Segregation vs Hybridisation: The Science
For more than 100 hundred years; black and white nationalists in America have argued for the purity of races and racial seperation. They have cloaked their ideology in scientific language to argue the genetic superiority of those termed racially pure individuals and considered genetic preservation of the race as a panacea that one should be willing to pick up arms for.
Despite the development of the politics of racial supremacy and or nationalism in the United States; geneticists, social psychologists and scientists argue that it is racial mixing that leads to genetic, psychological and cognitive advantages rather than the purification of race theories that were argued for by Hitler, Garvey and the Ku Klux Klan.
According to social psychologists, those born of multiple heritages develop a mental flexibility from a young age from having to adjust in order to engage with their relatives of different races. I understand the experience totally.
As a child I stayed at my white Grandmother and Aunts Houses; when I engaged with them I did not engage in the same way that I engaged with my black Grandparents. They were quite different in the way that they spoke and behaved. Their historical stories were different.
My white Grandmother shared her war stories and reflected on her Jewish roots whilst my black Grandmother reflected on growing up on a sugar plantation in Jamaica, being a descendant of slaves and a migrant. This is not to say that they did not share some similarities because of the colonial context that shaped Jamaican society and the fact that they spoke the same language but the obvious differences, though sub-cultural, still existed.
According to studies undertaken at Duke University; after being asked to reflect on their multiple racial identity before completing tasks, mulattoes were able to show considerably greater creative and problem solving skills than their mono-racial counterparts. This was also the same for mono-racials that were asked to reflect on their multiple identities such as worker, father, man, before completing tasks. The study showed that having multiple identities and acknowledging them improves your abilities.
From the get go, mulatto children are privy to more than one social historical story and more than one racial identity and are often having to slip between the two in order to be accepted amongst the different lineages in their families. Which naturally supports the development of more wider cognitive skills, from being bi-lingual, to being multi-cultural. Knowledge of more than one culture is always a social advantage, as well as the ability to communicate across racial, cultural, ethnic boundaries through language.
In a world where we have been taught that blood is thicker than water, the fact that mulattoes share blood from and genetics with more than one racial group makes their ties with both black and white America strong which is an advantage that Obama has wielded to great effect.
Geneticists, have long known of the genetic advantage that comes with having multiple racial backgrounds and have coined the term “hybrid vigour”, often referred to in scientific terms as heterozygosis or heterosis in opposition to homozygosis.
Children inherit copies of their parents genes. Zygosity indicates the degree to which both copies of a gene have the same genetic code and come from the same genetic variant. Those whose genes derive from the same variant and have a strong similarity to each other are considered to have genetic homozygosity and those whose genes are less similar and from differing variants are considered to have genetic heterozygosity.
With homozygosity comes the loss of genetic diversity that leads to a depletion of genetic fitness. Populations that are small and have strong indications of inbreeding have a greater loss of genetic fitness than those that do not. This is because the genes from differing variants are able to mask the recessive genes that may exist in a particular gene variant. The genetic variety enables alleles from other variants to cancel out any recessive alleles from one parent with the genes of the other.
For example there are many African-Caribbean people that carry sickle cell traits. If they produce children with individuals that have different genetic variants then their alleles will cancel out the sickle cell alleles.
It has been found that people that have inherited a multiplicity of gene variants, those with heterozygosity, are more resistant to diseases such as Hepatitis B and HIV.
At the level of the gene there is no such thing as race, there are only gene variants. Much of the demands of racial politics on the side of black and white nationalisms that have racial purity at their centre are not a reflection of science but of science fiction. The advantages of mixing of gene variants is clear, there is ample evidence to support the genetic, cultural, cognitive and social advantages that it bestows upon those that inherit those genes.
I am not trying to argue for the intellectual or physical supremacy of mulatto people. The genetic diversity of Africa for example is very wide. There are African populations who have very different gene variants. The genetic variants within East African Amhara people are considerably different from West African negro populations. Children born from unions with far-flung tribes and ethnicities in Africa may be as genetically diverse as mulatto populations in the future. However, those who are born of mixtures of African, European and/or Asian genes have the widest of gene variations by some margin.
White and black nationalists have sought to standardise their races in the most extreme cases but their ideology is not based on the science of genetic fitness. It is a response to a social construct and mythology rather than scientifically backed.
Of course, your genetic inheritance does not tell us everything about your identity, there are other factors involved as to why people may encourage relationships with those that share major genetic similarities. The point is that these other factors are not based on what is genetically advantageous to the human species but what is advantageous to the social construct of race and power.
ALT
