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PaperclipPerfector  15d ago (text post)   2958 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 16, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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What's the state of research into the physiological/psychological effects of race-mixing?

The last good look into this question I've come across was Emil Kirkegaard's blog post, which covered the overrepresentation of certain psychological and behavioral risk patterns in mixed-race adolescents. I haven't seen anything else on this subject from the HBD crowd, but I might be missing something. I'm particularly curious about research into differences between first-generation mixes with total racial heterozygosity and later-generation mixed people with greater homozygosity, seems like there could be some interesting differences there.

I very much doubt that any two humans alive today are distant enough genetically that their offspring will be biologically better or worse off purely by dint of being mixed-race. We aren't talking about Neanderthals or Denisovans here, where hybrids appear to have been less fit and many of their genes were disproportionately selected against over time.

There are clearly psychological differences (presumably with genetic correlates) associated with the kind of person who is more likely to marry outside their race, as well as environmental factors i.e. how mixed children are treated by their peers growing up, and these seem sufficient to explain whatever characteristics might at first glance seem to be the results of the mixing itself.

what about Pygmies and Papuans (Fst ~ 0.45)?

Emil Kirkegaard's blog post

Page not found. This one?

Yep, thanks.

There's something subtly absurd about the use of the term "race-mixing" that gave me a chuckle there, nice

Otherwise this seems like a super super broad question. Are you asking about the psychological impact of doing a race-mix with someone, or the typical profile of a person who's inclined to racemix, or traits over-represented in their resultant offspring, or...?

Since it's a super-broad question, I'll toss in a couple of unscientific observations I find interesting.

First, in biracial people with one SSA-descended parent and one Euro-descended parent - those with a white dad are practically a different ethny to those with a white mum. This isn't hyperbole -I can very reliably discern white-dad from white-mum biracials with about the same accuracy I can discern western and southern Africans, say. And it's interesting because the world at large doesn't seem to put much stock in this distinction - I can't imagine environmental effects can plausibly account for the difference, rather it's because white men who shack up with black women tend to be very different in profile from white women who get knocked up by black men.

White-dad biracials are more upwardly mobile, competent, typically identify more with the white part of their ancestry once the dad is still present, and don't seem particularly blighted as a group. White-mum biracials are cut from different cloth entirely

I'm curious if there are other bi-racial pairings whose offspring differ greatly based on which parent is which ethnicity. I could see Jewish-Christian matches showing some interesting patterns, dependent on country. Arab-Euro matches might also have an interesting assymetry

I'm interested in the potential somatic effects of distant admixture, independent of parental selection effects. Partly because I'm biracial myself (white dad, black mom), partly because I predict that it'll become a hot button topic in the near future. Opposition to miscegenation is still quite gauche in the right-wing zeitgeist, but I don't see it staying that way for long.

You may be interested in long lasting endogamous mixed race groups around the world, eg cape coloreds.

I'm biracial myself (white dad, black mom)

Slay, king. I genuinely had no idea while writing this, and wasn't trying to do some weird suck-up thing about the better outcomes for black-mum biracials. Do you agree on the possibility of reliably discerning white-mum and black-mum biracials?

A few further guesses here, for perfect stereotype accuracy - it'd be amazing if you let me know the accuracy of any of this, also feel free to tell me to fuck off. I'll limit myself to stuff that shouldn't be immediately inferable from the racial fact of their marriage (eg your folks are relatively open-minded, and your dad's overall less racist than your mum - no shit)

1)your mum's a bit nerdy and 2)benignly snobbish. 3) She's experienced at least one incident of serious depression 4) Your dad is quite a kind guy

I see the logic behind the other three but what does the depression have to do with it?

Rock music and alternative subcultures

Bear in mind the parents of @Eupraxia paired off in the past

Lots of the black girls who might view white guys as suitable mates, especially in the past when music was more racially segregated, were into goth/grunge/punk/metal/emo/scene - interest in all these genres is also associated with common mental illnesses, particularly depression, and creativity generally

I have noticed a difference, yea. WMBF kids tend to be able to pass for white more often, and if not they don't look especially "black" either. I fall into the latter category, my brother's more the former. As for your stereotypes:

  1. Very true
  2. Nope
  3. Don't know, but I'd guess not
  4. True enough

2/4 - I'd call that a misfire for my stereotyping. In my defence, I wrote that yesterday in the pub, it being St Patrick's day.

