Friday, October 20, 2023

My friend is half Filipino. Why doesn't she look like a Filipino at all

You haven’t provided enough information about your friend so the answer I give can be very non-specific and inapplicable to your friend’s situation. What do you mean by “half-Filipino”? What is the appearance and ethnic heritage of his or her Filipino parent? Is the Filipino parent a pure Austronesian or Pacific Islander type; a Negrito, Melanesian, African or Caribbean Negro type; a Latino, Mexican, or native American Indian type; a Spanish or North American Caucasian type; a Han Chinese, Korean, or Japanese East Asian type? Some pure Filipinos have those family and cultural lineages so you need to be more specific. There are also a few naturalized Filipinos who were originally of Iranian, Arabic, Vietnamese, and American nationality, etc., who took up Filipino citizenship later on. Also some Filipinos have emigrated permanently and took on US, Canadian, Australian, or New Zealand citizenship so you might mix them up with American citizens whose parents were Latinos, Mexicans, Maoris, Polynesians, Hawaiians, and other similar ethnicities.

What about the non-Filipino parent? Is he also any of those aforementioned racial or ethnic types? You could have a pure-looking Nordic blond type like Olivia McDaniel, the current half-Filipina goalkeeper of the Philippine Women’s National Team. Or you could have a pure-looking Black American type like Sarina Bolden (striker of the said team) and defenders Jessica Cowart and Dominick Randle. In fact, if you look at this football team composed of pure-blood and half-blood Filipinos, you will see a whole range of racial and ethnic types. Also there are a number of modern-day Filipinos whose parents are considered pure-blood Filipinos but could have had ancestors who were Chinese or European immigrants, and their children could have different outward appearances.

As another example: my female cousin married a man from Jamaica who was from pure African stock; their daughter looks Black African and you would not think she is a half-Filipino but consider her as a pure black person. The Spanish use the term mestizo to indicate somebody who has either mixed parentage or racial ambiguity, and they even have terms like mulatto, which mean a person with mixed white (European) and black (Negro) ancestry, a term which is currently considered outdated and somewhat offensive. However, just because one parent has a different race, doesn’t mean that all their children will appear to be mixtures, because some can look almost “full-blooded” versions of one parent or the other. In a set of Filipino siblings, cousins, or niblings (a group of nephews and nieces; children of a sibling or siblings), each one may look different from the others, e.g., chinky-eye or round-eyed, light-colored or dark-colored irises, pointed or flat noses, straight haired or wavy haired or curly haired, hairy or non-hairy, blond or brunette, heavy-set or slender, light-skinned or brown-skinned or dark-skinned, etc. Filipinos are primarily Austronesian but may have ancestors who were Chinese, Malay, Mexican, and European, or any type of colored American so the offspring could appear like any of those ancestries or a mix of them.

The genes that form an offspring are randomly segregated among gametes and the gametes that pair-up to form a zygote will thus come from random selections and come up with an unexpected genotype and phenotype. Outward appearance (called a phenotype in biology) is not purely random but follows the laws of dominance and recessiveness, so it can range from one racial extreme to the other based on the genes inherited from both parents (called a genotype in biology). Scientists have been able to trace and track the genetic ancestry of various organisms through time by sampling the genetic code of various individuals in different parts of the globe. I suggest you read up on those or watch the videos produced by different subject matter experts on that topic.

No comments: