Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
What's the state of research into the physiological/psychological effects of race-mixing?
The last good look into this question I've come across was Emil Kirkegaard's blog post, which covered the overrepresentation of certain psychological and behavioral risk patterns in mixed-race adolescents. I haven't seen anything else on this subject from the HBD crowd, but I might be missing something. I'm particularly curious about research into differences between first-generation mixes with total racial heterozygosity and later-generation mixed people with greater homozygosity, seems like there could be some interesting differences there.
There's something subtly absurd about the use of the term "race-mixing" that gave me a chuckle there, nice
Otherwise this seems like a super super broad question. Are you asking about the psychological impact of doing a race-mix with someone, or the typical profile of a person who's inclined to racemix, or traits over-represented in their resultant offspring, or...?
Since it's a super-broad question, I'll toss in a couple of unscientific observations I find interesting.
First, in biracial people with one SSA-descended parent and one Euro-descended parent - those with a white dad are practically a different ethny to those with a white mum. This isn't hyperbole -I can very reliably discern white-dad from white-mum biracials with about the same accuracy I can discern western and southern Africans, say. And it's interesting because the world at large doesn't seem to put much stock in this distinction - I can't imagine environmental effects can plausibly account for the difference, rather it's because white men who shack up with black women tend to be very different in profile from white women who get knocked up by black men.
White-dad biracials are more upwardly mobile, competent, typically identify more with the white part of their ancestry once the dad is still present, and don't seem particularly blighted as a group. White-mum biracials are cut from different cloth entirely
I'm curious if there are other bi-racial pairings whose offspring differ greatly based on which parent is which ethnicity. I could see Jewish-Christian matches showing some interesting patterns, dependent on country. Arab-Euro matches might also have an interesting assymetry
I'm interested in the potential somatic effects of distant admixture, independent of parental selection effects. Partly because I'm biracial myself (white dad, black mom), partly because I predict that it'll become a hot button topic in the near future. Opposition to miscegenation is still quite gauche in the right-wing zeitgeist, but I don't see it staying that way for long.
Slay, king. I genuinely had no idea while writing this, and wasn't trying to do some weird suck-up thing about the better outcomes for black-mum biracials. Do you agree on the possibility of reliably discerning white-mum and black-mum biracials?
A few further guesses here, for perfect stereotype accuracy - it'd be amazing if you let me know the accuracy of any of this, also feel free to tell me to fuck off. I'll limit myself to stuff that shouldn't be immediately inferable from the racial fact of their marriage (eg your folks are relatively open-minded, and your dad's overall less racist than your mum - no shit)
1)your mum's a bit nerdy and 2)benignly snobbish. 3) She's experienced at least one incident of serious depression 4) Your dad is quite a kind guy
I have noticed a difference, yea. WMBF kids tend to be able to pass for white more often, and if not they don't look especially "black" either. I fall into the latter category, my brother's more the former. As for your stereotypes:
2/4 - I'd call that a misfire for my stereotyping. In my defence, I wrote that yesterday in the pub, it being St Patrick's day.
The appearance thing is something I'd noticed too, that WMBF tend to look like they have more euro ancestry. It's super interesting to me, though I disagree with @hydroacetylene that this is because white men pair off with black women who have more euro admixture. If the white man in question were all about lighter-skinned women, he could just.... pair off with literally any other race if woman instead. It would be strange to go to an Italian restaurant, and pick the least Italian dish they serve; I'd simply choose another restaurant if that were my preference.
My hypothesis is that it's not anything to do with different ratios of euro to SSA inheritance, but rather something psychological to do with identity development and the relationship this has specifically to fathers - men and women both tend to more influenced by the surface "tag" component of their father's identity than their mothers. Biracial people generally have some control over how black or white they appear - hairstyle, makeup, clothes, tanning habits, overall habitus My guess is WMBF biracial people tend more to view both of their inheritances as equally integrated, and their self-presentation reflects this
I like your theory for this much better than mine, but I do have my own:
"Momma's baby, daddy's maybe" is an eons-old problem, and combining the lower certainty of paternity with the (typically) higher violence of males suggests there's been a long history of some nasty evolutionary selection pressure for kids to resemble their dads more than their moms. Infanticide in non-human primates and many non-primate mammals isn't uncommon, even many human "civilizations" took our damn time before deciding to punish it, and before agriculture it may have been a common form of birth control in tough times.
I'd guess even a couple million years of this would mostly affect which genes control appearance (or mediate other genes controlling appearance? there's not that much Y chromosome...), though, not habits. My interracial marriage is N=1, but while my kids look much more (75/25?) like me than like my wife, their personalities are maybe 55/45 on average and no more than 40/60 in one case.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link