I was thinking yesterday about the ancestry thread in GNS and the idea that someone who is primarily of African descent with some non-African ancestry (or primarily European with some non-European ancestry etc.) is technically mixed (if you're not 100% X then you are, by definition, mixed). It lead to my toying with the idea that black Americans, black Latinos, black Caribbean people, black Middle Easterners and the black Siddis of India (an earlier Islamic slave trade brought Africans to India and the Middle East), as well as predominately non-black people who have some black African ancestry (like approximately 1/5th of white Southerners who have some African slave ancestry and I'm sure the rates of African ancestry in mostly non-African descended people are high in some Latin American countries and Middle Eastern countries like Yemen) should be considered ethnic Africans (again, even the ones who are of mostly non-African descent). I wouldn't push the issue on someone who felt otherwise or feel the need to say it offline and it's not morally or ultimately important to me but I do currently think it makes sense. A man can't produce a child who isn't a member of his (biological) family and, by extension, his ethnic group. Ethnicity is socially constructed but it's generally agreed that ethnicity is determined by family heritage, so a man can't have descendants who aren't members of his ethnic group (everyone is related even if it's too distant to be considered 'significant' and there's no completely unrelated group of people, at least not on this planet, whom we can compare ourselves to, but whether or not we are related by any degree is still yes or no). The counter argument (at least one, the one I've always understood) is that 18th century black Americans developed a new ethnic identity in the American South that was forged out of the experience of being subjected to the racialized Southern slave system but, here comes my argument, they never stopped being members of their parent's and ancestor's ethnic groups, they just developed a new ethnic identity and culture (I wouldn't necessarily claim that black Americans are culturally African). So the new ethnic identity didn't 'replace' the old ones, it just branched off from them. If ethnic group A, the Balfours, descend from ethnic group B, the Marans, they should be considered a specific group of Marans. Not all Marans are Balfourans but all Balfourans are Marans. I know all humans are 'African' but I mean people who belong to modern indigenous ethnic groups that still live in Africa.
I'm not committed this view but I think it makes sense if ethnicity, unlike just culture which is fluid and can change completely from generation to generation, is determined by geneology. There's no non arbitrary cut off point between the ancestors who count and the ones who don't. I want to know if there are any holes in my logic or if the issue is really just subjective and open to interpretation
