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    sTalkinggoat, first and last of his nameAngela Helm
    4/23/19 11:25am

    Goodamn. Then i got tot his part.

    these Ancestry commercials aired during the Roots television series)

    What the absolute fuck? Would these motherfuckers ever make a commercial about a jewish woman being enticed to flee Germany with a Nazi and air that shit during a showing of Shindler’s List. They’d fire your ass for even suggesting such a thing, but I bet Karen and Chad are really upset that everyone is making their little romance short about race.

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      Mr.DuckSaucesTalkinggoat, first and last of his name
      4/23/19 2:16pm

      You know they wouldn’t show it during schinlder’s list because the people complaining would be white people, they would be aware before they just put it out.

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      GreenBabyWeightsTalkinggoat, first and last of his name
      4/23/19 2:23pm

      I really would like to see a source for this one. No contemporary article makes any mention of this and Janina’s the first I heard to quote this as a fact.

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    Pretty TerryAngela Helm
    4/23/19 10:56am

    The ad was probably directed by Amma Assante.

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      VincentPriceLostHisLaughPretty Terry
      4/23/19 12:54pm

      Whew there’s a name I had blocked out.

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      whatamithinkingPretty Terry
      4/23/19 3:41pm

      LOL..wicked of you. But I agree. Seriously, Amma Assante has some serious self-hating issues and it’s right there on film.

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    GarlandAngela Helm
    4/23/19 3:27pm

    Then you bear this man’s mixed-race children, and they too start to benefit from the dynamic of colorism over the other slaves who didn’t have this same relationship.

    Good lord, no. You know what happened to mix-race children? They were sold for a premium, especially the girls. The more white-presenting, the more valuable. These were an entire class of slaves sold specifically to be sex slaves. Here’s how this went down: the master rapes one of his slaves, and a mixed girl is born as a result. She’s sold for a profit to another master, who might wait until she’s hit puberty to start raping her. Another girl results, who’s auctioned off. Each generation of this cycle results in girls with greater and greater percentages of Caucasian blood. While these racist slaveowners rarely let their prejudices get in the way of their desire to sexually dominate their property, there was still a desire to have “pretty girls” who were whiter in appearance. Some of these girls were only one-sixteenth black, and from appearances were indistinguishable from a “pure” white girl. That’s why the “one drop rule” and matrilineal slave status were so important: so white slaveowners could auction off their mixed-race children. In the case of the girls, so that their new owners can use said children as sex slaves.

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      whatamithinkingGarland
      4/23/19 4:54pm

      In every corner of the African diaspora mixed race children/people (“mulattoes”?) benefited or were treated better, by any measure, because of the resulting pigmentocracy.

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      Garlandwhatamithinking
      4/23/19 5:09pm

      I was talking specifically of the context of slave children on American plantations, which is what the author brought up.  Being lightskinned might usually mean greater acceptance by a racist society, but under American chattel slavery it just meant a far higher likelihood of sexual abuse.

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    Brown RoseAngela Helm
    4/23/19 11:06am

    This ad was for white people. I am willing to bet some white people who thought thet were getting native ancestry percentages or something else, and see 10% african instead. Its to appeal to their romanticism and make them feel less bad about that drop of black that has been denigrated for centuries.

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      Janina Jeff, PhDBrown Rose
      4/23/19 1:21pm

      I never thought about it from that angle but I could see how this could help with guilt that liberal whites live with.

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    HuskyBroAngela Helm
    4/23/19 10:53am

    If your podcast is anything like this article...

    Your browser does not support HTML5 video tag.Click here to view original GIF
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      Mr.DuckSauceHuskyBro
      4/23/19 2:17pm

      Nice Kim’s Convenience reference.

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    EvenBaggierTrousers7Angela Helm
    4/23/19 2:32pm

    Look, I get that they want to acknowledge that white men fathered children with black women during slavery. And I get they don’t want to use the word “rape” in their fuzzy, warm family story/commercial. So how about using real people simply acknowledging that they found that their enslaved ancestors had children with slave owners, and not through choice always (ever?). The shit happened. Just tell folk, hey, we might be able to help you find out WHICH white guy fathered your branch of the family tree. Shit, everybody knows it. Fuck this warm fuzzy shit.

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      WhigglyEvenBaggierTrousers7
      4/23/19 3:24pm

      Or the actual case of the Forresters, a recurring pairing between free blacks and Sephardic Jews whose main claims to fame are being the first to return the Union flag over Richmond and (earlier, obviously) technically re-enslaving themselves (I think to a shell corporation?) to dodge Virginia’s free black ban because business down there was good.

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      Janina Jeff, PhDEvenBaggierTrousers7
      4/24/19 4:02pm

      haha! This is true, check out the spoof on our IG page from Random Acts of Flyness.

