Choice in dolls says a lot about race issues
I’m way behind on reading blogs and past posts, but I’m desperately trying to catch up. Today I caught a post on Because Mom Said So from Jan. 23 about a high school student’s documentary and the debate it’s sparking up. Titled, Student’s documentary on Race has people stunned, the post links to a news bit on the documentary.
View it at http://www.komotv.com/home/video/5001856.html?video=YHI&t=a
After watching the video, I am not surprised at all, but at the same time am sad that children so young already have these ideas about what is “nice” or “good”. So far, baby girl has dolls of all colors and her father and I have purposely done this, just for this reason. We want her to get used to seeing dolls that are more in her liking and embrace that image.
Make sure to watch the video and let me know your thoughts.
technorati: because mom said so, high school documentary, race, parenting
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Posted in Motherhood, Parenting, Race, The Monkey on February 5th, 2007 by ModernMami | | 3 Comments
It’s True!
I was bored and decided to browse Blogthings. I took the Who’s Your Inner European quiz and guess what????!!! I am indeed of Spanish heritage! Now if you don’t know, I am Puerto Rican, which of course means I have Spanish blood, but if you don’t believe me, see for yourself! lol 
| Your Inner European is Spanish! |
 Energetic and lively. You bring the party with you! |
technorati: Spanish, european, blogthings, heritage, Puerto Rican
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Posted in Puerto Rico, Race on November 14th, 2006 by ModernMami | | 1 Comments
Really? I never noticed…
I came across an article on MSNBC.com today titled “U.S. report: Racial disparities continue“. My first thought was - no kidding. The report details how there is a gap amongst whites, blacks, and hispanics concerning education, income, and home ownership.
Here’s a little excerpt:
Decades after the civil rights movement, racial disparities in income, education and home ownership persist and, by some measurements, are growing.
White households had incomes that were two-thirds higher than blacks and 40 percent higher than Hispanics last year, according to data released Tuesday by the Census Bureau.
White adults were also more likely than black and Hispanic adults to have college degrees and to own their own homes. They were less likely to live in poverty.
Read full article at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15704759
Now I ask you - Did we really need to do the research? It’s not like we didn’t already know that. And if you didn’t already know this, then I guess this article was made for you. Go, read, learn.
technorati: race, education, income, home ownership, civil rights, racial disparities, census, poverty, msnbc
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Posted in Articles, Race on November 14th, 2006 by ModernMami | | 0 Comments
Whites, Blacks, Hispanics Disagree About Way Minority Groups Treated
July 11, 2006
Whites, Blacks, Hispanics Disagree About Way Minority Groups Treated
Whites diverge from blacks, Hispanics in their views of black-Hispanic relations
by Jeffrey M. Jones
GALLUP NEWS SERVICE
PRINCETON, NJ — Gallup’s annual Minority Rights and Relations poll finds that non-Hispanic whites are much more likely than blacks or Hispanics to express satisfaction with the way each of six different minority groups are treated in society. However, whites are not as positive when asked to rate the state of relations between specific groups, especially when it comes to black-Hispanic relations. Whites are divided as to whether black-Hispanic relations are good or bad, but majorities of both blacks and Hispanics say that relations between these groups are good. There are only minor differences in the way whites and blacks rate black-white relations, although blacks are more likely than whites to believe that black-white relations will always be problematic.
The Minority Rights and Relations poll was conducted June 8-25, interviewing more than 2,000 adults nationwide and included samples of 500 blacks and Hispanics each. The poll was weighted so that it is representative of the U.S. adult population.
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Posted in Race on July 11th, 2006 by ModernMami | | 0 Comments
So now we’re all the same…
So now someone from Trinidad is the same as being from Puerto Rico. Let me explain. A coworker of mine said that there were 3 hispanics in the office today. That I knew of, there were only 2, me included. So I asked, who’s the third? Said person pointed to one of the student assistants, who I know is from Trinidad. Hmmmmm - He’s not hispanic, he’s from Trinidad! Then this person proceeded to tell me - Well, it’s close enough, isn’t it? Suuuuuureeeee! It’s in the Caribbean and it’s an island - so let’s just say from now on that all people from the Caribbean are hispanic. Why not??!!
