How DNA ancestry
testing can turn our notions of race and ethnicity upside down
By W. Ralph Eubanks
When I was a young
boy, I found a photograph half-hidden in the back of my parents’ closet, leaned
up behind my mother’s stacked boxes of high-heel shoes. A dandyish man in a
dark suit and skinny tie stared out at me, bearing a striking resemblance to my
mother. Who was he? His hair, parted neatly in the middle, peeked out under a
broad-brimmed hat perched jauntily on his head. In time, I learned that the
unknown man was my grandfather James Morgan Richardson. But not until I was 16,
when I overheard a conversation between my parents in the middle of the night,
did I learn that he was white.
My parents kept my
grandfather’s portrait hidden because in 1960s Mississippi, with all its racial
paranoia, displaying the picture in our living room would have been risky, if
not impossible. Severe social consequences awaited any black person claiming close
kinship with a white person. So the picture stayed hidden, part of my mother’s
past, and my own—something I knew about but didn’t yet feel free to explore.
My mother knew
that the portrait fascinated me, and when I got married, she gave it to me. I
saw that gift as an invitation to learn more about the man within the borders
of the frame. It has taken me 20 years, but I’ve finally begun to figure things
out and better understand my own history as well.
In 21st-century
America, my family would be described as multiracial. But in the world I grew
up in—the American South of the 1950s and 1960s, where the idea of race and
identity determined who you were and your place in the world—you were either
black or white. We were first colored, later Negroes, and still later black.
Claiming mixed status meant you were either trying to be white (implying that
black was inferior) or trying to pass for white (a dangerous business few spoke
of openly), and doing so carried the risk of being labeled a racial traitor. Consequently,
my identity was shaped by the racial boundaries of the American South as well
as the double consciousness that W. E. B. Du Bois speaks of in The
Souls of Black Folk. I always felt that duality: “an American, a Negro; two
souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark
body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
My mother was
seven years old when her mother died. The town doctor who pronounced my
grandmother dead offered to help the family start over as a white family, far
away from their small town in rural, isolated south Alabama. Even though my
grandmother Edna Howell Richardson was black, all her children’s birth
certificates said they were white. So, this “transformation” would have been easy.
But in the end my grandfather, the man whose portrait had been hidden in the
closet, chose not to hide his children’s mixed race. Instead, my mother and her
sister grew up going to black schools and identifying as black. When they
married black men, they had to have their race officially changed on their
birth certificates in order to get legal marriage licenses.
I grew up hearing
my mother say, “You can always tell when someone is passing.” Since she could
pass for white, my mother spoke from a position of authority. Racial passing,
once a common subject of discussion in the black community, has faded from
American consciousness with the emergence of racial and multiracial pride. But
even today, with six multiracial grandchildren of her own, my mother stands by
her statement: “You can always tell.”
Once, in 1967, she
spotted an old classmate from Tuskegee Institute who was managing the men’s
furnishings section of a Mississippi department store where, a few years
earlier, black people weren’t allowed to try on clothes, much less work above
the position of elevator operator. Black people couldn’t even work as clerks in
that store, so the man could not have moved up to this level unless he was
passing. When my mother recognized him, he was fussily arranging a display of
memorabilia from southern schools. She strolled over to take a look, remarking,
“Why, I don’t see anything from my school here.”
The man replied
with steely silence, carefully maintaining his composure.
Then my mother
asked him point-blank, “Do you have anything from Tuskegee? I’d like to get
something for my husband.”
The man turned
beet red, quietly said no, and tried to smile his way through my mother’s
attempt to “out” him. In her inimitable southern manner, my mother responded
with fury cloaked in sweetness: “Well, I thank you so much for
checking.” From that day forward, the man avoided my mother whenever she walked
into the store, and each time, her eyes shot in his direction, casting that
knowing glare upon him.
When I look back
on this incident, I realize that my mother reacted the way she did because she
saw this man as a traitor of the highest order. He had turned his back on the
philosophy of racial uplift he had been taught at Tuskegee; the oppressed had
assumed the role of oppressor. And all this during the height of the civil
rights movement. Given the times, and my mother’s history, I can understand her
anger.
In spite of her
being mixed race, in spite of having been raised primarily by her white father,
being black remains the core of my mother’s identity. Perhaps to keep from
confusing my siblings and me, she didn’t tell us about her father’s race until
the four of us were all nearly adults. So, for many years, I had to pretend
that I hadn’t overheard my parents talking in the middle of the night—talking
about how hard it had been for my dark-skinned father to ask a white man for
his daughter’s hand. And I had to pretend, as well, that I hadn’t seen the
portrait hidden in the closet.
