The myth of mudsharking and the melting pot

It turns out there is considerably less racial miscegenation in the United States than is commonly believed:

A recent genetics ancestry survey by 23andme found that White Americans (European Americans) on average are: “98.6 percent European, 0.19 percent African and 0.18 percent Native American.”  Wow, that’s pretty white.  I’ll come back to that in a minute.

The survey also found that Latinos are “18 percent Native American, 65.1 percent European and 6.2 percent African.”  There might be a little self-selection here, resulting from testing more upper-class Hispanics, who tend to be more white. For instance, Rubén Lisker found the average admixture of a lower-income mestizos in Mexico City to be: 59% Amerindian, 34% European,  and 6% black.

Back to European Americans and their utter whiteness. The 98.6% figure, mind you, is an average.  Previous studies found that more than 95% of White Americans have no African or Amerindian ancestry and the 5% who do seem to have very little, so it is probably this 5% of White Americans who might be adding the 1.4% admixture into the average.

Let that sink in: 95% of White Americans have no African or Amerindian ancestry and those who do seem to have very little.

I'm afraid that leaves me out, of course, as I am considerably more Native American than Latinos are African. The idea that white women are attracted to black men has been pushed heavily by the media, but from dating sites to genetic science, the contrary conclusion keeps reappearing nevertheless.

Steve Sailer puts the percentages into perspective:

Think about your family tree back nine generations ago, which would mostly be in the 1700s. You have 512 slots in your family tree nine generations ago (two to the ninth power). The 23andMe numbers suggest that for the average white American, 1 of your 512 ancestors nine generations ago was black and 1 of 512 was Native American.

Here’s another way to think of it. If the average self-identified black is 73.2% black and the average self-identified white is 0.19% black, then the average black in America is 385 times blacker than the average white. That doesn’t seem very murky to me.

There are about 200 million whites, so that means a little over 3% have any black ancestry that can be found by 23andMe.

Posted in: Science