Some people are so ignorant.
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Posted in Puerto Rico, Race on July 7th, 2006 by ModernMami | | 0 Comments
I hate it when…
I’m sure this has happened to other people before. I hate it when people ask me why I put a Puerto Rican flag up in my car. I tell them I’m proud of where I come from. They then ask, “So what, I should put a US flag up?” If you feel like it, then do so! It’s that simple.
That’s the problem. People are only patriotic when there is a “crisis”. After the world trade center attack, everyone had a US flag up in their car, outside their houses, and everywhere else they could think of, where are they now??!!
Don’t catch an attitude with me for putting up my flag and being proud of my roots. Do the same and represent and leave me and my flag alone!
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Posted in Puerto Rico, Race on July 6th, 2006 by ModernMami | | 0 Comments
Roots of Human Family Tree Are Shallow
Article from the LA Times -
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Roots of Human Family Tree Are Shallow
By MATT CRENSON
AP National Writer
2:17 PM PDT, July 1, 2006
Whoever it was probably lived a few thousand years ago, somewhere in East Asia — Taiwan, Malaysia and Siberia all are likely locations. He — or she — did nothing more remarkable than be born, live, have children and die.
Yet this was the ancestor of every person now living on Earth — the last person in history whose family tree branches out to touch all 6.5 billion people on the planet today.
That means everybody on Earth descends from somebody who was around as recently as the reign of Tutankhamen, maybe even during the Golden Age of ancient Greece. There’s even a chance that our last shared ancestor lived at the time of Christ.
“It’s a mathematical certainty that that person existed,” said Steve Olson, whose 2002 book “Mapping Human History” traces the history of the species since its origins in Africa more than 100,000 years ago.
It is human nature to wonder about our ancestors — who they were, where they lived, what they were like. People trace their genealogy, collect antiques and visit historical sites hoping to capture just a glimpse of those who came before, to locate themselves in the sweep of history and position themselves in the web of human existence.
But few people realize just how intricately that web connects them not just to people living on the planet today, but to everyone who ever lived.
With the help of a statistician, a computer scientist and a supercomputer, Olson has calculated just how interconnected the human family tree is. You would have to go back in time only 2,000 to 5,000 years — and probably on the low side of that range — to find somebody who could count every person alive today as a descendant.
Furthermore, Olson and his colleagues have found that if you go back a little farther — about 5,000 to 7,000 years ago — everybody living today has exactly the same set of ancestors. In other words, every person who was alive at that time is either an ancestor to all 6 billion people living today, or their line died out and they have no remaining descendants.
That revelation is “especially startling,” statistician Jotun Hein of England’s Oxford University wrote in a commentary on the research published by the journal Nature.
“Had you entered any village on Earth in around 3,000 B.C., the first person you would have met would probably be your ancestor,” Hein marveled.
It also means that all of us have ancestors of every color and creed. Every Palestinian suicide bomber has Jews in his past. Every Sunni Muslim in Iraq is descended from at least one Shiite. And every Klansman’s family has African roots.
How can this be?
It’s simple math. Every person has two parents, four grandparents and eight great-grandparents. Keep doubling back through the generations — 16, 32, 64, 128 — and within a few hundred years you have thousands of ancestors.
It’s nothing more than exponential growth combined with the facts of life. By the 15th century you’ve got a million ancestors. By the 13th you’ve got a billion. Sometime around the 9th century — just 40 generations ago — the number tops a trillion.
But wait. How could anybody — much less everybody — alive today have had a trillion ancestors living during the 9th century?
The answer is, they didn’t. Imagine there was a man living 1,200 years ago whose daughter was your mother’s 36th great-grandmother, and whose son was your father’s 36th great-grandfather. That would put him on two branches on your family tree, one on your mother’s side and one on your father’s.