My family’s
complex racial history, filled as it is with myths and truths, led me to DNA
ancestry testing. I had begun writing a book on the life and times of my
maternal grandparents, whose marriage around 1915 was an act of defiance in a
part of the South governed by Jim Crow laws. In that book, The House at
the End of the Road, my purpose had been to tell the little-known
story of mixed-race families in the American South, like my mother’s, that
prevailed in spite of Jim Crow and laws against interracial marriage. As the
book took shape, a scientific study caught my eye.
In late 2005,
scientists reported the discovery of a gene mutation that had led to the first
appearance of white skin in humans. Other than this minor mutation—just one
letter of DNA code out of 3.1 billion letters in the human genome—most people
are 99.9 percent identical genetically. And yet, what divisions have arisen as
a result of such a seemingly inconsequential genetic anomaly. Moreover, this
mutation had separated members of my family along tightly demarcated racial
lines for three generations. As this discovery became known, I was invited to
join a class on race relations at Pennsylvania State University in which all
the students participated in DNA ancestry testing as a way of discussing
contemporary attitudes about race and cultural identity.
Through the DNA
tests, students came to realize that the racial or ethnic identities they grew
up with were sometimes in conflict with their genetic material, belying the
notion of racial purity. In class, I listened to students talk about racial
labels and identities, and whether ancestry testing had changed their
perceptions of themselves. Most embraced the newly found diversity that their
DNA test revealed, and none felt that ancestry testing had changed their
personal identities. Still, the discovery of mixed ancestry was a struggle for
a few. One white student wondered whether her African heritage came from “a
rape in my past,” and another thought that her African DNA must have come from
“promiscuous family members.” These comments were indicative of the stigma that
any hint of African ancestry carries for many white Americans. No one suggested
that racial passing—which I’d immediately brought up in the discussion—might
explain some of these traces of mixed heritage. Only one student even seemed to
understand the idea of racial passing. He grew up in an interracial home, with
a father of Jamaican descent and an Irish mother, and he was close to both
sides of his family. Although issues of race were discussed openly at home, he
told me, no one ever forced him to choose between being black and being white.
And in spite of having fair skin, he did not claim to be white, choosing
instead to forge his own identity as multiracial, thus embracing his phenotypic
ambiguity.
When the
instructor, sociologist Sam Richards, asked whether I would be interested in
taking my own DNA ancestry test, as part of a larger DNA study being conducted
by anthropologist Mark Shriver, I did not hesitate to say yes. Given that I
already knew my mixed-race background, the results weren’t shocking: 60 percent
West African ancestry combined with 32 percent European, six percent East
Asian, and two percent Native American. The East Asian ancestry was the only
surprise, but Mark explained that Asians and Native Americans are closely
related evolutionarily. (Several years later, I took a second and more
sophisticated DNA test that revealed slightly different results: 50 percent
African, 44 percent European, and six percent Asian. These two sets of results
are within the margin of error.)
Outside Mark’s office
at Penn State, I studied a wall of photographs showing the faces of various
people from his DNA study, from Penn State and around the world, each image
accompanied by the ethnic designation that person identified with. Beside the
photograph was a paper flap, which, when lifted, showed what a DNA sample
revealed about that person’s ethnic background. As I went through photograph
after photograph, few of the personal ethnic identities matched the DNA
profiles. Most people had some mixture of DNA from at least two groups; many,
like me, had genetic ancestry from Europe, East Asia, West Africa, and Native
American groups. Blond people had African and Asian ancestry, and several
dark-skinned people had more than half of their DNA from Europe.
What we see when
we look at a person may or may not correlate to his or her ancestral and ethnic
background. DNA results confirmed for me that identity cannot be constructed
based on a “percentage” of African ancestry, and that our society’s generally
accepted racial categories cannot begin to address the complexity and nuance of
our heritage. I soon began to think about race only in terms of culture and
biology together. And as race became an abstract rather than a concrete
concept, the categorical ways in which I had thought about race in the past
were quickly broken down. Once we see how small the differences are that bring
about the characteristics we think of as racial—hair, skin color, eyes, facial
features—in relation to the entire human genome, it’s hard to make a fuss about
them. Our differences are
astonishingly slight.
