The Heirlooms of DNA

[browngirl]

(typed fast into the comment box.)

I have recently read and/or seen several reports (print and TV) about people investigating their genetic heritage and being startled by the results. This amuses me, in a fond way.

I guess what amuses me most are the surprise and bemusement from people who are Black and find they have White ancestors and relatives or vice versa. (OK, especially vice versa.) I could try to say something inspiring about how we are all related, one great human family, but my heart's not really in that message of togetherness right at the moment.

Instead, I'm looking at the coffee-with-a-spoon-of-milk tone of my arm and my face in this userpic, and thinking of my grandfather who prided himself on (supposedly) being of pure-blooded African ancestry, my caramel-colored grandmother, and how much darker anyone I've ever met from West Africa is than I am. I've had people debate with me over whether I have any European ancestors; if I ever have the money maybe I'll go in for one of these tests and see, but what would surprise me would be if I didn't. One way of looking at one's ancestry is to divide it into phases across time; one of the phases my ancestry passed through was being slaves in the New World, which all but guarantees that I have some masters and overseers in my ancestry as well. That's what people with power do to the powerless, after all.

(And no, I don't think that's shameful to relate. I'm proud of my ancestors for surviving that and a million other indignities, and I'm grateful to them since if they hadn't I and the rest of my family wouldn't be here.)

These ethnohistorical suppositions of mine have been borne out by genetic studies of various Black populations in the Western Hemisphere (frex, researchers have found high incidences of mDNA from Africa and Y-chromosome markers from Europe) and are showing up in people's lives now as they research their genetic history. To say nothing of more recent dramas in people's ancestry; humans lie and have secrets and secret affairs and "pass" and all sorts of things. One article noted how its author had been told his family had Native American ancestry and not only did that turn out not to be true he found that they had Black ancestry, and on reading that I found myself wondering about/making up two sisters, daughters of a slave, and how one was light-skinned enough to say she was part Indian and part White so she did, and the other "looked Black", and their great-great-great grandchildren finding each other through one of these genetic geneaology programs in the modern day, one a White woman and one a Black one. But then I don't have to theorize that, when that very event has been happening and has been the subject of some of the articles I've read and news segments I've seen.

If one genetic lineage can contain people of two or more racial groups, what does that say about the very concept of race?

Comments

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

Gosh, I thought it was common knowledge that ANYONE from the New World and whose family has been here a few generations has blood from all over Europe, Africa and Asia.

You'd think people would know this... it's really odd, how people think of race and ethnicity as these monolithic things.

I wish I could ask my grandfather more about his ancestry.