* After her stint as black, Grace Halsell passed as an Indian and later annoyed Zionists with her commentary on Israel.
* Twenty-first-century holdouts could still cling to idealized notions of white-Anglo-Saxon-Protestantism, as in the case of the late Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington in Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity (2004).
* Genes hold DNA and RNA (whose functions are only now being understood), the recipe for proteins that activate themselves in response to the environment. Not that the genome consists only of genes. Ninety-seven percent of the genome is a mixture of various sorts of DNA summed up as junk DNA whose purpose, if it has one, remains mysterious.
* Strictly speaking, the human genome that had been sequenced was not “the” genome of every human being, for despite a similarity of 99 percent of our genes from one person to another, each individual’s genome is unique. The genome that Celera mapped was that of a particular individual, its founder, Craig Venter. Therefore “the” human genome that Celera owns is that of a particular white American man. Mapping a complete human genome now costs nearly $100,000, so few are likely to know themselves to this degree, and Venter’s gene sequence will represent the normal for some time to come.
* According to Anne Fausto-Sterling, Neil Risch and his colleagues even use Blumenbach’s term “Caucasian” for the European and Middle Eastern group.
* The methodologies used, the tracing of Alus and SNPs, do not explain whether Alus and SNPs play any active role in human behavior.
* In an odd way, the weird theories of the mid-twentieth-century Nation of Islam (NOI) held a grain of truth within a nutty overall scheme. According to the NOI, a crazed black scientist had turned black people into whites through selective breeding as a punishment for wickedness. No such scientist existed, but whiteness out of blackness actually occurred over the course of thousands of years and residence in different climates.