Around this time,
I was immersing myself in the work of philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah and
especially his books Cosmopolitanism and The Ethics of
Identity. I’d begun to make distinctions between my personal identity and
the collective dimension of identity that comes from society. When you accept
that race is socially constructed—that being African American is a collective
identity developed outside one’s self and is therefore not within one’s
control—race matters less. DNA ancestry testing made that idea much clearer for
me. It highlighted the flawed logic underlying the American concept of race
based on standards of purity and superiority, since very few people have DNA
that comes from only one part of the world. More important, it confirmed for me
how many people have several cultural identities, not just one. The way I saw
myself did not change, but DNA ancestry testing helped me abandon the racial
myths that had shaped the first part of my life. I was moving away from the
very limiting vision that divided the world into “us” and “them.”
I began thinking
about how firmly my own children’s identities were rooted in the post–civil
rights era. My three children are multiracial—my wife is of Irish, Swedish, and
Swiss-German descent—and they grew up talking openly about race and cultural
identity. They knew all about my parents and grandparents. Moreover, we live in
Washington, D.C., until recently a majority black city but one with constantly
shifting ethnic and social demographics. Given the diversity of our city, my
children’s identities have been shaped in an environment more rarefied than
less-urban parts of the country. What would a DNA ancestry test reveal to them?
Excited about my own experience, I asked my eldest son, Patrick, who was born
in 1992, to take an ancestry test and to tell me how he felt about the results.
I imagined we’d
have a vigorous discussion about how DNA turns the historical concept of race
upside down. But for my son, the traditional concept of race had already been
overturned, and our discussions revealed a deep generational gulf between us.
As in my case, the sources and percentages of my son’s ancestry were not
surprising: 72 percent European, 25 percent African, and three percent Asian.
But when I mentioned how revealing DNA had been to me, Patrick just shrugged
his shoulders, as if the numbers meant little to him. “They don’t change the
way I think of myself or the way I view the world,” he said. “When people ask
me, ‘What are you?’ I generally tell them that I am American. And given how
diverse my background is, it’s in my way of thinking, a background that could
only come about in America.”
My wife and I had
fielded “what is he” questions about Patrick over the years, particularly when
he was quite small. Patrick is very fair-skinned, with light brown hair. Up
until his teen years, he was so blond that people sometimes assumed that my
dark brown–haired wife and I had adopted him. Once, a visitor to my wife’s
office, glancing at a family picture, asked insistently why we had adopted one
of our three children, pointing directly at Patrick. “I gave birth to that
child, believe me,” my wife responded quite sternly to her incredulous visitor.
“No, that one,” he insisted, pointing to Patrick, “is definitely adopted.” This
man believed that a child who looked like Patrick was a genetic impossibility,
based on our appearance and my ethnic background. If he had seen the wall of
photographs hanging outside Mark Shriver’s office at Penn State, he might have
better understood how hard it is to judge “identity” on looks alone.
“What I tell
people depends on the assumptions someone makes about me,” Patrick told me.
“Since I am from D.C., people will ask me what it was like for a white kid to
grow up in a black city or will launch into a series of stereotypes of black
people. I’ll tell them it was pretty easy growing up in D.C., since I am black.
Then I watch the shocked disbelief on their face. If someone appears to have no
real agenda when they ask me, I tell them that my mother is white and my father
is black.” Patrick said he never gets into the complex racial mix on my side of
the family, with a white great-grandfather and a black great-grandmother, both
of whom had blond hair and blue eyes. “Still, I always make it clear I am not
white. I’ve tried not to fall into that fear of belonging to a single group
that many people have, even though I know race is not a real thing and just
something people have made up over time to define themselves.”
Since Patrick is a
college student, the conversation about “what he is” sometimes moves toward a
discussion of science and a belief in evolution, in the context of generational
differences. “We’re asking ourselves better questions now,” he said to me. “The
science that drove discussions of race in the last century was conducted to
maintain the status quo and affirm stereotypes. That’s the one thing DNA
changes.” And yet, I kept coming back to Patrick’s indifference to his DNA
ancestry test. “Seeing that I have ancestry that can be traced back to
Mesopotamia is pretty cool,” he said, “but for the most part, I’d put DNA
ancestry testing on the ‘meh’ list. Your DNA test may have deconstructed race
for you, but my DNA test had no real impact because race has already been
deconstructed for me—and has been my whole life.”
