The light skin color genes from the white parent and the light and dark skin color genes from the mulatto parent can combine in any combination. When a white and a mulatto of any degree mate, the situation is different. In this case the child would be a mulatto and would have to be lighter than its father. I myself have seen a Negro as black as a coal brought into England, who taking a fair English woman to wife, begat a son in all respects as black as the father was. In 1578, in an overstatement typical of the exaggerated literary style of the time, commentator George Best described a genetic impossibility when he wrote that a white and a black had a black child: (Pigment-producing skin color genes may vary in potency which explains the reason several offspring of a white and a black may differ slightly in shade from one another.) This child is a true “mulatto” in the strict definition of the word, although it is important to note that the term is commonly taken to mean a person with any degree of white and black admixture. When a white and a black mate, their child will be an intermediate combination of the all light skin color genes of one parent and the all dark skin color genes of the other parent. In order to understand the process involved here, three different unions will be discussed – white and black, white and mulatto, mulatto and mulatto. Inasmuch as it is a genetic impossibility for these two people to have such a child, this survey finding shows that skin color inheritance is an often misunderstood phenomenon. Of the white women in the national probability sample, 63% agreed with the belief that a white woman and a light-complexioned Afro-American man could have a child with a darker complexion than the man (Belief Statement 6). How Do We Inherit Our Skin Color? Chapter Seven of “A Completely New Look At Interracial Sexuality”
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