A few years ago I watched a bunch of Megan Bowen’s YouTubes about living in Korea as an expat. In one episode she had explained that the reason she had a black American accent (she’s from Georgia I think) is that she is a black American. Just a very light-skinned one.
In other videos, you can see that her skin is a little darker without typical Korean makeup, though she is still very light-skinned. And her natural hair is quite curly. But it would not be implausible to assume that she is one of the 10% or so of African Americans who are more than 50% white.
I didn’t think much about this until today. As part of my job, I watch ancestry-related YouTube videos to get a sense of how people interpret their results, and Megan Bowen showed up!
So I watched her video. There are some photos of her parents, and both look darker in complexion and more typically African American in their appearance. She also admitted that she was so light at birth that her father took a paternity test, and she was his.
The results for her ancestry came back…and she’s 65% Sub-Saharan African! This is curious because arguably Megan Bowen looks more “white” than the actress Megalyn Echikunwoke, who is 50% European (American) and 50% Nigerian (or half-Shona half-English Thandie Newton, the list could go on).
We have the genome-wide data. Megan is 65% Sub-Saharan African. And ~32% European.
Ultimately this is a pretty clear issue of the fact that only a subset of genes are responsible for the features which we deem ancestrally informative in a naive manner. Skin color, hair form, and facial features.
To the right is a plot from a paper which looked for variants affecting skin color in a Cape Vedre sample. They used ~900,000 SNPs to assess ancestry, so you know that that’s right. They also used a melanin index generated with a spectrophotometer. You see that 44% of the variation in skin color can be predicted by ancestry in this admixed population.
There’s a clear correlation between ancestry and complexion, but because the number of loci affecting the variation of complexion in humans is relatively small for a polygenic trait, the relationship can get decoupled rather easily (a few large effect genetic loci explain a lot of the rest of the variation).
If you looked at pigmentation loci in Megan Bowen and did local ancestry analysis, you’d see a strong enrichment for European segments. Far greater than the genome-wide 32%. It happens. It’s probability, not magic.
She’s cute whatever she is!
In people who are mostly of a particular kind of ancestry, I would reckon 25% or more “exotic” ancestry is what is RELIABLY needed for that person to actually look mixed. For instance, in someone who is mostly West Eurasian, having less than a quarter Sub-Saharan ancestry is probably not going to be obvious in their phenotype.
That said, exceptions happen in individuals all the time, but it can even happen at a population level. Consider the case of the Aeta and Nogai. Based on the latest SE Asia study, the Aeta derive about half of their ancestry from Austronesian-speaking East Asians from Taiwan, while the other half is Melanesian. You would expect them to look a lot more like the Taiwanese aborigines than they actually do given their ancestry. Consider also the Nogai of the Northern Caucasus. They often look waaay more Mongoloid than one would expect given their predominantly West Eurasian ancestry profile.
Luke Lea,
She was cute … until she started talking.
I plied an increasingly obscure trade for awhile. At one point hired a congenial Garifuna, born Honduras. I was invited into his lodgings once and met his wife and passel of younger children, who ranged in age from toddlers to age fourteen. It was a pleasant and memorable encounter. His wife was a sturdy blond. The kids were Wow. I can’t remember precisely the combinations, but in my impressionistic recollection of the event, it was: one child had red tight-curly-hair and had dark sub-Saharan African features, one child red tight curls with African facial features but very pale coloration, one with European features but dark skin, one dark ‘afro’ skin and hair and African-looking but with blue eyes, one straight haired blonde with brown skin, one blonde with light skin…
To Russell’s point: in Mexican families, it’s not uncommon for skin tone to vary non-trivially across siblings, especially across male and female siblings. My mother could get away with claiming “pure Spanish” ancestry; my uncles definitely could not (though they all have the round faces and high cheek bones you would associate with Amerind physiognomy).
I dated a girl a while back (I’m tempted to link a photo but I won’t), black dad and white mom, and she was just as white as this Megan girl. Then there’s that 4-chan troll-ess Brittany Venti, whose mother is black.
More and more Americans just don’t fit into the black/white dichotomy, so we’re gonna have to figure out whether ancestry, phenotype, or some combination thereof “counts” in relation to policies designed to help marginalized individuals.
Actually, this was a discussion that should have happened a long time ago. Different Amerindian groups have admixed or not admixed to vastly different degrees, and it’s patently absurd that, e.g., the Cherokee tribal youth council seem to have more access to goodies than do the dirt poor, 99% Amerindian Navajos in New Mexico.
She clearly made herself appear more Eurasian than she really is, comparing that video with her other ones. A trick for the clicks, to provoke comments and attention.
Nevertheless, if everything is right she’s communicating, her being so much more SSA than European comes as a true surprise. It must be the result of recombination by chance. Its not just her skin color, but her whole appearance and facial features. Would wonder how her siblings look or would have looked like?
The one drop rule and the idea of people with some non-European admixture being “non-white” made the idea of “race as a construct” much easier to digest than in world regions with a more realistic view on racial issues.
That people like Halle Berry and Barrack Obama being considered “black” by a lot of people in the USA seems like a joke. Berry once cried for her success as “the first black woman” and then hugging her mother is really strange to view.
Its like there is, or at least was, no realistic concept for mixed race people in the USA for quite some time. That doesn’t mean race is not real, it just means the US populace had/has a distorted view on it.
In this day and age, there is no “one drop rule.” No authority is going to order you to stop calling yourself white, especially if your phenotype is European. Even in the 19th and 20th century, conducting oneself as white was more important than genetic purity. If that were not true, Latinos and Arabs in this country would be “black.”
https://www.amazon.com/Legal-History-Color-Line-One-Drop-ebook/dp/B005EN73FS/
A few years ago I watched a bunch of Megan Bowen’s YouTubes about living in Korea as an expat
Mr. Khan, have you done one of these Korean fire noodle challenges?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Azg02mW4B4I
The rather Germanic matter-of-fact style status updates the guy on the right gives as he eats the noodles is pretty funny. Very dry.
The “one drop rule” seems to be still active for the institutionally privileged people in the United States which are in way in opposition to whites. Blacks and Indians. Some of those self identified being more European than what they call themselves. So the rule being applied by them.