Worldwide Demographics

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

The U.K. does track racial data and from an American perspective it seems more like France in terms of attitudes towards racial and interracial coupling. As of the most recent U.K. census, 2.7% of the population identifies as "British Mixed" versus 4.09% in the United States identifying as mixed. That might seem like the U.S. has more common interracial mixtures, but that would be incorrect to conclude. The U.K. is overall much whiter than the U.S. The U.K. is about 83% white according to its last census (77% British/Irish white) or 17% non-white. The U.S. is 58% white, non-Hispanic or 42% non-white (or white Hispanic). This means that close to 20% of the U.K.'s non-white population is "mixed" versus less than 10% of the U.S.'s non-white population. In fact, there are nearly as many people in the U.K. who identify as mixed (2.7%) as there are people who identify as black (3.7%).

Not to mention that the Black population has lived in the US far longer than it has in the UK. Also not to mention that many so-called "Black" people in France/UK who come from our former colonies in the Caribbean are in fact mixed people. If they had to declare their "ethnicity" in the French census, I don't know whether they would declare it as Black or as mixed races. A mixed race person is called "Métis" in French, and it's a term often used. In slang the young people even say "tismé", I see it used often.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by eschaton

At the same time, it was official government policy for much of this period to "breed the native out" in hopes that Indian schools and the like would cause them to just blend into the white population over time.

No one ever seriously proposed this for black Americans.

Do you mean Indian termination policies? I don't think it's correct to say these policies were a result of whites having a more favorable attitudes towards natives. I think it was just the opposite because that was an attempted genocide. Blacks and whites were very socially similar by the 20th century so there never really needed to be a termination policy. Black people also did not have sovereignty over their own lands, which was the impetus for creating the termination policies.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by New Brisavoine

Not to mention that the Black population has lived in the US far longer than it has in the UK. Also not to mention that many so-called "Black" people in France/UK who come from our former colonies in the Caribbean are in fact mixed people. If they had to declare their "ethnicity" in the French census, I don't know whether they would declare it as Black or as mixed races. A mixed race person is called "Métis" in French, and it's a term often used. In slang the young people even say "tismé", I see it used often.

Regarding "Black" people from the colonies being mixed, the same is true of Black Americans. Likely all black Americans alive today who are descendants of U.S. slaves have some degree of European ancestry.

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

Regarding "Black" people from the colonies being mixed, the same is true of Black Americans. Likely all black Americans alive today who are descendants of U.S. slaves have some degree of European ancestry.

It's nothing comparable to the Black and Creole populations of the former British and French sugar islands. Here again, there was a very big difference between the US and the British/French. In the British/French colonies, the male colonists often had Black concubines, and mixed children were very numerous (often they formed a free Creole population). In the US, the separation between Black slaves and White masters was stricter, there were less Black concubines and less mixed children. White people were much more numerous than in the British and French colonies of the Caribbeans, so they had plenty of White female "supply", and didn't need Black concubines.

And it shows in the population. In the Caribbeans, you see all shades of colors, from very white to very black, and lots of people are café au lait (i.e. in between black and white), whereas in the US the Black Americans have a much more "black" skin color.

Here at a festival in a primary school in Martinique, you can see the range of skin colors of the mothers, from very black to café au lait (I don't know whether the White woman is a native Martiniquan or a Metropolitan Frenchwoman, but there do exist native White Martiniquans, descending from White planters).



In general, talking about former French colonies, the Martniquans tend to be "whiter" than the Guadeloupeans, who are themselves "whiter" than the Haitians (the Haitians have the darkest skins, in a large measure because the White and mixed populations of Haiti were either exterminated or forced to flee during and after the Haitian Revolution; a few mixed people have remained in Haiti, and they usually make up the upper society, although many have left in the past 20 years due to the awful situation of Haiti).

This is in Guadeloupe, at the St Joseph de Cluny private Catholic school, in Pointe-à-Pitre. Some of these kids would definitely be considered "mixed races" in the US.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by New Brisavoine

It's nothing comparable to the Black and Creole populations of the former British and French sugar islands. Here again, there was a very big difference between the US and the British/French. In the British/French colonies, the male colonists often had Black concubines, and mixed children were very numerous (often they formed a free Creole population). In the US, the separation between Black slaves and White masters was stricter, there were less Black concubines and less mixed children. White people were much more numerous than in the British and French colonies of the Caribbeans, so they had plenty of White female "supply", and didn't need Black concubines.

And it shows in the population. In the Caribbeans, you see all shades of colors, from very white to very black, and lots of people are café au lait (i.e. in between black and white), whereas in the US the Black Americans have a much more "black" skin color.

