Southern whites have more black DNA than whites in the rest of US: study

Some of the states with the most racially charged attitudes towards African-Americans are also the states where the most whites have black ancestors, according to a recently released study.

Researchers examined 145,000 DNA samples provided to genetic testing company 23andme for ancestry analysis to determine that at least six million Americans who called themselves white had 1 percent or more African ancestry.

The study published this month in the American Journal of Human Genetics found that whites in the South were far more likely to have at least 1 percent black ancestry than any other part of the country.

"European Americans with African ancestry comprise as much as 12% of European Americans from Louisiana and South Carolina and about 1 in 10 individuals in other parts of the South," the authors wrote.

The study also noted that individuals with less than 28 percent African ancestry tended to identify as white, while individuals with more than 50 percent African ancestry almost always identified as African-American.

And black Americans living in the South also had more African ancestry than any other region of the country. African-Americans in West Virginia and Oregon had the lowest percentage of African ancestry.

Vox's Jenée Desmond-Harris explained why black individuals were more 15 times more likely to have a European male ancestor.

"That, of course, reflects what historians know about white slave owners raping enslaved women who descended from Africa," Desmond-Harris wrote.

(h/t: Washington Post)