Betcha money there's European in there. The African American who has no white ancestry is rare indeed. Langston Hughes, in his memoirs of being a merchant seaman, tells of anticipating his first trip to Africa and being stunned when Africans thought he was white. Malcolm X's autobiography (written by Alex Haley, author of "Roots") talks about Malcolm's mother defiantly specially doting on her darkest children. Haley's family history, told in "Roots", features ancestor Chicken George, who was the progeny of slave & slaveowner. We know that founding father Thomas Jefferson had a slave who bore his children.
That's kind of how slavery worked. After the slave trade was outlawed in 1808, very few slaves were smuggled in. There was therefore an extra premium on keeping the female slaves pregnant throughout their childbearing years. Nobody was particular about who kept them pregnant; owners & their families & employees often contributed to the effort. Optimal age to sell those children, some their OWN children, was 7-10 or so. Still malleable while big enough to work. And so on. This is exactly what has made genealogy so challenging for the descendants of slaves.
Your comment does not indicate you know these things. But surely you must, at least some of it.
In a related vein, DNA is bringing out the large degrees of Native American blood in Hispanics in the Southwest. There's maybe not enough info to tell Apache ancestry apart from Ute, but I think it's starting to emerge that Athabaskans and Aztecs are genetically somewhat distinguishable. I've read how White Nationalists have started trying to discredit DNA pie charts, upset when they find some "non-white" in their own ancestry. I take DNA sequences and associated data analysis as developing science with a long ways to go. (For better or worse, a separate question.)
I started out with crates of paper with thoroughly sourced genealogy. Only found after someone died, so there was no one to talk to about it. It goes back a dozen generations through many, many lines, thoroughly documented. Three of them worked on it over a period of 50 years. About 4500 profiles when I put it in Family Tree Maker, 15+ years ago. I know a lot about my personal ancestry, and I find that my own "pie chart" is a very close match, is well within the error margin for the occasional brick wall. It's certainly possible their sample size is more extensive for my Northern European ancestry than for other demographics/regions so I can see where accuracy might vary. Even if it's off a little, it's reasonably close. Skip Gates takes it seriously, and I take him seriously.
IMO, you're too dismissive as to what can be gleaned on the pie chart level.
