing as acting white, the term “acting white” is a misnomer. The idea of white behavior has its origins in America and the term acting white applies to middle class behavior. Hence acting white should actually be called “acting middle class”. The reason for this is the over-whelming number of middle class whites and the association of the underclasses with being black. There have always been some underclass white people in AMerica but the majority of the underclass has always been black and so this is why middle class behavior came to be incorrectly labelled as white behavior.
Being white is a biological category of human that is defined through phenotype.
soj-
jewish identity is based on a religion because it is based on halachic law and that is why atheists can define themselves as jews(they have jewish mothers).
Being white is a biological category of human that is defined through phenotype.
So what you’re saying is that “white” has a biological basis but that being Jewish is just a social construct with a ‘mommy rule’? I’m not sure how that strengthens your case but if you say so. It certainly doesn’t undermine anything I’ve said. After all, your basically just saying that Judaism has a legitimate claim to selectivity because halachic law “says so”. Whereas others don’t because… you say so.
A person can make a religion out of being white but even if you make a religion out of being white that doesn’t mean that your religion defines what white is.
In other words, your saying it depends on how one “chooses to define it”? Where have I heard that before? Oh, I remember now. ME!
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The rest is off-topic but I’m willing to entertain two topics.
As far as acting white goes there is no such thing as acting white
Sure there is. I’ve traveled to four continents and seen the differences with my own eyes. I’ve also spent most of my life as a white minority in majority non-white environments. A few whites adopt the culture & behaviors of those they live amongst but most don’t.
Hence acting white should actually be called “acting middle class”. The reason for this is the over-whelming number of middle class whites and the association of the underclasses with being black.
Why is it that everyone not digging a ditch or working on an assembly line thinks they’re middle class? Just from reading your comments its obvious you’re not even middle class. That’s not an insult because I’m not either. And it has nothing to do with where I live or how much I earn. It has to do with acculturation. For example, Bill O’Reilly went to Harvard and earns millions of dollars. But he’ll always be working class because his roots are working class. His attitudes, values and behavior are all working class. But they’re white working class.
There have always been some underclass white people in AMerica but the majority of the underclass has always been black
No it hasn’t. A disproportionate number of blacks are underclass. But the majority of the underclass has always been white. And they have traditionally not mixed.
The issues about a couple of percent Neanderthal and black DNA are to me only of academic curiosity.
But the Obama issue makes me think. His mother basically gave birth and educated a child that was not of her race. Reminds me of your article about the racist father that impressed me a lot. Because until then I could not see your point why a white women could not marry a guy like president Obama whose success, intelligence and character surpasses most whites.
In Brazil, things are a bit different. They have several intermediate races in the official census. I think they have mulatto and “pardo” which is kind of brown.
And being reasonably white makes you white. Blonde, blue eyed (and to lesser extent, green eyed) is considered a specially desired quality in partners and babies. That is sort of whiter then white. “How pretty, this baby: look at these blue eyes”.
Women in Brazil don’t just die hair blonde, they also wear, to a smaller extent, blue contact lenses.
By the way, I am surprised you don’t have much to say about the British riots.
Shoot London rioters on sight! Politically correct humanitarianism risks lives of good citizens to save looters and hooligans
Shockingly, British police was too politically correct to disturb looters and rioters with water cannons or rubber bullets. Rather have innocent citizens being beat up, their work and livelihood destroyed.
I always suspected that many Arabs, especially those from the Arabian Peninsula, had some African ancestry, just from looking at them. Many, especially from the southern areas of that region, across the sea from the Horn of Africa, are clearly part Negroid (Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to the US, clearly falls into this group). SInce the Jews and the Arabs share common origins (of which I think the story of Abraham is most likely allegorical), it is not at all surprising to me that Jews would have some African ancestry.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1180338/
According to the abstract of this peer reviewed article, more than a third of Yemeni mitochondrial lineages were of clear sub-Saharan origin. Other Arab populations carried ~10% lineages of sub-Saharan origin, whereas non-Arab Near Eastern populations, by contrast, carried few or no such lineages, suggesting that gene flow has been preferentially into Arab populations. Several lines of evidence suggest that most of this gene flow probably occurred within the past ∼2,500 years. In contrast, there is little evidence for male-mediated gene flow from sub-Saharan Africa in Y-chromosome haplotypes in Arab populations.
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Translation: Arabs are part black but European Jews are NOT!
Not to spam, but this also explains why white people with a small degree of negroid ancestry would often claim to be Jewish, back before it was “cool” to be black.