Reply #57: I think in the case of African Americans, the issue of genetic distance

[moc]

becomes so great that the concept of race becomes virtually meaningless. For example, African Americans have very high rates of hypertension whereas West Africans (the area from African from which most African Americans descent) have very low levels of hypertension.

Much of the meaningful genetic variation is related to geography of origin, which is an imperfect correlate of what most people think of as the divisions of races.

Here's a fun anecdotal story about African Americans and "race":

http://www.alternet.org/story/16917/

Black Like I Thought I Was
By Erin Aubry Kaplan, LA Weekly. Posted October 7, 2003.

Wayne Joseph is a 51-year-old high school principal in Chino whose family emigrated from the segregated parishes of Louisiana to central Los Angeles in the 1950s, as did mine. Like me, he is of Creole stock and is therefore on the lighter end of the black color spectrum, a common enough circumstance in the South that predates the multicultural movement by centuries. And like most other black folk, Joseph grew up with an unequivocal sense of his heritage and of himself; he tends toward black advocacy and has published thoughtful opinion pieces on racial issues in magazines like Newsweek. When Joseph decided on a whim to take a new ethnic DNA test he saw described on a 60 Minutes segment last year, it was only to indulge a casual curiosity about the exact percentage of black blood; virtually all black Americans are mixed with something, he knew, but he figured it would be interesting to make himself a guinea pig for this new testing process...

<snip>

But when the results of his DNA test came back, he found himself staggered by the idea that though he still qualified as a person of color, it was not the color he was raised to think he was, one with a distinct culture and definitive place in the American struggle for social equality that he'd taken for granted. Here was the unexpected and rather unwelcome truth: Joseph was 57 percent Indo-European, 39 percent Native American, 4 percent East Asian -- and zero percent African. After a lifetime of assuming blackness, he was now being told that he lacked even a single drop of black blood to qualify.

<snip>