3532 You don't know you're 1/8 anything. Stop it.

Sunday, May 13, 2012

The art of life is to show your hand.

-- E. V. Lucas --

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Some woman somewhere running for some office or something has come under fire because her opponents claim that in applications she had claimed mixed heritage and used a university's diversity goals to achieve her position, and it is now discovered that her claimed mixed heritage consists of 1/32 Cherokee.

Bullpoopy.  You can't claim any genetic heritage less than 1/2 without a DNA test, and anyway, it's possible to be more culturally Cherokee than a full-blooded Cherokee, without having a single Cherokee gene.

Let's establish some definitions and ground rules.  Even 100% heritage is questionable, but let's grant that it does exist.  Most people confuse race and culture anyway.  Let's pretend that they're both valid classifications for various arguments, and for this argument I'll use common claims, not technical racial classifications.

So, let's assume someone who is 100% (let's call that 1/1) Cherokee has a baby with someone who is 1/1 European/Caucasian.  We can validly say that the baby is 1/2 Cherokee and 1/2 European/Caucasian, because half of its genes are pure Cherokee and half are pure Caucasian. (But if the child is raised Cherokee, does the proportion of genetic material matter?  Couldn't we say the child is culturally Cherokee, no matter what the genetic makeup?)

After that point, genetically speaking, all bets are off.  Because subsequent generations get a random mix of genes from the mother and father, the combination of 1/2 Cherokee/Caucasian and 1/2 Cherokee/Caucasian can produce offspring who can be genetically 1/1 Cherokee or 1/1 Caucasian, or any fraction between.  It just depends on what genes they happened to get.  The next generation is even more emulsified.  That's how white couples have black babies, and black couples have white babies.  Random combinations of available genes.

So anyone who says "I'm 1/4 German, 1/4 Welsh, 1/8 Polish, 1/8 Native American, 1/8 ..." is full of crap.  Without a DNA test you don't really know.  It's more accurate to just say, "I had a Cherokee great-great-grandmother, a Welsh great-grandmother, ...."  That at least is probably true.

So the woman who got her job at a university because she was 1/32 Native American?  The university should be ashamed. They should know better.  (So should she, unless she is at least 1/32 culturally Cherokee.  How do you measure that?  By counting and classifying her recipes and food preferences?)
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