In fact, most of the people who lived 1,200 years ago appear not twice, but thousands of times on our family trees, because there were only 200 million people on Earth back then. Simple division — a trillion divided by 200 million — shows that on average each person back then would appear 5,000 times on the family tree of every single individual living today.
But things are never average. Many of the people who were alive in the year 800 never had children; they don’t appear on anybody’s family tree. Meanwhile, more prolific members of society would show up many more than 5,000 times on a lot of people’s trees.
Keep going back in time, and there are fewer and fewer people available to put on more and more branches of the 6.5 billion family trees of people living today. It is mathematically inevitable that at some point, there will be a person who appears at least once on everybody’s tree.
But don’t stop there; keep going back. As the number of potential ancestors dwindles and the number of branches explodes there comes a time when every single person on Earth is an ancestor to all of us, except the ones who never had children or whose lines eventually died out.
And it wasn’t all that long ago. When you walk through an exhibit of Ancient Egyptian art from the time of the pyramids, everything there was very likely created by one of your ancestors — every statue, every hieroglyph, every gold necklace. If there is a mummy lying in the center of the room, that person was almost certainly your ancestor, too.
It means when Muslims, Jews or Christians claim to be children of Abraham, they are all bound to be right.
“No matter the languages we speak or the color of our skin, we share ancestors who planted rice on the banks of the Yangtze, who first domesticated horses on the steppes of the Ukraine, who hunted giant sloths in the forests of North and South America, and who labored to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu,” Olson and his colleagues wrote in the journal Nature.
How can they be so sure?
Seven years ago one of Olson’s colleagues, a Yale University statistician named Joseph Chang, started thinking about how to estimate when the last common ancestor of everybody on Earth today lived. In a paper published by the journal “Advances in Applied Probability,” Chang showed that there is a mathematical relationship between the size of a population and the number of generations back to a common ancestor. Plugging the planet’s current population into his equation, he came up with just over 32 generations, or about 900 years.
Chang knew that answer was wrong because it relied on some common, but inaccurate, assumptions that population geneticists often use to simplify difficult mathematical problems.
For example, his analysis pretended that Earth’s population has always been what it is today. It also assumed that individuals choose their mates randomly. And each generation had to reproduce all at once.
Chang’s calculations essentially treated the world like one big meet market where any given guy was equally likely to pair up with any woman, whether she lived in the next village or halfway around the world. Chang was fully aware of the inaccuracy — people have to select their partners from the pool of individuals they have actually met, unless they are entering into an arranged marriage. But even then, they are much more likely to mate with partners who live nearby. And that means that geography can’t be ignored if you are going to determine the relatedness of the world’s population.
A few years later Chang was contacted by Olson, who had started thinking about the world’s interrelatedness while writing his book. They started corresponding by e-mail, and soon included in their deliberations Douglas Rohde, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology neuroscientist and computer expert who now works for Google.
The researchers knew they would have to account for geography to get a better picture of how the family tree converges as it reaches deeper into the past. They decided to build a massive computer simulation that would essentially re-enact the history of humanity as people were born, moved from one place to another, reproduced and died.
Rohde created a program that put an initial population on a map of the world at some date in the past, ranging from 7,000 to 20,000 years ago. Then the program allowed those initial inhabitants to go about their business. He allowed them to expand in number according to accepted estimates of past population growth, but had to cap the expansion at 55 million people due to computing limitations. Although unrealistic in some respects — 55 million is a lot less than the 6.5 billion people who actually live on Earth today — he found through trial and error that the limitation did not significantly change the outcome with regard to common ancestry.
The model also had to allow for migration based on what historians, anthropologists and archaeologists know about how frequently past populations moved both within and between continents. Rohde, Chang and Olson chose a range of migration rates, from a low level where almost nobody left their native home to a much higher one where up to 20 percent of the population reproduced in a town other than the one where they were born, and one person in 400 moved to a foreign country.
Allowing very little migration, Rohde’s simulation produced a date of about 5,000 B.C. for humanity’s most recent common ancestor. Assuming a higher, but still realistic, migration rate produced a shockingly recent date of around 1 A.D.
