The latest census for 2000 is coming out next Monday, but parts of it is being released that shows a dramatic shift in the racial composition of this country that is moving faster than government officials thought possible. "From the explosive growth of hispanic immigration to the increasing number of interracial people and marriages, America's racial complexion is changing faster and is becoming more diverse than was previously believed", said Tony Pugh from Knight Ridder Newspaper.

There is now a tie in the largest minority population category between blacks and hispanics (35.3 million for hispanic, up from 22.4 million in 1990), interracial marriages are exploding across all groups, and the distinction between racial groups is blurring.

The Census is reporting as many as 8.4 million people who are listing themselves as multi-racial. This could reach 18.5 million, about 6.6 of the U.S. population, according to Princeton University. Among blacks, according Jeff Passel demographer with the Urban Institute, a public policy think tank in Washington D.C. said that the number of African Americans, which now includes people of mixed race backgrounds, will total 36.4 million on the 2000 Census. Of that number, 34.7 million reported being "black only", while 1.7 million reported being multiracial backgrounds.

According to the Census as many as 63 different racial groups are beginning to appear up from the old six major racial groups of the past. In those six groups, there are 57 additional multi-racial groups, which means people are identifying themselves by one of the 63 racial categories. This expanding and changing mosaic is leaving local, state, federal officials nervous on the effects of this rapid change in how it will affect and influence decisions about medical research, political redistricting, civil rights enforcement, employment, housing (suburban sprawl) and urban planning.

America is on the verge of a multi-racial and cultural social revolution at the beginning of a new century. What we look like as a nation is going to be a lot different in just 20 or 40 years. What will this country look like in year 3001?

Note: I realize this site was created primarily for less esoteric and controversial subjects, for love and relationships between white women and black men. I know I've been responsible for introducing subjects here that are more fitting for a site that is more encompassing to such issues. That is why I will no longer post here. I'm considering a new site in the future that is more fitting for these subjects that is geared to people who are intrested in such topics. ~ Roberto

By Mad_scientist (134.124.212.217) on Monday, February 12, 2001 - 06:10 pm:

Yes, I'm breaking copyright, so who cares? *smiley* Here's the article

Copyright © 2001 The Seattle Times Company

Local News : Sunday, February 11, 2001

Race gene does not exist, say scientists

By Eric Sorensen
Seattle Times science reporter

The human genome, to be published in nearly complete form this week in the journals Nature and Science, stands to cure cancer, prevent mental illness, and even, as one local researcher joked, locate the "don't-ask-for-directions gene" on the Y chromosome unique to men.

But billions of pieces of genetic code sequenced thus far are notable for what they don't appear to contain: a genetic test to tell one race of people from another.

All scientific signs point to the conclusion that race doesn't exist. The further scientists go in sequencing the genome - the complete catalog of the genetic material found in every human cell - the more they realize there is no biological basis for our most contentious and divisive of social categories.

Moreover, science has repeatedly found far more variation within a given racial group than between racial groups.

And the guiding principle of race, skin color, is small and superficial in scientific terms.

Genetic research from the mid-'90s suggests much of our skin color comes from variations of just one of tens of thousands of genes. The gene may be involved in melanin production, leading to variations in the color of human skin and hair.

If that's true, say University of Washington geneticists Kelly Owens and Mary-Claire King, this variation at a single, small genetic site has been "the cause of enormous suffering."

"Of course, prejudice does not require a rational basis, let alone an evolutionary one," Owens and King wrote in a 1999 article in Science. "But the myth of major genetic differences across `races' is nonetheless worth dismissing with genetic evidence."

"The races really differ very little from one another - that's quite a striking point that's come out of the comparative (genetic) studies that have been made," said Leroy Hood. Now the head of Seattle's Institute for Systems Biology, Hood is one of the original participants in the Human Genome Project, the federally funded group whose work is being published in Nature.

Mapping the genome is an accomplishment that Hood ranks above landing a man on the moon. It is, he said, a genetics parts list; a fundamental description of our basic being, in digital form; a "Periodic Table of life."

The work of Hood's group is combined with the work of Celera Genomics, the private genetic-research company whose genome sequence is to be published in Science this week.

Celera used DNA from three females and two males who identified themselves as Hispanic, Asian, Caucasian or African American.

"In the five genomes, there is no way to tell one ethnicity from another," Celera President Craig Venter said when the genome's rough draft was announced at the White House in June. "Society and medicine treat us all as members of populations, whereas as individuals we are all unique and population statistics do not apply."

While Celera's sampling explored a broad cross section of groups it was not deep, having drawn DNA from so few individuals. The DNA of more people will be surveyed over the next decade as sequencing tools get faster and as researchers search among populations for the genetic influences on things like disease and clues to our origins and evolution.

Even then, the chance of finding a race gene is remote, as is the chance of finding a genetic basis for characteristics often ascribed to certain races.

"I would certainly be shocked - utterly shocked - if there were any fundamental differences whatsoever in the traits we value most: intelligence, physical capacity, things like that," Hood said.

Which is not to say race does not exist as a cultural reality, evident in racial profiling, persistent stereotypes, discussions of affirmative action and debates over differences in athletic ability. It is evident in the varying housing, education and job opportunities available to people who have been categorized by skin color.

"The issue is a bloody cultural mess," said Nancy McKee, a Washington State University anthropologist.

Much of this "mess" was created with the help of science, which in the 19th century developed elaborate methods of categorizing people by race - methods since proved faulty.