Here at a festival in a primary school in Martinique, you can see the range of skin colors of the mothers, from very black to café au lait (I don't know whether the White woman is a native Martiniquan or a Metropolitan Frenchwoman, but there do exist native White Martiniquans, descending from White planters).



In general, talking about former French colonies, the Martniquans tend to be "whiter" than the Guadeloupeans, who are themselves "whiter" than the Haitians (the Haitians have the darkest skins, in a large measure because the White and mixed populations of Haiti were either exterminated or forced to flee during and after the Haitian Revolution; a few mixed people have remained in Haiti, and they usually make up the upper society, although many have left in the past 20 years due to the awful situation of Haiti).

You're probably the only person I've ever heard say that the U.S. Black population has darker skin tones than Black populations elsewhere. Everyone else says the exact opposite.

Anyway, it is very widely known that Black Americans have a high degree of European ancestry (mostly from the British isles), almost all through white slave owners procreating with enslaved black women. In fact, this is why laws in British Colonial America and the early United States were written so that children of Black women inherited the status of their mother instead of their fathers. Traditionally, children inherited the status of their father under British law. Without this distinction for Black enslaved, the children of Sally Hemings would have been heirs to Thomas Jefferson's estate and fortune upon his death. Also, since Sally Hemings was genetically the half sister of Thomas Jefferson's wife, Sally Hemings would have inherited the same status as Thomas Jefferson's wife instead of being her slave.

[Yuri]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

You're probably the only person I've ever heard say that the U.S. Black population has darker skin tones than Black populations elsewhere. Everyone else says the exact opposite.

US Blacks definitely have a much darker skin tone than Black Brazilians. And I mean self-declared Black (10% of population), not Mixed.

I'd say the majority of US Blacks could easily "pass" as full blooded African. Brazilian Blacks would be a minority and in small pockets in Rio or Salvador.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Yuri

US Blacks definitely have a much darker skin tone than Black Brazilians. And I mean self-declared Black (10% of population), not Mixed.

I'd say the majority of US Blacks could easily "pass" as full blooded African. Brazilian Blacks would be a minority and in small pockets in Rio or Salvador.

I'm never sure of who identifies as "black" when I'm in Brazil so that's hard for me to compare. There are a lot of mixed and even "white" Brazilians that would be considered black in the U.S. The U.S. definition of black seems much, much more broad than Brazil's definition, so I would imagine that the U.S. has more broader skin tones, tbh. I also think a lot of non-Americans tend to assume that lighter skinned black Americans are mixed or of some other race, which might skew the perception.

[jmecklenborg]

Originally Posted by New Brisavoine

What struck me a lot when I lived in the US is how Blacks and Whites don't mingle.

This is not correct. It happens in some areas where there is a wide economic spread but not in low or middle-class areas. There is a ton of "mingling" and dating and intermarrying in rural areas, where there are few wealthy people, and among the working class in any city. Tourists to the United States do not visit normal towns and cities - they visit the exceptional ones. They also never get a job at any sort of common place (i.e. any e-commerce warehouse like Amazon) where the full diversity of the native and immigrant U.S. population converges every single day for 8+ hours.

[Yuri]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

I'm never sure of who identifies as "black" when I'm in Brazil so that's hard for me to compare. There are a lot of mixed and even "white" Brazilians that would be considered black in the U.S. The U.S. definition of black seems much, much more broad than Brazil's definition, so I would imagine that the U.S. has more broader skin tones, tbh. I also think a lot of non-Americans tend to assume that lighter skinned black Americans are mixed or of some other race, which might skew the perception.

Several genetic studies had shown self-declared Brazilian Mixed are between 60%-70% European on average. The rest might be more Indigenous or African or both depending on the region. Self-declared Blacks have between 30%-50% European background on average.

Think of your Athletics team or NBA teams. You can't easily assemble a group of Black Brazilians looking so "African" even though 10% of Brazilians call themselves Black. US Blacks, Black Jamaicans are very different from your average Black Brazilian.

Here in São Paulo: if you see a very African looking person on the streets, they're African or Haitian. There are very Black Brazilians but only a fraction of what you see in the US. Mortality rate of Brazilians slaves were extremely high and birth rates were extremely low. That, coupled with miscegenation not being a big taboo, resulted in a high non-African admixture on self-declared Brazilian Blacks.

And no, we don't think light skinned US Blacks are Mixed or White as we're educated by your movies, TV series, etc.

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

You're probably the only person I've ever heard say that the U.S. Black population has darker skin tones than Black populations elsewhere. Everyone else says the exact opposite.

