Mixed Race Studies

How Slavery Changed the DNA of African Americans

Pacific Standard
2016-07-19

Michael White, Assistant Professor of Genetics
Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri

(Photo: John-christopher-bowers/Flickr)

Widespread sexual exploitation before the Civil War strongly influenced the genetic make-up of essentially all African Americans alive today.

Our genetic make-up is the result of history. Historical events that influenced the patterns of migration and mating among our ancestors are reflected in our DNA — in our genetic relationships with each other and in our genetic risks for disease. This means that, to understand how genes affect our biology, geneticists often find it important to tease out how historical drivers of demographic change shaped present-day genetics.

Understanding the connection between history and DNA is especially important for African Americans, because slavery and discrimination caused profound and relatively rapid demographic change. A new study now offers a very broad look at African-American genetic history and shows how the DNA of present-day African Americans reflects their troubled history…

Read the entire article here.

Without natural genetic boundaries to guide us, human racial categories remain a product of our choices. Those choices are not totally arbitrary, biologically meaningless, or without utility. But because they are choices, we have some leeway in how we define and apply racial categories. We shouldn’t deceive ourselves; how we define race does not just reflect biology, it reflects culture, history, and politics as well.

Michael White, “Why Your Race Isn’t Genetic,” Pacific Standard, May 30, 2014. http://www.psmag.com/nature-and-technology/why-your-race-isnt-genetic-82475.

Why Your Race Isn’t Genetic

Pacific Standard
2014-05-30

Michael White, Assistant Professor of Genetics
Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri

DNA doesn’t determine race. Society does.

If you glanced around the room at a conference of geneticists, it would be easy to guess where in the world all the attendees’ ancestors came from. Using skin color, hair, facial features, and other physical traits, you could distinguish the East Asians from the South Asians and the Africans from the Europeans. Our broad racial categories appear to be founded on genuine biological differences between people from different geographical regions. And these differences seem to define a set of natural human groups, the product of the last 70,000 years or so when modern humans emerged from Africa to colonize the other continents, acquiring distinct physical traits as they adapted to new environments.

The concept of human races appears to be solidly grounded in present-day biology and our evolutionary history. But if you asked that conference of geneticists to give you a genetic definition of race, they wouldn’t be able to do it. Human races are not natural genetic groups; they are socially constructed categories…

Read the entire article here.