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AALBC.com's Thumper's Corner Discussion Board » Culture, Race & Economy - Archive 2006 » OPRAH HAS NO EUROPEAN ANCESTRY: HOW AUTHENTIC ARE YOU? « Previous Next »

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Mrs_hart
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
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Post Number: 309
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Posted on Wednesday, February 08, 2006 - 11:04 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Oprah is 89% sub-saharan and 11% American Indian. She has no European in her.

This information comes from tonight's PBS documentary by Henry Louis Gates.

How authentic are YOU?
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Nels
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Posted on Wednesday, February 08, 2006 - 11:47 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Not as authentic as Oprah!
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Cynique
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Posted on Thursday, February 09, 2006 - 12:35 am:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Wellll, look who's back. Mrs. Hart. Oprah can't be "authentic" if she has Native America blood. Not to mention that she wears make-up to lighten her skin, false eye-lashes, hair extensions and is rumored to have had a nose job. She's more like - um what is the word I'm thinkin of - hummmmm - phony! Heh-heh. Just kiddin "O". You know I worship and adore you and wanna be just like you when I grown up.
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Chrishayden
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Posted on Thursday, February 09, 2006 - 11:56 am:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

And how did they confirm this about the Big O?
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Yvettep
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Posted on Thursday, February 09, 2006 - 01:35 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

I haven't seen the special yet. (I have it taped--Hopefully I can stay awake tonight after the kids have gone night-night long enough to watch.)

A good explanation of the science behind the tests is provided by sociologist Troy Duster (bolded emphasis is mine):

We each have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, etc. As Gates points out in the fourth segment, current technology permits us to link via DNA analysis to only two specific lines. On the Y chromosome, one's father's father's DNA, going back as far as we can locate the genetic material, can be determined with a high degree of certainty. (That is how Thomas Jefferson — or one of his brothers — was definitively linked to Sally Hemmings's offspring.) On the female side, mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) can link one's mother's mother's mother going back as far as we can garner the DNA. So, while we have 64 great-great-great-great-grandparents, the technology allows us to locate only two of those 64, if we're going back six generations, as our real legacy and genetic link to the past. But what of the other 62? Those links are equal contributors to our genetic makeup, and we ignore them only because we do not have access to them....

In 2000 the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma amended its constitution so that members needed to show "one-eighth Seminole blood." The Black Seminoles could use either Y-chromosome analysis or mitochondrial DNA to link themselves through very thin chains back on two edges of the genealogical axis (mother's mother's mother, etc.; or father's father's father, etc.), but that would miss all other grandparents (14 of 16, 30 of 32, 62 of 64).

One attempt to fill in the blanks is the use of a technology called admixture mapping through ancestry-informative markers, or AIM's. Unlike Y DNA or mtDNA tests, this technology examines groups' relative sharedness of genetic markers found on the autosomes — the nonsex chromosomes inherited from both parents.

In the last segment of the series, each of the nine subjects, including Gates, is given information using molecular genetics and computer-assisted analysis of all three kinds of DNA markers. Each of the subjects accepts the ostensibly scientific news of his or her percentage ancestry, deduced by AIM's — that is, African or European or Native American — as if it were of the same certainty as a clerk's entry of a birth date on a certificate. Oprah is crestfallen when she is told that she is not Zulu.

Gates has no match to Africa at all using the conventional tests — so he deploys Mark D. Shriver, a Pennsylvania State University geneticist at the forefront of admixture mapping, to conduct a special test for him. Gates's autosomes are compared to the small set of African samples Shriver has in his database, from no more than six West African regions. When compared against those few, Gates is closest to the Mende people of Sierra Leone.

Shriver himself seems wary of these results. He surely knows the clusters of DNA are at best crude approximations completely contingent on available samples. Africa has over 700 million inhabitants, and among them it has the greatest amount of human genetic variation found on any of the seven continents. Depending on methods, some regions will be completely missed, while others will be oversampled. The scientists who do the analysis will freely admit that when pressed, but the seekers' eagerness to know spurs a willingness to accept as definitive these artifacts of sampling contingencies.

Ancestry-informative markers (with one exception) are shared across all human groups. It is therefore not their presence or absence, but their rate of incidence, or frequency, that is being analyzed. When taken together, these markers appear to yield certain patterns in people and populations tested. A specific pattern of alleles — corresponding genes on each of a set of chromosomes — that have a high frequency in the "Native Americans" sampled then become established as a "Native American" ancestry result. The problem is that millions of people around the globe will have a similar pattern — that is, they'll share similar base-pair changes at the genomic points under scrutiny. This means that someone from Hungary whose ancestors go back to the 15th century could map as partly "Native American," although no direct ancestry is responsible for the shared genetic material. AIM's, however, arbitrarily reduce all such possibilities of shared genotypes to "inherited direct ancestry." In so doing, the process relies excessively on the idea of 100-percent purity, a condition that could never have existed in human populations.

To make claims about how a test subject's patterns of genetic variation map to continents of origin and to populations where particular genetic variants arose, the researchers need reference populations. The public needs to understand that these reference populations comprise relatively small groups of contemporary people. Moreover, researchers must make many untested assumptions in using these contemporary groups to stand in for populations from centuries ago representing a continent or an ethnic or tribal group. To construct tractable mathematical models and computer programs, researchers make many assumptions about ancient migrations, reproductive practices, and the demographic effects of historical events such as plagues and famines. Furthermore, in many cases, genetic variants cannot distinguish among tribes or national groups because the groups are too similar, so geneticists are on thin ice telling people that they do or don't have ancestors from a particular people.

...There is a yet more ominous and troubling element of the reliance upon DNA analysis to determine who we are in terms of lineage, identity, and identification. The very technology that tells us what proportion of our ancestry can be linked, proportionately, to sub-Saharan Africa (ancestry-informative markers) is the same being offered to police stations around the country to "predict" or "estimate" whether the DNA left at a crime scene belongs to a white or black person. This "ethnic estimation" using DNA relies on a social definition of the phenotype. That is, in order to say that someone is 85 percent African, we must know who is 100 percent African. Any molecular, population, or behavioral geneticist is obliged to disclose that this "purity" is a statistical artifact that begins not with the DNA, but with a researcher's adopting the folk categories of race and ethnicity.

...The fourth part of "African American Lives" would have benefited from a lot more scientific humility about just how much we can know about our "percentage ancestry." Oprah may have some Zulu (among the "other 62") in her lineage that current technology can neither tap nor exclude. And since nothing in the current state of scientific knowledge can rule that out, we should be so informed by an otherwise enlightening series. The Bantu migration entailed massive movements of people across the African continent. So it is possible that as a "West African," Oprah could indeed have a Bantu link somewhere in the ancestral pedigree. That this possible link might not be called Zulu is more a function of social definition and historical effect.


Chronicle Review (subscription required): http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i22/22b01301.htm
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Doberman23
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Post Number: 100
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Posted on Thursday, February 09, 2006 - 03:54 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

i don't care what ya'll say about this and that being fake on oprah... she is rather attractive to me. even though she's out of my age league, i'd still tap that. i saw her in that little tight dress at ms.kings funeral ... awww man her cheeks looked like a valentine's heart flipped upside down... jumping jesus, she just don't know .. i'd give her the best 2 minutes and 16 seconds of her life. by the way, indians (dots not feathers) are the worlds biggets consumers of bleaching cream and bleaching cream ingredients.
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Chrishayden
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Posted on Thursday, February 09, 2006 - 04:09 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Doberman23--

Make sure ou got some protection and that Gale ain't nowhere around.
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Cynique
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Posted on Thursday, February 09, 2006 - 04:33 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Doberman, Oprah looks better now than she's ever looked in her life. Like all women, she is entitled to use everything at her disposal to indulge her vanity and make herself look better. I think any man would find her attractive and consider dating her. I have admitted that I am jealous of Oprah because I, too, want to be a billionaire without a care in the world.
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Doberman23
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Posted on Thursday, February 09, 2006 - 05:03 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

who's gale? i don't play that gay stuff, i thought she went out with some dude name simon.

cynique, when your as rich as oprah you have more to care about than you'd like to. when she does stuff for people then other people complain because it wasn't them. people kissing her ass all the time, prolly don't know who's her friend and who's just there for the cashola. probably can't go anywhere without a damn crew, who wants to deal with that? i personally feel sorry for people when they hit that stratosphere, she will never know what it's like to be normal even after she's dead.
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Cynique
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Posted on Thursday, February 09, 2006 - 06:30 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Trust me, Doberman, Oprah is thoroughly enjoying her celebrity and her wealth. If I, personally, was a billionaire, I wouldn't be in the public eye and have to put up with all that that involves. And as Barbra Streisand once said: "I've been rich and I've been poor, and rich is better." And do you seriously not know that "Gale" is Oprah's veeeery best friend, or that Orpah's boyfriend's name is "Steadman"???
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Mrs_hart
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Posted on Thursday, February 09, 2006 - 10:16 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/aalives/index.html

Lineage Testing These tests trace your lineage either along the male line, (using the Y chromosome) or the female line (via mitochondrial DNA). During the making of AFRICAN AMERICAN LIVES, Dr. Rick Kittles of Ohio State University, Dr. Peter Forster of the University of Cambridge, and Dr. Fatimah Jackson of the University of Maryland conducted these tests.

Admixture Testing This type of testing analyzes a selection of specific regions of your DNA, compares them against a database and estimates what proportions of your genetic ancestry may originate from different population groups. For this part of the project, AFRICAN AMERICAN LIVES worked with Dr. Mark Shriver of Penn State University.

Oprah has no "lite-brites" or Whites in her family tree whatsoever.

I wonder how many people (characters)on this board can say that?

I say that this is a good day for science and a very bad day for haters of all stripes.


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Enchanted
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Posted on Thursday, February 09, 2006 - 11:00 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Oprah's biological sister, her mother's "favorite child" is very, very fairskinned. They were on LIFETIME together. We all have every color in our families. We're all black.


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Yvettep
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Posted on Friday, February 10, 2006 - 08:48 am:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Oprah has no "lite-brites" or Whites in her family tree whatsoever

No, that's not what the science tells us. These are probablistic estimates.
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Doberman23
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Posted on Friday, February 10, 2006 - 11:06 am:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Cynique
i know who those people are now (thanks to google), i don't watch day time tv. i also don't read essence and stuff like that, i used to get those jets but the beauties of the months started looking to average for me (not that i would've put them up in my room like i did as a kid)besides they send too many of those little boogers and my place is cluttered enough as is.

i do know that if you want to be rich, there's nothing stopping you from getting there. :-)
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Yvettep
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Posted on Friday, February 10, 2006 - 11:11 am:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

I think Cynique *is* Oprah. Wouldn't that be a hoot?!
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Doberman23
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Posted on Friday, February 10, 2006 - 12:10 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

if she is she needs holla, i'd leave my girl for oprah ...lol...i'd be like that dave chapelle skit.
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Cynique
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Posted on Friday, February 10, 2006 - 12:10 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

LMAO. Or, - I could be Oprah's evil twin, channeling Oprah's represssed cynicism because she needs a diversion from being the Nurturing Earth Mother of the World.

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