I've asked ChatGPT whether the Black Americans had darker skins than the Black and Creole populations of Martinique and Guadeloupe, and the answer is "there is no clear, consistent difference", but in the end ChatGPT adds:

A more plausible observation is that the French Antilles may have a higher visible proportion of mixed-race ("métis") individuals than many predominantly Black American communities, which can create the impression that the overall population is lighter. But if you compare specifically the Black populations of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and the United States, the ranges overlap greatly and there is no simple rule that one group is darker than the others.

The last sentence turns the issue a bit upside down. If you remove the mixed races from Martinique and Guadeloupe, then there's not much difference in skin color with the Black Americans. Like duh! It's precisely because of the mixed races that there is this impression of lighter skins.

But then, I suppose it's a subjective subject. My point is, in the Black American community, you don't have community leaders who look like this (former pro-independence president of the Martinique regional council... this guy does not belong to a White planter family, and I doubt he would define himself as White; if such a question existed in French censuses, he would define himself as "Créole", or "Métis"):



Or this guy, former chairman of the French Senate, from French Guiana:



Or this guy, former deputy mayor of Fort-de-France:



When I think of Black Americans I think of Martin Luther King, Jessie Jackson, Malcom X, and they don't look like that at all.

But then again, given that it is a subjective subject, there won't be a definite answer.

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

In fact, this is why laws in British Colonial America and the early United States were written so that children of Black women inherited the status of their mother instead of their fathers. Traditionally, children inherited the status of their father under British law. Without this distinction for Black enslaved, the children of Sally Hemings would have been heirs to Thomas Jefferson's estate and fortune upon his death. Also, since Sally Hemings was genetically the half sister of Thomas Jefferson's wife, Sally Hemings would have inherited the same status as Thomas Jefferson's wife instead of being her slave.

In the French colonies, the White fathers in general freed the children they had with Black concubines, although it wasn't an absolute rule, and it depended of the exact individual and the exact situation (the child conceived with a Black female slave that you raped once in her dormitory wouldn't have the same status as the child of the Black lady who was your long-term concubine of course; the former may have remained a slave, the latter was very often freed).

These freed colored people formed a distinct class of society, separate from the purely White planters and from the Black slaves. They could own slaves themselves (and it was very frequent in fact to see free colored people owning Black slaves, even though these free colored people were never treated as equal by the White planters and bourgeoisie, which is one of the causes of the Haitian Revolution, initially led by free colored men who wanted full equality with the White planters and merchants).

There are also quite a few cases of White colonists who brought their mixed children back to Europe with them. Once arriving in France, they were immediately legally free (that was French law since the Middle Ages: Metropolitan French territory made anyone a free man).

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by New Brisavoine

I've asked ChatGPT whether the Black Americans had darker skins than the Black and Creole populations of Martinique and Guadeloupe, and the answer is "there is no clear, consistent difference", but in the end ChatGPT adds:



The last sentence turns the issue a bit upside down. If you remove the mixed races from Martinique and Guadeloupe, then there's not much difference in skin color with the Black Americans. Like duh! It's precisely because of the mixed races that there is this impression of lighter skins.

But then, I suppose it's a subjective subject. My point is, in the Black American community, you don't have community leaders who look like this (former pro-independence president of the Martinique regional council... this guy does not belong to a White planter family, and I doubt he would define himself as White; if such a question existed in French censuses, he would define himself as "Créole", or "Métis"):

...


Or this guy, former chairman of the French Senate, from French Guiana:



Or this guy, former deputy mayor of Fort-de-France:

I also think it's subjective but these two could definitely blend in as Black Americans.

Originally Posted by New Brisavoine

When I think of Black Americans I think of Martin Luther King, Jessie Jackson, Malcom X, and they don't look like that at all.

But then again, given that it is a subjective subject, there won't be a definite answer.

Malcolm X? He was clearly mixed with European ancestry. He even had light colored eyes and red hair. I think many people confuse the image of Denzel Washington with him because of the movie, but Denzel Washington is several shades darker than Malcolm X.

The reason it's surprising to hear people say that African Americans are darker skinned is because black immigrants in the U.S. tend to say the opposite. Black immigrant groups in the U.S. tend to emphasize that African Americans have lighter skin tones because of European ancestry. This is especially true in NYC where African Americans are less than half of the city's black population.

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by jmecklenborg

Tourists to the United States do not visit normal towns and cities - they visit the exceptional ones. They also never get a job at any sort of common place (i.e. any e-commerce warehouse like Amazon) where the full diversity of the native and immigrant U.S. population converges every single day for 8+ hours.

