Slavery and Rape

MattL

Guest
Joined
Aug 20, 2015
Location
SF Bay Area
Many topics have touched on this topic, though I wanted to start a topic specifically about this. Please share anything relevant to it or general discussion. Things relevant could be first hand accounts, legal cases, data, genetics, etc.

I'll start by sharing one of the things I find really confirms a lot of the anecdotal knowledge is genetics. It's simply amazing how strongly it matches the events of large scale sexual violations during slavery. Here is the most recent study on the subject that I know of, it looks at the results from multiple sources previously looked at.

http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.1006059

----

Abstract

We present a comprehensive assessment of genomic diversity in the African-American population by studying three genotyped cohorts comprising 3,726 African-Americans from across the United States that provide a representative description of the population across all US states and socioeconomic status. An estimated 82.1% of ancestors to African-Americans lived in Africa prior to the advent of transatlantic travel, 16.7% in Europe, and 1.2% in the Americas, with increased African ancestry in the southern United States compared to the North and West. Combining demographic models of ancestry and those of relatedness suggests that admixture occurred predominantly in the South prior to the Civil War and that ancestry-biased migration is responsible for regional differences in ancestry. We find that recent migrations also caused a strong increase in genetic relatedness among geographically distant African-Americans. Long-range relatedness among African-Americans and between African-Americans and European-Americans thus track north- and west-bound migration routes followed during the Great Migration of the twentieth century. By contrast, short-range relatedness patterns suggest comparable mobility of ∼15–16km per generation for African-Americans and European-Americans, as estimated using a novel analytical model of isolation-by-distance.

...

A model allowing for two phases of European admixture outperforms the single-pulse model for HRS and SCCS (see Materials and Methods). In HRS, it suggests a first admixture event in 1740 (8.3 generations ago; bootstrap 95% CI: [1711.6, 1744.2]) and a second pulse, of approximately equal size, in 1863 (3.8 generations ago; bootstrap 95% CI: [1852.9, 1865.9]) (S8 Fig and Materials and Methods). Mean birth year in SCCS is Ts = 1946.9, supporting a single admixture event in 1802 (6.3 generations ago; bootstrap 95% CI: [1799.2, 1803.6]), or two events in 1714 and 1854 (9.5 and 4.4 generations ago; bootstrap 95% CIs: [1704.6, 1739.7] and [1849.8, 1868.7]) (Fig 2A, S8 Fig and S4 Table for confidence intervals). The two-pulse model remains a coarse simplification of the historical admixture process, but the data strongly supports ongoing admixture, predominantly before or around the end of the Civil War. This is consistent with historical accounts of “a marked decline in both interracial sexual coercion and interracial intimacy” [21] at the end of the Civil War (see also Ref. [22] and references therein).


----

Basically the DNA is completely consistent with heavy European DNA entering African American populations up until the Civil War in which a sharp decline happens.

Also African Americans on average have 16.7% European DNA. For example a great grandparent contributes roughly 12.5% DNA (not considering the variable of what DNA passes down)... That means on average every African American has more DNA than a single fully European great grandparent. Or another way to think of it, every African American has on average 1 European descended ancestor out of every 6 ancestors.

That is all without much European DNA input since roughly 1863, about 150 years.

Even more the DNA tells about where that DNA came from

----
Along the X chromosome in the HRS, we estimate 84.82% African ancestry, 12.89% European ancestry, and 2.29% Native American ancestry (bootstrap 95% CI [2.14%, 2.45%]). The higher proportion of African ancestry along the X compared to autosomes is consistent with previous studies [12, 17] and the historical record of early admixture occurring predominantly through coerced sexual interaction between European-American males and African-American females [21]. A model with a single pulse of admixture (as considered in [12]) applied to the present data suggests 28.6% Europeans among male contributors, but only 5.2% among female contributors. By contrast, it suggests almost no contribution from Native American males, and 3% from Native American females.
----

That again is a massive result in the DNA. 28.6% European DNA among male contributes and only 5.2% among female contributors. Again this strongly supports all the anecdotal evidence of white slave masters raping their slaves.

It's very hard to find an interpretation of the DNA other than the one that matches the anecdotal history of slave masters and sexual violations.
 
Back
Top