Until then, race was a folk notion that grew out of the ancient theorem of the Great Chain of Being and came in handy for classifying people subjugated by colonialism, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) noted in its 1998 Statement on Race, an attempt to clarify the term's cultural roots.

Science, no stranger to the biases of popular culture, took to developing elaborate racial categories that treated Africans, Indians and Europeans as separate species. Africans, the AAA study found, were believed "the least human and closer taxonomically to apes."

Caucasian was considered the norm and ideal; anything else was inferior. At one time, Irish people were not considered white, nor were Jews, Poles or southern Europeans, said Richard White, a former UW history professor now at Stanford University.

But this thinking did not anticipate certain pitfalls. For one, all humans can be traced to Africa. Moreover, no group or race was pure or distinct; the globe is too small and humans wander and breed too widely for that to happen.

"You cannot demarcate populations because populations all over the world blend into each other," said Audrey Smedley, a professor of anthropology at Virginia Commonwealth University and author of the AAA's statement.

Where scientists once saw race in terms of black and white, anthropologists in the mid-20th century saw a continuum of variations with no clear dividing lines between races or populations. Moreover, environment came to be seen as a far larger player in determining an individual's characteristics, as happened when researchers probed the origins of sickle-cell anemia in the 1950s.

The disease, a disorder in which red-blood cells take on a curved shape that clogs vessels, is commonly believed to occur only in African Americans, as if it were some sort of racial genetic marker. At one time its gene was called "the Negro gene," said Frank Livingstone, a University of Michigan anthropologist and sickle-cell pioneer.

The sickle-cell gene is actually a genetic mutation, an act of natural selection that helps fight malaria. Livingstone showed that sickle-cell anemia occurred in "clines," or gradients of change, across geographic regions. The disease was present in tropical Africa, where malaria is widespread, and also in the malaria-infested Arabian Peninsula and southern India.

"Genetic variation in the Old World did not exist as a racial trait," Livingstone said yesterday from his Ann Arbor home. "There are more sickle-cell carriers in India than there are in Africa. The idea of race just didn't make sense. The Zulus had no frequency of the disease, and they're African."

Other genetic research has shown that most physical variation - more than 80 percent - occurs within what we have come to define as a racial group. But between what we think of as distinct racial groups, genes vary only about 10 percent of the time.

Still, the idea of different biologically-based human races has stuck.

White, the Stanford historian, said he has spent the past 10 or 15 years teaching students that race is a social construction. They often greet his lessons with disbelief, as if to say, "we know what we know."

In a society so defined by race, he said, "everything we see, everything we understand, is bound up in this idea of race and it's very hard to give up."

The AAA urged the U.S. Office of Management and Budget to drop the use of the term "race" in federal reports and the 2000 census and replace it with "more correct terms related to ethnicity, such as `ethnic origins.' "

"That's where we should be going, realistically," said Michael Blakey, a Howard University anthropologist, who pushed for the changes.

But the new census had respondents mark one or more of 14 boxes representing six races and subcategories or "some other race," with 63 racial possibilities. The groupings were criticized for both confusing the issue and continuing to rely on racial categories.

Yet Blakey acknowledged the position of civil-rights groups who see the importance of continuing to record racial designations to remedy inequities in employment, housing and health care for people long discriminated against on the basis of skin color.

Eric Sorensen's phone number is (206) 464-8253. His e-mail is esorensen@seattletimes.com.

By Roberto (152.163.201.67) on Monday, February 12, 2001 - 05:45 pm:

Mad Scientist:

Can you resubmit the article. I'm curious what it says. All we get is an error when you click on the "hear" indicator icon. Thanks. ~ Roberto

By Mad_scientist (134.124.212.217) on Monday, February 12, 2001 - 12:00 am:

I know this is not related, but read the article right here.

By Roberto (205.188.193.57) on Saturday, February 10, 2001 - 11:45 pm:

Not long ago an admitted bigot told me it was his belief that America will always be a "white nation". A myth if I have ever heard one.

According to demographers like Barry Edmonston of Portland State University in Oregon and Jeff Passel of the Urban Insitute, a Washington, D.C. think tank, officials of individual states, and the U.S. Census Bureau, by 2050 calculations based on current immigration and racial intermarriage trends show the percentage of the U.S. population that will claim mixed ancestry meaning some combination of black, white, hispanic, and asian will likely triple to 21%.

This means millions more americans will be of mixed racial and ethnic backgrounds. Kind of like a "So them are us and us are them". How many of you knew that lovely MSMBC Soledad O' Brian, the news anchor and correspondent is the product of a black cuban woman and a white Irish-Austrailian. She represents the future of what this country will look like at the end of this century in many hues. She will be like millions who will be a "blended race".

The controversey around last year's census form dealt with for the first time in U.S. history for americans to be able to pick more than one race and ethnic category to describe themselves. This is the result of pressures from parents of bi-racial children who don't want their kids to have to choose one part of their ancestry over another. Current census figures that I have been able to discern show that about 7% of the population today claim multiple ancestry. I predict at the state level one day a case involving a dispute over a racial identity in hiring, school enrollment or some other acceptance qualification will be challenge and will be forwarded to the state and ultimately U.S. Supreme Court.

So for that admitted bigot all I can say for him and others like him, I say this from a flyer I got from a german lady in November 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down, "there is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world and that is an idea whose time has come".

Webmaster, consider yourself and others in the interracial world to be at the tip of a historical sword of change in this web site. ~ Roberto