I grew up in a
world of racial boundaries; Patrick grew up free of a repressive racial
calculus. Therein lies the difference between us. Two sets of test results
inside one family; two markedly different responses. And not because of the
numbers, but because of what those numbers mean (or do not mean). Because of
how we read them, because of the context of our lives, our different moments in
history.
According to the
2010 census, the number of multiracial children in the United States has
increased in a decade by 50 percent to 4.2 million people, making multiracials
the fastest-growing youth group in the country. Across the country, nearly
three percent of the population chose more than one race on the last census, a
change of about 32 percent since 2000. In the South and parts of the Midwest,
the growth of the multiracial population has increased more than the national
average. In my native Mississippi, the multiracial population grew by about 70
percent, and the state had the largest increase in interracial marriage of any
state since the last census. Still, the multiracial population of Mississippi
is only 1.1 percent, and many Mississippians see the legacy of the state’s
racial inequities as part of the cultural mindset. That’s not hard to
understand, given that less than half a century ago interracial marriage was
illegal in Mississippi. Neighboring Alabama—where my grandparents lived—removed
the constitutional prohibition against interracial marriage only in 2000, with
40 percent of Alabamians voting to keep the prohibition in place.
How do we get
people such as those who voted against interracial marriage to focus less on
the concept of race and more on the concept of humanity? As Mark Shriver
remarked when we discussed my DNA test results, “You can defuse traditional
thinking about race by making people see these differences as natural and
teaching them that the differences are just part of the variety of life. That’s
the trajectory we are on regardless. How quickly we get there depends on how
good a job we do in educating people to this new way of thinking.”
What is left once
we have deconstructed race, and what does such a concept mean for the present
and the future? Racism is easy when only two races exist in any
significant numbers, as has generally been the case throughout American
history. Multiple and overlapping ethnicities (with none in the majority) make
racism more difficult. In the 19th century, the eventual path to acceptance for
the Irish, Italians, Eastern European Jews, and to a certain extent, Asians who
immigrated to America, was to become “white.” This option was uniquely closed
to African Americans. In a more diverse and racially mixed America, “becoming
white” may no longer be a key to equality. That may be the biggest, most significant
change in American culture over the next generation.
Demographically,
we are becoming less white and more multiracial, and have a larger population
of Hispanics and Asians. Moreover, Hispanics complicate America’s simplistic
black-white dichotomy: they do not fit neatly into either racial category. As
Amitai Etzioni pointed out in a 2006 essay that appeared in these pages, if “Hispanics
continue to see themselves as members of one or more ethnic groups, then race
in America might be pushed to the margins.” And yet, American cultural
discourse on race is still stymied by a tainted racial past largely divided
between black and white. For more than a century, America built a racial caste
system, a concept originally invented to categorize perceived biological,
social, and cultural differences. Though that system has been eroding for
decades, our changing demographics require a swifter transformation. Our rapidly
expanding multiracial and Hispanic populations do not signal the end of race as
a concept, but they do open up new possibilities for how we think, talk, and
understand the subject. And talking about race—engaging in the sort of frank
and open discussions that I witnessed at Penn State—is precisely what we need
more of at the moment.
Such dialogues
will, alas, likely take place only within a small part of our population. Too
many people are still in the thrall of cultural myths. Having grown up with
many of those myths, I recognize their power to divide and to cause harm. And
yet, I no longer look at a person and think I can presume to know his race,
ethnicity, or background, or whether he is claiming a race other than the one
into which he was born. Increasingly, I believe that it is unethical to engage
with another person solely on the basis of race or ethnicity.
Perhaps it all
goes back to the man in the portrait at the back of my parents’ closet. Before
I knew he was white, I thought he was just a cool-looking guy. I didn’t know
why he’d been relegated to the back of a closet. There was no flap to lift on
his portrait, as with the photographs on the wall at Penn State, to reveal what
percentage of his makeup came from this part of the world, or that. Maybe part
of what appeals to me about DNA testing is that it helps show how much all of
our portraits are composites, and reminds us how much better it is to expose
those portraits than to hide them away.
I still see myself
as a black kid from Mississippi, but first and foremost, I think of myself as a
member of the human family. Embracing this idea has allowed me to reconcile
ways of feeling and of comprehending race previously clouded by my personal
history. I like to think that W. E. B. Du Bois would be pleased that I no
longer feel held back by unreconciled strivings. As Du Bois wrote in 1909 in
his biography of John Brown, “the cost of liberty is less than the price of
repression.”
No comments:
Post a Comment