Submitted by susou in Whiteness (edited )

You can analyze human genomes and match the parts that are more similar to each other than to other populations.

Ex: Someone from India might tend to have a C at a particular site while someone from China has an A. These patterns can be represented by color coded components.

https://i.imgur.com/dLHp9cT.png

What science has found over and over again for the last 25 years, is that modern Europeans are only about 50% European on average.

10,000 years ago: Europe inhabited by "pure" hunter gatherers. We call these Native Euros.

8,000 years ago: Farmers from Anatolia start migrating to Europe. They are genetically distinct, and are more similar to people from Iran/Arabia.

4,000 years ago: Aryan pastoralists invade Europe in a Spanish-American style colonization event. They displace and/or violently kill all males and take their women as wives. Genetically, the Aryans in this region were a two way mix of Iranian and European.

Both the Anatolian ancestry and the Iranian ancestry portion of the Aryans come from the Middle East. What's more, they are both more genetically related to each other than they are to the European ancestry component.

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ziq wrote

Since race has no scientific basis I'm not sure what the relevance of this is? Whiteness is an artificial construct like all class divisions: invented to bestow privilege to the dominant social class.

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susou OP wrote (edited )

The point is that, using the definitions that 99.9% of people hold for race

And yes, those definitions are arbitrary, but 99.9% of people have some sort of vague idea of it

Using those ideas/definitions, white people are mixed race. Even more mixed than African-Americans.

I'm also using "white" as a stand-in for "modern European" here, and yes white is more of an arbitrary appearance rather than anything to do with ancestry. But we can just as easily say "all Europeans are mixed race" and it'll be the same.

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masque wrote (edited )

If I'm reading the PCA chart in your linked image correctly, it looks like the "pure European," "pure Levantine/Anatolian," and "Pure Iranian" clusters only include ancient DNA samples, and don't align closely with the clusters found in modern samples.

Why shouldn't DNA information services targeted at a modern audience label people in terms of the clusters that are relevant to modern populations?

The cliché thing to say is that "if you go back far enough, everyone is African." The understanding of what "European" means depends on where you place the temporal cutoff. Why should we place this cutoff 10000 years ago (like you seem to be suggesting) and not more recently?

EDIT: I guess the point is that people who take pride in being "pure European" have no scientific basis for this, but trying to claim that they're wrong on a scientific basis also seems questionable, because the concept of being "pure European" is inherently kinda arbitrary and unscientific.

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susou OP wrote (edited )

Why shouldn't DNA information services targeted at a modern audience label people in terms of the clusters that are relevant to modern populations?

Why does 23andme use a racist double standard where Latinos and African Americans are "mixed", but white people are not?

White people are also mixed, and are in fact more mixed than Afro-Americans.

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masque wrote (edited )

I haven't used 23andme and don't know exactly what results it gives. However, I was under the impression that people who think they're "pure white" finding out otherwise is actually a pretty common occurrence, to the point of it being a bit of a meme used to make fun of ignorant white nationalists. So I don't think 23andme is deliberately going out of their way to protect people's self image as "pure white."

I was also under the impression that 23andme breaks down European ancestry into groups roughly corresponding to modern national divisions (e.g. 23% German, 12% Polish, etc.), which generally does make white people look "mixed" in some sense.

I don't know exactly what 23andme says about Latinos and African Americans, but it's true that a lot of these people are "mixed" in the sense of having people of widely-considered-to-be-distinct races in their recent history (i.e. over the last couple centuries, unfortunately often due to rape by colonizers and/or slave owners), which is qualitatively very different from being descended from populations that widely intermingled 4000 years ago.

Again, the question is really just about where it makes sense to place the temporal cutoff, and in general it feels kinda icky to spend a lot of time worrying about who is "pure" or "mixed".

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LostYonder wrote

the only relevant thing is that your "white/Europeans" are in fact interbred with Neanderthals and they have proven that over and over again!

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/5/100506-science-neanderthals-humans-mated-interbred-dna-gene/

Why continue to naturalize a concept that has no scientific validity but presenting scientific arguments? There is something called social race, but that has absolutely nothing to do with DNA. Social race/racism is very real - but it is an ideology, not science (which of course is ideological too, but that's another argument).

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susou OP wrote

whites (aka modern europeans) are thus a two way mixture of ancestries. One ancestry part comes from Europeans, and one ancestry part comes from Middle Easterners.

The Middle Eastern part can be further subdivided into the Levant and Iran.

While it's a roughly 50:50 mixture on average, Middle Eastern ancestry is even higher in Southern Europe. Italians and Greeks are actually more Middle Eastern than they are European.

In addition, there are other ancestries (East Asian Siberian, Indian, Sub-Saharan African) that are significant, but only in narrow populations (Finns/Slavs, Romanians, and Iberians, respectively)

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