Rachel,
All of your points are excellent but the following two are so obvious that
their omission from all of the commentators who "take a middle ground" bares
their apologetic butt
"Anyone familiar with American social history knows that
the admixture of "white" genes in the African-American gene pool is
tremendous."
"And it helps not one bit that skin and eye color are not linked with any
other "racially" significant characteristics, so you can't tell a person's
percentage of
"African" genes just by looking at him/her. "
Right on! Every student who has taken Intro to Physical Anthropology knows
that race is a construct and that the biology of human phenotypes is a
matter of relative allele distributions. The so-called racial categories
that Jensen uses have even been abandoned by the census department which
will offer us a choice of three ethnic bakcgrounds next year.
The wonder is that he hasn't been debunked on this, challenged in public,
made to run a gauntlet of full-fledged Louisiana "colored" and high yellow
of all varieties.
Paul H. Dillon
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