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    hillratAngela Helm
    4/23/19 11:53am

    I don’t even know why anyone gives up their genetic information like this, what possible good can come from it? Not much that I can think of (unless you have some sort of genetic disorder & it’s helpful to your doctor to already have your genetic information handy and how often does that happen?) but there’s a whole boatload of ways that corporate America can and will use this information to fuck you over. 

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      DavidHHhillrat
      4/23/19 11:22pm

      The funny thing is that most genetic testing is a joke, as they look for a trait or two per chromosome, rather than testing for something useful. A First Nations woman took the sample from her dog, and was told she was part Native.

      Quality genetic testing would be very helpful, as western medicine has focused on treating people of European Ancestry, and ignored the differences of other peoples. These differences can matter, even with the dentist, as I learned the hard way, as Native teeth are different having a more robust root structure. After I got kicked in the face, I need two teeth pulled, and learned that my dentist had never pulled the broken root from a tooth like mine, he didn’t even have the right tools...

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    TheCrandleAngela Helm
    4/23/19 10:14am

    I don’t see how these DNA companies can market to African Americans without addressing the reality of slavery, and this was NOT the way. I would love to know more about my background, but I don’t trust what these companies will do with my genetic information. Recent stories about the use in criminal investigations and data breaches don’t inspire trust, and neither does the history of how scientific research has treated black patients.

    You make a great point about scientists’ need for access to black patience for medical science.  For so long the default human was white and male, and that’s not enough to address disease, etc in all human populations. However, missteps like this and the general knowledge of how black patience are seen as less than won’t inspire people to grant access.

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      Just Being RealTheCrandle
      4/23/19 1:17pm

      “Recent stories about the use in criminal investigations and data breaches don’t inspire trust..” So you don’t want to help catch killersif they are part of your family tree,gotcha  

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      Janina Jeff, PhDTheCrandle
      4/23/19 1:24pm

      I definitely agree. To your point about data breeches it is important to know that some companies sell data to these entities moreso than a data breech. I am not saying here we shouldn’t do genetic testing or participate in research. I actually think we should and we must but I think we need to do it in an informed and safe way with advocates who can understand our pain without exploiting it.

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    Sorely VexedAngela Helm
    4/23/19 10:45am

    Fascinating article. Horrible ad.

    One question, regarding this sentence:

    “However, population geneticists have observed an increased amount of African ancestry on the X chromosome in African Americans, suggesting involuntary mating between European-American men and African-American women.”

    I’m a bit confused as to how increased African ancestry on the X chromosome points to that conclusion. Should it have read ‘European ancestry?’ I looked at the linked abstract, but it didn’t really help.

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      Auntee Ho-tepeeSorely Vexed
      4/23/19 11:37am

      You read it right!  In other words, once we got away from”massa”and his appetite for dark meat we were able to go back to where we really wanted to be, in the arms and beds of Black men.

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      Janina Jeff, PhDSorely Vexed
      4/23/19 11:53am

      Hi Sorely,

      Yes this is correct. If admixture events are non-random between sexes then you would observe an increased proportion of the original continental ancestry  on the sex chromosomes. In this case African ancestry on chromosome X.

      Here is an excerpt from the paper.“Along the X chromosome in the HRS, we estimate 84.82% African ancestry, 12.89% European ancestry, and 2.29% Native American ancestry (bootstrap 95% CI [2.14%, 2.45%]). The higher proportion of African ancestry along the X compared to autosomes is consistent with previous studies [12, 17] and the historical record of early admixture occurring predominantly through coerced sexual interaction between European-American males and African-American females [21]. A model with a single pulse of admixture (as considered in [12]) applied to the present data suggests 28.6% Europeans among male contributors, but only 5.2% among female contributors. By contrast, it suggests almost no contribution from Native American males, and 3% from Native American females.”

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    BiturbowagonAngela Helm
    4/23/19 11:31am

    I have an even more basal objection to all of this: the enormous violations of privacy and autonomy that compose the business model of these genetic testing companies.

    This ad is a ham handed (at best) attempt to lure unsuspecting people into volunteering their genetic data to the company.

    You focus on one legitimate and offensive aspect of this ad, but the issues go even deeper.

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      Janina Jeff, PhDBiturbowagon
      4/23/19 1:20pm

      I couldn’t agree more this is just scratching the surface around the ad itself and in no way dives deep into issues around the test itself like: privacy, data shelf life and sharing, accuracy for non-European populations, interpretation and the complexity around non-European genetic architecture (allele frequencies and linkage disequilibrium).

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      BiturbowagonJanina Jeff, PhD
      4/23/19 3:46pm

      Indeed. And the detail that this was aimed at a nonwhite audience, and the ramifications of this, are not lost on me. 

      (I was a bit surprised that your message needed to be pulled out of the grays.)

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