Hi longnshort; re: "wrong my father was 100% Irish, my moms'family 100% polish all my relatives are 100% white european same with most of the people who came here in the 1900s"
Well, this is what they tell you. But are you really certain who your daddy's daddy's daddy is? You should be aware that genetic testing is a modern thing and sometimes mothers aren't completely accurate on who the father is. By the time you go back 10 generations you're talking about something like 1000 opportunities for errors.
Art class challenges views of ancestry
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But there was a twist. Florida Atlantic University instructor Peter Fine suspected many of the graduate students would be unaware of their full genetic makeup.
So Fine, an associate art professor, asked the students in his Visualizing Race class to take DNA tests.
Before opening their results last week, most of the 13 students identified themselves as white Europeans. One considered himself mostly African with some European and Native American genes mixed in.
The DNA results surprised almost everyone. Only one student was completely European. The rest discovered they had some mixture of European, Native American, Sub-Saharan African and Asian ancestry.
Britt Feingold, 25, of Boca Raton, learned she was 8 percent Asian. She said she's been told her facial features resemble that of Asians, but she never took it seriously. Her mother's ancestors came from Scandinavian countries, while everyone on her father's side was Eastern European.
"This is odd," she said. "I have no idea where this 8 percent came from."
>>>
articles.sun-sentinel.com
Oh there's plenty of "pure" white people in the US. But they're mostly newcomers like you. On the other hand, there's a huge number of people who think they're pure white but of course they're not. Read more by looking at the wikipedia article on "passing":
en.wikipedia.org
Back in the 19th century, people generally weren't proud of their minority ancestors so they didn't tell anyone about it. Later their kids grew up assuming they were purebred white. But like I said above, no one really knows who their ancestors really are.
The early "white" colonists in the US region not only knew they had Indian blood they were proud of it:
The Pocahontas Exception: The Exemption of American Indian Ancestry from Racial Purity Law
papers.ssrn.com
Later it became more impressive to be "pure" and people didn't bother to tell their kids about the Indian blood. Do that for one generation and it's forgotten.
Miscegenation isn't something unique to the United States. The Romans used African soldiers to garrison Britain and their genes are in the population there now:
Genes reveal West African heritage of white Brits
newscientist.com
As for the Poles, they carry the genetic heritage of every ethnic group that's invaded them and that would be pretty much everybody, most famously the Mongols. After so many US men got all-expense paid tours of Vietnam a lot of babies were born with non Vietnamese features. Eventually their descendants will assume that they're "pure" Vietnamese. Miscegenation is completely universal human behavior and it happens absolutely every time that a foreign army visits a region.
-- Carl |
