[erichmond]

Do you know how this plays out in mixed race people? This is a question that no doctor has ever given me a straight answer for. If I have an african-american father and a european mother, do I need to worry about this?

Also, what about people who have a single grandparent who is African-American. Does this kind of thing apply to them?

[tokenadult]

This indeed is one of the problems with "race" classification. As the Census Bureau itself says, "The U.S. Census Bureau collects race data in accordance with guidelines provided by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and these data are based on self-identification. The racial categories included in the census questionnaire generally reflect a social definition of race recognized in this country and not an attempt to define race biologically, anthropologically, or genetically. In addition, it is recognized that the categories of the race item include racial and national origin or sociocultural groups. People may choose to report more than one race to indicate their racial mixture, such as 'American Indian' and 'White.' People who identify their origin as Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish may be of any race."

http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/meta/long_RHI525211.htm

I was a recipient of the official American Community Survey from the Census just in the last week. I filled out the survey according to questions I was asked. For race, for all of my family members, I put in "other" as the race and filled in "human" for the response below that. (For the decennial census back in 2010, we filled out the form in the expected way by the federal definitions, holding our noses while we did that.) Both times, we filled in national ancestry according to the known countries of origin of ancestors, which is quite a diverse mixture for my children.

As Henry Harpending wrote back in 2006: "On the other hand, information about the race of patients will be useless as soon as we discover and can type cheaply the underlying genes that are responsible for the associations. Can races be enumerated in any unambiguous way? Of course not, and this is well known not only to scientists but also to anyone on the street." Chapter 16: Anthropological Genetics: Present and Future in Anthropological Genetics: Theory, Methods and Applications (2006), edited by Michael Crawford.