It's worth noting that 7% of the US population commits 53% of the murders. Can you guess which demographic group that is? I'll give you a hint, it's not descended from Europeans. So even if you eliminated all the crime committed by European-descended Americans, America would still have a higher crime rate than European countries.
Europeans who criticize America often imagine it to be a country of European colonists. That's increasingly not true. European multiculturalists also expect that a person's cultural background will have zero influence on them. That is also not true.
There is no demographic group in the US as large as 7% that is not "descended from Europeans". If that is incorrect, then I need more hints, or perhaps you could be courageous enough to name it. We almost all have significant European ancestry, and every human is descended from Africans.
If you're being pedantic, it is true that African Americans have on average about 30% European genetic admixture. The facts presented are still quite striking, no?
So the lightbulb has appeared and you've acknowledged that "African Americans", like most Americans, are descended from both Europeans and Sub-Saharan Africans, and that there is no demographic group satisfying your initial description.
I think that data about crime rates related to different demographic groups is quite important. My purpose is not to be pedantic, although I do enjoy that, but to help clarify the thinking of those who might confuse this demographic data with outmoded and superstitious ideas about "race". I'm sure you're much too knowledgeable to fall into this trap, but there could be others, not as sophisticated as you, who might suffer from common misconceptions about genetics, race, and related issues.
87% of Americans are not descended from a recent Sub-Saharan African population (where recent is defined as within the last 80,000 years). African Americans form a genetically distinct American subpopulation with about 70-80% of genes from Africa. If you sent in spit samples to 23andMe from a white American and an African American, 23andMe would have no problem telling them apart. If race did not exist, this would not be possible.
It is interesting that crime rates and other social pathologies are so segregated by race in America. Different experts have different explanations for this. The point is, comparing America against Europe is hard to do when the racial makeup of the two countries is so different.
The legacy of slavery in America cannot be avoided. 14-24 year old African American males make up 1% of the USA population and commit 27% of the murders. Europe had no large scale agricultural African slavery in the 19th century, and its current society has evolved differently as a result.
I agree that government-defined racial categories are too broad and inexact. The true amount of human genetic diversity is far larger and far messier than five racial categories would suggest. Andrew Sullivan addressed the myth that "race is a social construct" on his blog[1].
Europe also didn't allow racism to prevent it from building a functional social safety net for the majority ethnicities. Or allow racism to propel a targetted drug war that has ghettoized inner city minority neighborhoods. Or allow racism to migrate most of the accumulated wealth of the country into newly constructed suburban jurisdictions with higher-quality subsidized public services, while employing public sector institutional finance mechanisms to deny investments to minorities. Or allow the tax and budget mechanisms to actively redistribute large quantities of wealth from cities where minorities are concentrated, to rural regions with almost no minorities. So there's that.
You've suddenly introduced a new concept: "recent". I don't see how it's relevant. A gene will encode the same protein regardless of when it was introduced into the genome.
"23andMe would have no problem telling them apart"
If someone you define as "black" marries someone you define as "white" and their child sends a sample to 23andMe, will the report say that the child is white or black? Remember, you claim they will have "no problem".
Andrew Sullivan, from the link you provided: '“race” is a social construct when we define it as “white”, “black,” “Asian” or, even more ludicrously, “Hispanic.”'
The "recent"-ness of common ancestry (or lack thereof) is what separates you from a Chimpanzee. 80,000 years of evolution matters, so you will find that peoples from Europe have many different genotypes and phenotypes from people in Africa (or any other part of the world, for that matter). For example, people in Europe have no incidence of sickle cell disease, a recessive genetic disease that in its heterozygous form grants resistance to malaria. Malaria is not prevalent in Europe, so such a mutation would confer no survival benefit to Europeans as it does in Africans. And indeed natural selection does work so we see no sickle cell disease in Europeans as we do in Africans. Lots of other traits vary across the world, too. Almost all Northern Europeans can digest milk as an adult while few Africans can. West Africa consistently has the fastest runners in the world [1].
It is not hard to take a listing of the single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in a persons DNA and compare them against a database of genetic sequences from various parts of the world to tell where they came from. The same mutation occurring in parallel in two different populations and persisting is rare enough that you can use SNP data to construct a phylogenetic tree of the human population (here is one I googled up[2]). We can tell interesting things from human population genetics, for example that Amerindians probably came from Asia, since the East Asians are there closest genetic cousins.
You should have a mixed-race friend send their spit into 23andMe and see what happens! When races mix, you have genetic admixture. It remains trivial to see which portions of a persons DNA comes from which part of the world because those portions contain SNPs which are only found in certain human subpopulations.
If you are the child of an African father and a European mother (like Barack Obama), you get half your chromosomes from your father and half from your mother. A few bits from each chromosome swap over, but it is not hard to unravel which bits came from Africa and which from Europe.
The government's big racial categories are somewhat inaccurate (especially hispanic, since some hispanics are European and some are Amerindian). But distinct human genetic populations are very real. Razib Khan's blog[3] is great if you want to move beyond the sound bytes and get into the real science of human population genetics. Sadly, liberal views on race tend to be extremely unscientific.
"The 'recent'-ness of common ancestry (or lack thereof) is what separates you from a Chimpanzee."
No, it's the composition of the species' genomes. If they were created in a lab yesterday the situation would be the same. Unless you believe in some kind of supernatural effect, the way homeopaths believe that water has "memory".
"we see no sickle cell disease in Europeans as we do in Africans"
There is sickle cell disease in southern Italy, and in many other parts of the world outside of Africa. It cuts across "racial" divisions, and follows the historical distribution of malaria.
You avoided the simple question about 23andMe. You claimed they would have "no problem" categorizing people as "white" or "black". So how would they categorize the child of a "white" and "black" parent?
Europeans who criticize America often imagine it to be a country of European colonists. That's increasingly not true. European multiculturalists also expect that a person's cultural background will have zero influence on them. That is also not true.