Some people even suspect that the most recent common ancestor could have lived later than that.
“A number of people have written to me making the argument that the simulations were too conservative,” Rohde said.
Migration is the key. When a people have offspring far from their birthplaces, they essentially introduce their entire family lines into their adopted populations, giving their immediate offspring and all who come after them a set of ancestors from far away.
People tend to think of preindustrial societies as places where this sort of thing rarely happened, where virtually everyone lived and died within a few miles of the place where they were born. But history is full of examples that belie that notion.
Take Alexander the Great, who conquered every country between Greece and northern India, siring two sons along the way by Persian mothers. Consider Prince Abd Al-Rahman, son of a Syrian father and a Berber mother, who escaped Damascus after the overthrow of his family’s dynasty and started a new one in Spain. The Vikings, the Mongols, and the Huns all traveled thousands of miles to burn, pillage and — most pertinent to genealogical considerations — rape more settled populations.
More peaceful people moved around as well. During the Middle Ages, the Gypsies traveled in stages from northern India to Europe. In the New World, the Navaho moved from western Canada to their current home in the American Southwest. People from East Asia fanned out into the South Pacific Islands, and Eskimos frequently traveled back and forth across the Bering Sea from Siberia to Alaska.
“These genealogical networks, as they start spreading out they really have the ability to get virtually everywhere,” Olson said.
Though people like to think of culture, language and religion as barriers between groups, history is full of religious conversions, intermarriages, illegitimate births and adoptions across those lines. Some historical times and places were especially active melting pots — medieval Spain, ancient Rome and the Egypt of the pharaohs, for example.
“And the thing is, you only need one,” said Mark Humphrys, an amateur anthropologist and professor of computer science at Dublin City University.
One ancestral link to another cultural group among your millions of forbears, and you share ancestors with everyone in that group. So everyone who reproduced with somebody who was born far from their own natal home — every sailor blown off course, every young man who set off to seek his fortune, every woman who left home with a trader from a foreign land — as long as they had children, they helped weave the tight web of brotherhood we all share.
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Posted in Genealogy, Race on July 5th, 2006 by ModernMami | | 0 Comments
Why Race Isn’t as ‘Black’ and ‘White’ as We Think
An interesting article from the NY Times - http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/31/opinion/31mon4.html?ex=1151208000&en=c4b11fd61953a0ac&ei=5070
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October 31, 2005
Editorial Observer
Why Race Isn’t as ‘Black’ and ‘White’ as We Think
By BRENT STAPLES
People have occasionally asked me how a black person came by a “white” name like Brent Staples. One letter writer ridiculed it as “an anchorman’s name” and accused me of making it up. For the record, it’s a British name - and the one my parents gave me. “Staples” probably arrived in my family’s ancestral home in Virginia four centuries ago with the British settlers.
The earliest person with that name we’ve found - Richard Staples - was hacked to death by Powhatan Indians not far from Jamestown in 1622. The name moved into the 18th century with Virginians like John Staples, a white surveyor who worked in Thomas Jefferson’s home county, Albemarle, not far from the area where my family was enslaved.
The black John Staples who married my paternal great-great-grandmother just after Emancipation - and became the stepfather of her children - could easily have been a Staples family slave. The transplanted Britons who had owned both sides of my family had given us more than a preference for British names. They had also given us their DNA. In what was an almost everyday occurrence at the time, my great-great-grandmothers on both sides gave birth to children fathered by white slave masters.
I’ve known all this for a long time, and was not surprised by the results of a genetic screening performed by DNAPrint Genomics, a company that traces ancestral origins to far-flung parts of the globe. A little more than half of my genetic material came from sub-Saharan Africa - common for people who regard themselves as black - with slightly more than a quarter from Europe.
The result that knocked me off my chair showed that one-fifth of my ancestry is Asian. Poring over the charts and statistics, I said out loud, “This has got to be a mistake.”