Well, all I can say is when I lived in the Silicon Valley people told me do not, repeat DO NOT rent an apartment in East Palo Alto. I let you check on Wikipedia the ethnic distribution of East Palo Alto.

Once upon a time, I had a friend in Atlanta (female Asian girl), and she made it very clear to me that she would never EVER date a Black guy. The impression I got was that race barriers in Atlanta were even worse than in California. I have some friends in Seattle who tell me the rare times they've been to Atlanta they've felt like in a foreign country.

In LA I had a (female) friend who dated a Black guy, the only mixed couple I can remember, but that's because she was Latina (Mexican parents), and he was a Cuban Black guy.

Thinking of it, Black Americans are pretty invisible in the SF Bay Area (apart from bus drivers, or rubber-stamping employees at the local DMV). The only Black guys I befriended there were either from the Caribbean (US Virgin Islands), or at Safeway there was a nice Black Haitian guy at the fish stall, I tried to speak French with him.

You drive in SF, no Black people around, and suddenly bam!, it's all Black people in the street and you're thinking "oh my, I've entered a Black neighborhood", and then 5 or 6 blocks later, no more Black people. Same in LA. Once we drove from Century City to Redondo Beach, only along streets and avenues, and at one point south of LAX we entered a neighborhood it was like 99% Black people on the sidewalks (can't remember the name of the neighborhood), and then a few minutes later, no more Black people around. It's absurd how ghettoized American cities are.

[jmecklenborg]

Originally Posted by New Brisavoine

Well, all I can say is when I lived in the Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley and San Francisco are.....not normal American places. Many if not all of the cities in the Midwest and Eastern United States have far higher black populations than the West Coast cities. My home city was 45% black when I was a kid but it's now about 38%. Per Google, the neighborhood I was raised in is currently 35% black (I'm not sure what it was when I was young). Most of Northern California is like 2% black and per Google East Palo Alto is 9%.

I have some friends in Seattle who tell me the rare times they've been to Atlanta they've felt like in a foreign country.

Yeah the city of Atlanta is 45% black versus 6% in Seattle. If you watch the 1996 Olympics Opening Ceremony in Atlanta on youtube, you would get the impression that half of the U.S. population is black because the event featured a lot of black entertainers, marching bands from black colleges, etc.

However, the percentage of the U.S. that is black keeps ticking downward because there has been so much immigration from Mexico and elsewhere. Mexicans/Latinos now outnumber black Americans 2X nationally, but there are some areas of the U.S. and some major cities where there aren't very many Mexicans and Latinos. There is not some big conspiracy afoot - these things are happening by themselves.

[eschaton]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

Regarding "Black" people from the colonies being mixed, the same is true of Black Americans. Likely all black Americans alive today who are descendants of U.S. slaves have some degree of European ancestry.

Yes, virtually all black Americans (without recent African ancestry) are mixed. There are a handful of black people with ancestry from the Sea Islands (Gullah Geechee) who come out as 100% African on genetic tests, but the situation was very different on the Sea Islands than elsewhere, as the climate was so malarial that white overseers weren't even used, and they were the only black American group that spoke a creole language rather than English.

The average European ancestry for Black Americans is a bit under 20%, though it varies depending upon the sample group, with some showing as much as 25%. There's also regional differences (blacks in the North, and Louisiana, have a lot more European ancestry).

Originally Posted by New Brisavoine

It's nothing comparable to the Black and Creole populations of the former British and French sugar islands. Here again, there was a very big difference between the US and the British/French. In the British/French colonies, the male colonists often had Black concubines, and mixed children were very numerous (often they formed a free Creole population). In the US, the separation between Black slaves and White masters was stricter, there were less Black concubines and less mixed children. White people were much more numerous than in the British and French colonies of the Caribbeans, so they had plenty of White female "supply", and didn't need Black concubines.

And it shows in the population. In the Caribbeans, you see all shades of colors, from very white to very black, and lots of people are café au lait (i.e. in between black and white), whereas in the US the Black Americans have a much more "black" skin color.

I think you're too biased here regarding the Francophone population of the Caribbean, because Martinique/Guadalupe doesn't translate elsewhere.

I know in Jamaica, for example, the average black person is about 10% European descent - less than in the U.S. Most other English-speaking islands are broadly similar, other than how in Guyana and T&T many are mixed now with South Asian. There are places where mixed populations are more common, like the Cayman Islands, but they are the exceptions, not the rule, on English-colonized sugar islands.

Haiti is roughly similar (close to 90% African). There's of course variance (and a historically economically dominant mixed-race elite), but overall Haitians are less mixed than African Americans.

