Spurious Issues by Rainier Spencer

Author:Rainier Spencer [Spencer, Rainier]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, General
ISBN: 9780813336770
Google: rwxjeX9GFwEC
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 1557102
Publisher: Westview Press
Published: 1999-08-12T00:00:00+00:00

Further Inconsistencies in the Multiracial Idea

Who, then, is multiracial? Or a better question might be, Who is not multiracial? The answer, in the context of the present argument, is that either everyone is multiracial or no one is. Since there are no biological racial groups, there can be no biological multiracial group, unless by "multiracial" one intends simply to delineate all of humankind. Taking the example of Afro-Americans, multiracialism is immediately a redundant principle, since if one holds to a belief in biological race, then Afro-Americans are all multiracial.85 If biological races exist, then the first English/African offspring in North America would have been multiracial, and all present descendants of such persons would be multiracial as well. It is inconceivable, though, to suppose that many Afro-Americans, if any at all—through nearly 400 years of intermarriage, rape, casual sex, concubinage, and especially internal miscegenation—could count only unmixed Africans as ancestors.86

The reason for this is that a single individual entering the family bloodline adds potentially an entire genetic portfolio to that branch of the family tree. This is true whether such a person is a legal spouse, a casual sex partner, or a rapist. What people normally consider to be their family trees are generally truncated, arbitrary, and incomplete views at best, omitting unknown or embarrassing branches. The actual regression backward from the individual is not a straight line but an exponential curve: two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents, and so on. Any ancestor of one of the sixteen great-great-grandparents is an ancestor of the individual as well. The traditional view of a family genealogy as an ever expanding tree growing upward from a single ancestral base is inaccurate. This perspective does not account for the histories of persons entering the family line as spouses or sexual partners, except to sometimes announce their appearance as if from nowhere, as if without histories of their own.87 For this reason, a family tree is more properly conceived of as a banyan tree, with individual trunks dropping down from each of the branches. Each person born on a particular branch receives a genetic inheritance not only from the main trunk but also from the individual trunks of persons who entered the family line on that branch.

In the case of Afro-Americans, the mixture of West African and European (and often Native American) genetic material continues to this day, even without the active involvement of whites, as E James Davis describes:

It is important to note that the mixing of genes is continuous within a group defined by the one-drop rule, even if sexual contact with the out-group declines or ceases. That is, miscegenation occurs when there is sexual contact between unmixed African blacks and mulattoes, and between mulattoes and other mulattoes, not just when there is mixing between whites and African blacks or whites and mulattoes. In all four of these instances, genes from populations derived from Europe and sub-Saharan Africa are being mixed. In mulatto-mulatto unions, genes are mixed whether the ancestry of one individual is mainly white and the other mainly black, or the ratios are more nearly even.

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