That’s a common response among people who are tested. Ostensibly white people who always thought of themselves as 100 percent European find they have substantial African ancestry. People who regard themselves as black sometimes discover that the African ancestry is a minority portion of their DNA.
These results are forcing people to re-examine the arbitrary calculations our culture uses to decide who is “white” and who is “black.”
As with many things racial, this story begins in the slave-era South, where sex among slaves, masters and mistresses got started as soon as the first slave ship sailed into Jamestown Harbor in 1619. By the time of the American Revolution, there was a visible class of light-skinned black people who no longer looked or sounded African. Free mulattos, emancipated by guilt-ridden fathers, may have accounted for up to three-quarters of the tiny free-black population before the Revolution.
By the eve of the Civil War, the swarming numbers of mixed-race slaves on Southern plantations had become a source of constant anguish to planters’ wives, who knew quite well where those racially ambiguous children were coming from.
Faced with widespread fear that racial distinctions were losing significance, the South decided to define the problem away. People with any ascertainable black ancestry at all were defined as black under the law and stripped of basic rights. The “one drop” laws defined as black even people who were blond and blue-eyed and appeared white.
Black people snickered among themselves and worked to subvert segregation at every turn. Thanks to white ancestry spread throughout the black community, nearly every family knew of someone born black who successfully passed as white to get access to jobs, housing and public accommodations that were reserved for white people only. Black people who were not quite light enough to slip undetected into white society billed themselves as Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, South Asian, Native American - you name it. These defectors often married into ostensibly white families at a time when interracial marriage was either illegal or socially stigmatized.
Those of us who grew up in the 1950’s and 60’s read black-owned magazines and newspapers that praised the racial defectors as pioneers while mocking white society for failing to detect them. A comic newspaper column by the poet Langston Hughes - titled “Why Not Fool Our White Folks?” - typified the black community’s sense of smugness about knowing the real racial score. In keeping with this history, many black people I know find it funny when supposedly white Americans profess shock at the emergence of blackness in the family tree. But genetic testing holds plenty of surprises for black folks, too.
Which brings me back to my Asian ancestry. It comes as a surprise, given that my family’s oral histories contain not a single person who is described as Asian. More testing on other family members should clarify the issue, but for now, I can only guess. This ancestry could well have come through a 19th-century ancestor who was incorrectly described as Indian, often a catchall category at the time.
The test results underscore what anthropologists have said for eons: racial distinctions as applied in this country are social categories and not scientific concepts. In addition, those categories draw hard, sharp distinctions among groups of people who are more alike than they are different. The ultimate point is that none of us really know who we are, ancestrally speaking. All we ever really know is what our parents and grandparents have told us.
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Posted in Race on June 23rd, 2006 by ModernMami | | 0 Comments
Puerto Rico Genealogy
Happy Monday folks! Back to the weekly work routine. 
I’ve recently taken up on a genealogy hobby researching my family history and family tree. Initial surnames I’m researching are Acevedo and Rivera from Aguadilla, Puerto Rico. Both my father and mother’s family are from Aguadilla. I have been able to find a lot of information that neither one of them knew and have made some progress. Check out my page at http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~me483020 for more information and to see other surnames I’m researching.
A good website for Puerto Rico genealogy is Searching for Our Roots by Priscilla Colon Martinez, http://www.rootsweb.com/~prsanjua. This site is completely free and has a lot of information for all areas of Puerto Rico.
I’ve realized this is a lengthy project and it can go slowly. I’ve met people through discussion boards who are researching the same surnames and areas and even met a cousin of my mother, but the search is never ending! If you plan to start researching your family tree and history, be prepared to spend a lot of time and effort. Needless to say, with the new baby, I have no time for genealogy these days. Right now, if I come across something interesting, I’ll look into it, but I’m not very proactive in researching. I’ll get back to it someday, though. :sigh:
I’d love to hear from you if you are researching these names or if your family is from Aguadilla.
Research your family history with 7 Day Family Tree!
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Posted in Genealogy, Puerto Rico, Race on June 19th, 2006 by ModernMami | | 0 Comments
