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Why don't I have a Race? Why is is that "no one is pure"?

I always thought I was white, but when people talk about race, they often say that "no one is pure" if you look back far enough. I'm not sure I understand what that means. I have researched my genealogy and, as far as I can tell, all of my ancestors were from northern or central Europe. I can trace my ancestry back to Europe in the 1500s before colonial times. At that time, people were not able to travel long distances, so you can assume people almost always married someone in the same town or the next town or two away. Is that something very unique to me? I would think that most "white people" (but not all) would be the same way. I think that a lot of white people in the US have an ethnicity of e.g. German/Irish/English or Swedish/Danish/Dutch/Scottish or some combination of them. I've seen quite a few family trees from people that were like this. OK, so some "white people" might actually be 1/16 Native American or 1/32 African without knowing. I don't think it is a very larger percentage of the people who are called "white" in the US. I'm not sure how it could be ambiguous in any why to say that I "am white". And of course I could get more specific and explain where all of my ancestors were from. I'm not denying the out of Africa theory. I do believe in evolutions. If you go back far enough, every life form on Earth is related. This is not something exclusive to humans. Humans are related to dogs, mice, bees, algae, ferns, and bacteria too. When someone talks about a Siberian Tiger and a Bengal Tiger, no one makes a big fuss about explaining how they are the same species. All I'm asking is, why does everyone assume that we are all a little bit mixed. It usually is irrelevant. For an analogy, you can have red paint and it is red paint even if it is Scarlet or Crimson. Everyone would be confused if you tried to explain what color paint you have, without saying it was red and said "I don't know um it might have a small amount of of blue and um..." There is something called Pragmatics.

Public Comments

1. People traveled longer distances than you think in the 1500's! Remember Columbus and his little journey in 1492? You could very well have asian, middle eastern, or any other blood running through your veins. But really, why care?
2. DNA studies suggest that all humans today descend from a group of African ancestors . It's called science. How many generations back is 60000 years? About 2000 generations back.
3. If we interbreed then that is called a species. Race is only color phases like a black panther or golden puma.
4. Other than its impact on your health issues (like No. Europeans & diabetes, etc.) why worry? A smart man once said the character of a man counted more than the color of his skin.
5. The whole thing about purity is a total nonsense. Mixed genes produces a healthier, hardier, more intelligent person. Hitler was very hung up on the whole purity thing. He got his scientists to experiment in eugenics (the breding for a pure race. It was a total failure. The children were more prone to illness and were far less Intelligent. Indeed the group had a very high rate of learning difficulties.
6. Strictly speaking, no one is a pure anything. If you only want to go back a few Hundred or thousand years, you can say I'm pure... but if you go back far enough in the evolutionary scale we actually come from a fish with five bones in its fins.
7. Do you mean that is USA you are considered of unknown race? Are they the ones telling you that no one is pure? I have looked into my Genealogy and am sure my ancestors where English back to the 1500s until one of them came to Australia and from his seed many grew. I am satisfied that i am a white 4th generation Australian from British stock. I don't expect to be challenged. Is it an intellectual conundrum you have posed, or is it a problem in fact? It sound like you are blended from the best of European aristocratic stock. :) Stay warm
8. The problem is your premise. Humans are all very similar, as a species. We can't be "pure" and we can't be "mixed." We're all too similar for that. If you took one brand of strawberry ice cream and melted it with another brand of strawberry ice cream, and then refroze all of it into ice cream again, what would you have? You'd have a mixture, technically, but what you've really got is just a bunch of strawberry ice cream. You'll never again really separate the two brands. We like to slot people into races, but human variation is more complex than that. The traits that we say one race has are actually spread out across the whole species. Racial classifications tend to rely on "typical extremes" to make them sound plausible, and the fact is that you're not significantly more different from a typical African that you are from a typical Northern European, if you take all of the genes and traits available into account. Yeah, your skin color is different. There are thousands of other traits to take into account if you want to comprehensively talk about similarities. You are more likely more similar to your family and ancestors than you are to anyone else. But it's slight, and outside of family relations it's a false delineation. "Mixed" is a false classification.
9. How would you define "pure?" If you use the analogy "red paint and it is red paint even if it is Scarlet or Crimson" that could be carried to "Human and it's human even if it's red, black, yellow or white." Point is, statistically, at some point in your ancestry you run out of the "pure" in a population. Try this: You mention 1500. Take a generation of 25 years. There's 21 generations from now to 1500. At first that doesn't sound impossible. However, as you said "At that time, people were not able to travel long distances, so you can assume people almost always married someone in the same town or the next town or two away." In 1500, you had to have 104,576 living relatives. That's the math. So of a population of 104,576 people in 1500, how many can be shown to be "pure?" Add 100 years and you have 1,673,216 and even more of a problem. This was just after the Black Death and the population of all of Europe was only 60 million.