After the idiot in the White House made that comment about keeping people from $#!+hole countries out of the USA, I decided to look into my own heritage and see where I came from. On my father’s side, it was well known that his parents were both born in areas that are now Poland, despite the fact that on the 1940’s era census, my paternal grandmother was listed as German . My mother’s grand parents emigrated from Ireland quite a while ago, according to family members.
I orders a DNA test kit, swiped the inside my mouth with the cotton tip of the swab, and sent it to the lab.
In short, a majority of my DNA, a little over 58%, traces to Easter Europe and the Baltic region. A little more than 40% traces to Ireland, Scotland, Wales.
Surprisingly, 1.5% of my DNA traces to Nigeria.
This could be explained in many ways, from the Moors invading the Iberian Peninsula to trade routes from Western Africa, Western Iberian Peninsula, on to the Western shores of the British Isles. None the less, there it is. Yup, according to the racist in the White House, I’m part of the tide of humanity that emigrated to the United States of America from some $#!+hole country.
As if I needed another reason to despise this man.
I learned a lot more than my DNA as I shared this information with friends and co-workers.
Anyone who did not vote for that clown was excited about the news and shared my fascination about how eye opening this was. Sadly, those who did cast their ballot for the buffoon went on to make humorous but crude stereotypical and racist comments about me.
Talk about a bitter sweet experience.
I’m invoking the one-drop rule.
Welcome to the family, Brother May.
Honored and proud to accept your invitation.
My wife is a geneticist. Each and every one of us has at least that much African DNA.
We are all brothers and sisters. We are all part of the same family.
So why do I get mocked and critiqued around here, including by you, for my colorblindness all those times I try to make exactly that point?
I fear you miss the point.
We are talking about portion of our DNA that is largely unnoticed in the phenotype (the expression of our DNA). Virtually every living person today has this — it is the genetic confirmation of the “Out of Africa” hypothesis for the origin of our species.
There are, sadly, very profound differences in how racial groups treat each other in the US today. Those differences are driven by our prejudices and literally have nothing to do with genetics.
The distinctions that we use to separate our races — and to discriminate against our minority populations — are physically based in superficial variations in external appearance (there are no reliable genetic markers for race). The racial groups that comprise our society are identified by sociological, rather than genetic, attributes.
That does not mean that our society is color blind. To the contrary, it means there there is absolutely no genetic or biological foundation whatsoever for the racial prejudice that is still so rampant in today’s America.
I criticize you because you insist on a definition of “racism” that is so narrow that it leads you to define away the profound and pervasive racism that permeates our culture. You refuse to see it, and you therefore oppose nearly all steps to address it.
When the qualified applicant pool of a given position within a given company is 30% African-American, and the mix of employees who hold that position within that company is 1% African-American, that company has a racist hiring policy. The fact that the hiring manual and recruitment guidelines don’t explicitly call out race is irrelevant.
For as long as I’ve known you here, you reject the very existence of this de facto segregation. That is why I criticize you.
I will continue to disagree that your penultimate paragraph is automatically true. If we truly believe it doesn’t matter we should accept such outcomes unless there is actual evidence that deliberate discrimination was employed.
I responded to this:
You asked and I answered.
Your response to my answer exemplifies my answer.
I hate to say it, but your demand for “actual evidence that deliberate discrimination was employed” is itself racist. The “actual evidence” is the 1% hiring rate from a 30% pool.
Your posture is analogous to the now-discredited standard of demanding that a rape victim “prove” that she was “forced” in order to bring charges. The effect is to enable and promote rape.
The effect of your stance is to enable and promote racist behavior..
So if I have 100 applications for 10 positions in front of me and have no idea of the races connected to those applications and I’m going strictly on qualifications, I pick the 10 best qualified and all happen to be white (although some of the 100 weren’t) that makes me racist? I’m sorry, I cannot accept that. As a thought experiment, would you care if we substituted African-American for redhead or left-handed? If those ratios don’t matter to you why should this one? As for rape, I assumed you did have to show it wasn’t consensual and the defendant still gets the presumption of innocence.
I agree that it makes no difference whether the groups are redhead or left-handed. If a persistent pattern of extreme disproportionality exists (not just one manager for 10 jobs, but an entire company, industry, or government program) then that fact pattern is evidence of bias (against redheads, left-handed individuals, African-American, or any other minority group).
The language you used (“10 best qualified”) is precisely the way that unconscious racism shows itself in hiring. Very few managers are aware of feeling outright bias against blacks (or women or Hispanics). Countless studies show that those same managers consistently pick white males over those other groups when asked which seems “best qualified”.
The statistics about this have been in the literature for decades. Bias and prejudice like this has been identified using techniques such as “principal component analysis” in the same way that PCA is used to identify unknown reasons for anomalies found in clinical trial data.
I’m trying to be descriptive rather than judgmental here. Your stance on this issue demonstrates denial of facts that have been known for decades. Your apparent attachment to your stance in the face of such evidence is itself something perhaps worth examining.
The reality of de facto segregation is not something that can be explained away by philosophical sophistry and rhetorical hand-waving.
It is real, whether or not you accept that reality.
Since too many racist individuals, systems, and structures are in place that are no color blind. Hence why race still matters-even if we wish it did not.
And it is up to us, especially as white people, to make it not matter starting with committing to that ourselves.