Can a baby with a black dad and white mom appear completely Caucasian with light, straight hair, blue eyes and pale skin with no mixed look to it?

Of course. Recessive genes are unpredictable.

I have a white coworker who has a black husband. Their daughter is very pale with hazel eyes and straight red hair. The husband’s family was not sure at first that the baby was his daughter. But she is.

Actress Eartha Kitt was biracial, but was usually thought of as black. Her daughter, Kitt McDonald, appears entirely white.

To see how unpredictable genetics can be, look at the Giddings family. One dad, one mom, and four kids. All different.

Even twins can end up looking very different if the parents are of different races.

Twins Lucy and Maria Aylmer have a white father and a biracial mother.

Twins Kendall and Baylee with their parents, Curtis Martin and Rebecca Horton.

Twins Marcia and Millie Biggs with their parents.

Or how about these sisters that both had twins?

Or these guys? Here they are as infants with their mother.

And a bit older..

We all carry a mixture of genes from our ancestors. Very few of us are pure anything. And when a baby is born, he can get any combination of genes from his ancestors. Occasionally, the results can be very surprising.

It can happen, yes, Pale genes are normally recessive to dark, so the black dad could be carrying white genes from some ancestor a century ago. Not necessarily a European ancestor, either - there are some “black” people who are just naturally fair-skinned, although it’s not common because if they actually live in Africa they’re vulnerable to skin cancer.

In general and for most practical purposes, yes. Many people generally classified as black have some amount of mixed ancestry and so may have some recessive genes that allow for a broadly caucasian phenotype.

But if you’re talking about the first generation offspring of someone with purely black African ancestry and someone white, then no. Too many of the relevant recessive variants simply don’t exist in native African populations.

A few years ago, I taught a brother and sister. The boy had poker-straight, white-blond hair, light-blue, almost colourless eyes, and pale freckled skin. The girl could have passed for my daughter - strawberry blonde waves, green eyes, and tanning-shade-of-pale skin.

BOTH parents were black.

This happens sometimes. Genetics is weird.