It does seem like from the limited genetic studies I've seen of Martinique/Guadeloupe the average black person is a bit less African for some reason (about 70% African/25% European, with minor admixture elsewhere - likely Tamil), but these islands are somewhat outliers compared to the region as a whole (though not as much as St. Barts).

Originally Posted by New Brisavoine

These freed colored people formed a distinct class of society, separate from the purely White planters and from the Black slaves. They could own slaves themselves (and it was very frequent in fact to see free colored people owning Black slaves, even though these free colored people were never treated as equal by the White planters and bourgeoisie, which is one of the causes of the Haitian Revolution, initially led by free colored men who wanted full equality with the White planters and merchants).

The only part of the U.S. that developed this intermediate mixed "free people of color" population was New Orleans, due to the French roots. The Creole population even included slaveholders in the antebellum era. Jim Crow slowly ground down the creole identity into the black one as Anglophones became more dominant in Louisiana, but there's still something of a sense of a separate identity from blackness - which is why often light-skinned creoles in the past attempted to transition to whiteness if they left the area.

Elsewhere, though? The British had no real use for an intermediate caste between the planters and slave to be made of free people of color, because there were plenty of poor whites to go around.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by jmecklenborg

Silicon Valley and San Francisco are.....not normal American places. Many if not all of the cities in the Midwest and Eastern United States have far higher black populations than the West Coast cities. My home city was 45% black when I was a kid but it's now about 38%. Per Google, the neighborhood I was raised in is currently 35% black (I'm not sure what it was when I was young). Most of Northern California is like 2% black and per Google East Palo Alto is 9%.

The black population in Silicon Valley itself also probably skews more towards highly educated African immigrant than it does first African American. But the black populations in SF and Oakland do skew very African American.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by New Brisavoine

Well, all I can say is when I lived in the Silicon Valley people told me do not, repeat DO NOT rent an apartment in East Palo Alto. I let you check on Wikipedia the ethnic distribution of East Palo Alto.

East Palo Alto is very diverse, pretty safe and actually quite expensive. And there are barely any black people in East Palo Alto, or anywhere in SV. It's "bad" compared to Palo Alto or Atherton, but "bad" in SV means homes cost less than $3 million.

And the entire premise (French nonwhites are broadly integrated with larger population and U.S. nonwhites aren't) is bizarre and not supported by anything. Most of France is entirely white French people. It's just a few districts in a few cities which are majority Arab or African. The U.S. is 40% nonwhite and almost all metropolitan areas have large shares of nonwhites living with whites. SV is quite diverse, with large, nearly equal shares of Asians, Whites and Hispanics.

[eschaton]

I general, the western U.S. did not have a black population with very deep roots, even compared to the Northeast and Midwest. it mostly missed out on the First Great Migration (the one that happened immediately post WW1 when international immigration screamed to a halt). I believe that by 1940 the only black neighborhoods in the entire West Coast were in portions of Los Angeles (South Central/South Park) that are overwhelmingly Latino now. The Great Migration to the west coast (such as it was) was mostly triggered by the WW2 era demand for defense employment.

The West Coast has been shedding black people for 1-2 generations now, however, from Seattle down to San Diego. Much of this just comes down to housing costs - it's much cheaper to move to the Inland Empire, Stockton, or Vegas if you're working class. Los Angeles still has a solid band of black neighborhoods running from Baldwin Hills down to parts of Carson, but these are now mostly middle class - higher income than the migrant Latino neighborhoods surrounding them. They're the middle-class black folks who could afford to not be priced out. Pretty much everywhere else, black people live integrated into multiracial communities, and you simply don't see the sort of hyper-segregation you might see in Chicago or Philadelphia.

[Crawford]

Right, blacks on the West Coast are much more integrated than blacks east of the Rockies (esp. legacy metros), but I don't think that translates to greater cultural cohesion. It's just that there aren't a lot of black people (again, excepting that middle class corridor in South LA).

Not sure if there's any even plurality black low-income neighborhoods in the Western U.S. Watts is maybe 10% black these days. Maybe Compton, somewhat? At least for a few more years, until Compton becomes 90% Hispanic like the former black neighborhoods to the north. Oakland has some plurality black areas, but I think more middle class.

And I don't think Seattle, Portland or San Diego have any black neighborhoods anymore. Maybe a few legacy enclaves with some older households.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by jmecklenborg

Silicon Valley and San Francisco are.....not normal American places. Many if not all of the cities in the Midwest and Eastern United States have far higher black populations than the West Coast cities.

learning about black/white racial dynamics in US urban centers by going to SV is a little like going to the moon to learn about mars.