The appearance thing is something I'd noticed too, that WMBF tend to look like they have more euro ancestry. It's super interesting to me, though I disagree with @hydroacetylene that this is because white men pair off with black women who have more euro admixture. If the white man in question were all about lighter-skinned women, he could just.... pair off with literally any other race if woman instead. It would be strange to go to an Italian restaurant, and pick the least Italian dish they serve; I'd simply choose another restaurant if that were my preference.

My hypothesis is that it's not anything to do with different ratios of euro to SSA inheritance, but rather something psychological to do with identity development and the relationship this has specifically to fathers - men and women both tend to more influenced by the surface "tag" component of their father's identity than their mothers. Biracial people generally have some control over how black or white they appear - hairstyle, makeup, clothes, tanning habits, overall habitus My guess is WMBF biracial people tend more to view both of their inheritances as equally integrated, and their self-presentation reflects this

If the white man in question were all about lighter-skinned women, he could just.... pair off with literally any other race if woman instead

This assumes he specifically wanted a black woman, or had no non-appearance based reasons for his decision. It also boils the differences down to ‘light skin’ when in reality there’s a raft of features in which literally any race of women is generally more attractive to men than negros- hair, for example.

Eh, tastes vary and, while distributions differ, there are attractive women of every race. Personally (anecdata doesn't count etc I know) I've met women with very Bantoid features, dark skin etc whom I was attracted to and thought beautiful. Certainly for me personally it's not an aesthetic malus, pragmatic considerations aside.

I'd think it likelier that the white man in question just likes black women, rather than making the best of things. Women are pretty good at sniffing out genuine interest, better than men, and I'd imagine the black women in question (given that she's described as "nerdy" AKA intelligent) could discern if the level of interest were up to standard or not

Maybe I'm overly optimistic, dunno

WMBF tend to look like they have more euro ancestry

I like your theory for this much better than mine, but I do have my own:

"Momma's baby, daddy's maybe" is an eons-old problem, and combining the lower certainty of paternity with the (typically) higher violence of males suggests there's been a long history of some nasty evolutionary selection pressure for kids to resemble their dads more than their moms. Infanticide in non-human primates and many non-primate mammals isn't uncommon, even many human "civilizations" took our damn time before deciding to punish it, and before agriculture it may have been a common form of birth control in tough times.

I'd guess even a couple million years of this would mostly affect which genes control appearance (or mediate other genes controlling appearance? there's not that much Y chromosome...), though, not habits. My interracial marriage is N=1, but while my kids look much more (75/25?) like me than like my wife, their personalities are maybe 55/45 on average and no more than 40/60 in one case.

WMBF kids tend to be able to pass for white more often, and if not they don't look especially "black" either.

Because white men are high status and less-subsaharan-looking women tend to be more attractive.

Are we considering Jewish-Christian bi-racial??

Actually I'd greatly respect the chutzpah of someone with, say, half Croatian and half Ashkenazi parentage who declared themselves biracial on that basis

Depends who you ask I guess

Inter-ethnic might be a better term

It would be fascinating to compare children from monoracial monocultural relationships, inter-cultural but monoracial relationships, children from inter-racial but monocultural relationships, and children from parents of different races and cultures. So the difference between I marry a white girl from my high school, I marry an Amish girl, I marry a Black girl from my high school, and I marry a Chinese girl from China.

But that's probably too specific to get a good sample data from anywhere.

I wouldn't say the challenge would be sample size so much as a robust criterion for people of different races who share a culture. Seems like a dialect vs language problem; ie the boundaries would be pretty arbitrary. And also, you'd clearly have personality confounders in eg a black American who says they share a culture with white Americans vs a black American who would deny same

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