Slippin' into whiteness: Melungeons and other 'almost white' groups

[kwassa]

5. I particularly liked the discussion of how much racial ancestry is invisible.

One's physical appearance can be quite deceptive in regards to one's racial ancestry.

Dr. Shriver, it turns out, is one of the 74 million White Americans with significant recent African genetic admixture. In a coincidentally similar fashion, Dr. Rick Kittles, Shriver’s collaborator from Howard University in Washington, discovered that he carries the FY-null genetic marker at genome position 1q23. This marker is found in 998 out of every thousand Europeans but found in only one out of thousand Africans. Many of Dr. Kittles’s other ancestry-informative markers tell the same unexpected story. Dr. Kittles is one of the many Black Americans with strong European genetic admixture. And yet, and there is no other way to say this, Dr. Shriver "looks White", and Dr. Kittles definitely "looks Black." Why is there such a discrepancy between measured genetic admixture and physical appearance? There is an immediate answer to this question, and a deeper answer. The immediate answer is that many different invisible genes identify continent of ancestry.