—RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Recently, my wife, Trini, and I decided to explore our ancestral DNA. We are living in pioneering times in this field. While far from perfectly accurate, current DNA tests through online sites provide percentage matches based on samples provided by others. I’m aware they can be problematic: An African American friend of ours did a DNA test that claimed her ancestry was from Eastern Europe!
These tests may all be scams. Yet if they land in the genetic ballpark, they do yield interesting results. Trini and I undertook this exploration not to confirm any “purity” or favored cultural relationship but to get a glimpse of where we may have come from (at least in the past thousand years).
To provide a context, Trini and I both identify as Native, regardless of DNA: Trini to the Wixáritari/Mexica tribes of Mexico and me to the Rarámuri/Mexica. The Diné roadman, Anthony Lee, and his wife Delores, of Lukachukai, Arizona, recognized this after we took part in prayer meetings and other rituals on their land. In 1998, they spiritually adopted Trini. She’s been calling them “Mom” and “Dad” ever since. Trini takes this seriously—these adoptions are not for show or status. (Her own parents, now passed on, disowned her when she left home at twenty-one to finish college.)
Over twenty years ago we began to travel as much as possible to the Diné reservation for ceremony and family time. During one of those ceremonies, Anthony gave me a name in Diné: Naayee’ Neezghanii. This means “Monster Slayer,” or “someone who has overcome many obstacles.”
Trini and I are also working class—that social class that must sell its physical, creative, or mental labor to survive. We were both born in the United States; Trini in Martinez, California, as part of the farmworking migrant stream with her family of eleven siblings. We identify as Xicanx, in deference to our Mexican migrant parents. This situates us, providing a framework to distinguish what we are, not to separate ourselves or be classified into notions of superiority or inferiority.
In addition, we know we are culturally and “racially” diverse—like most Mexicans. A recent genome study in Mexico showed it is one of the most diverse lands on earth. This study proved Mexicans are more native than anything else—at least 60 percent, taking into account all the people, including 26 million tribal peoples, more than any country in the hemisphere. And its people are more African than is often recognized: in one state, Guerrero, the people were 22 percent of African descent. And many Mexican people’s DNA has strong traces of Europeans (Spanish and others), Middle Easterners, Asians, and more.
Before I reveal our DNA results, I’d like to delve into this whole “race” thing. In dissecting race as a concept, every which way possible, the hope is perhaps it will die of a thousand cuts. Race has been with us far too long—since Europeans first arrived in the Americas, and later with the birth of the USA—as a destructive and nagging presence. This county’s foundations are intertwined with it. In the United States there’s always some kind of “race” card being played.
We are forever dancing the race-and-identity mambo.
Holdovers of this habit include when so-called scientists measured people’s craniums to determine inferiority, or when one’s social status depended on how much white, black, yellow, or brown “blood” one had (blood, of course, has no such colors). Even the concept of “Caucasian” is racist—originally the term meant the people from the purported “Garden of Eden,” where human beings were said to have originated. In the 1700s, “scientists” and “philosophers” (Christoph Meiners, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Carl Linnaeus, et al.) falsely determined this was in the area of the Caucasus Mountains, home to the “superior” race of all races!
Another terrible example of this never-ending dance was when Spanish elites instituted the casta race system, whereby pure “white blood” Spaniards born in Spain were the most valued, and other categories were undervalued in layers: criollos (Spaniards born in the Americas), castizos (Europeans with some Native), mestizos (Natives mixed with Europeans), cholos (Natives with mestizos), mulattoes (Africans with Europeans), pardos (Europeans, Africans, and Natives), indios (Natives), negros (Africans) . . . and so on, including categories involving Chinese and other peoples.
All of this is made up.
“Whiteness” is in fact a big fat lie, concocted to favorably distinguish Europeans from dark-skinned people. This is the ultimate “identity politics.” Nothing in biology, in objective reality, exists to assign any superiority to skin color. Having different skin colors is what humans consist of—that’s just a feature of who we are, one that tells nothing about our characters or innate geniuses. The actual idea of race is unsound at all levels—except as a political and historical monstrosity, except as a power relation.
In addition, “white” as a racial category has moved around over the years. At various times in the United States, Arabs and Latinos were given “white” status. In Texas, Mexicans were considered “white.” If you look at my birth certificate from El Paso, my parents were labeled “white” although my mother was mostly Native and my father’s background includes Native, Spanish, and African ancestors.
“White” can be a label of convenience. Hitler, for example, declared Germany’s Japanese allies and Turkish SS troops “honorary Aryans.” When my family first moved to California, we lived mostly with blacks—restrictive covenants in housing limited where we could reside because in California we weren’t “white” anymore. In fact, many Mexicans lived with blacks in South Los Angeles, Pacoima, Compton, Inglewood, and similar areas because of these covenants and because of real-estate interests redlining housing tracts to exclude them.
Human beings have established social systems, racial categories, social classes, and more out of lies and absurdities for millennia. Such deceptions are made to appear real although they are patently untrue. To make “believers,” the powers that be have used books, movies, pseudoscientists, schools, military might, laws, and even religious institutions (which can claim “God’s” authority) to get the rest of us to go along.
Many “official” bodies, often touted as trustworthy, have fantasized alternative realities and spent public and private resources to propagate them. Think of what Hitler and his sick stalwarts did, and now see how other so-called leaders of government, corporations, and even educational institutions have done the same—some more benign, some worse and more sophisticated than Hitler.
Societies have consistently pulled the wool over our eyes— and I’m not just talking about run-of-the-mill con men, street-corner hustlers, or swindlers. I’m talking about kings, emperors, presidents, senators, generals, TV personalities, teachers, preachers, and even parents, those with power and voice to speak over the rest of us. While many people will be “had,” the majority of us must smarten up.
Of course, beliefs, faiths, and spiritual practices, which have come down to us from since humans first walked the planet, are natural, part of our rich imaginative life. That’s the tension. Stories and mythology are ingrained in our metaphor-/symbol-making brains. This is who we are. But those with power and wealth often mutate such mythic-poetic impulses to deceive and confuse the majority for their benefit.
One way they do this is to render stories, parables, and myths as “objective.” Literalizing distorts the understanding that stories, myths, and similar creations are the “lies” which hold our truths. These myths teach, inspire, and motivate by tapping into the image-receiving part of our makeup. If we literalize the stories, they can trap and paralyze us in falsehoods.
Think again about “race” and “blood.” When Europeans arrived in 1492 to the so-called New World, rape, pillage, murder, and racial categorization came along with them. All were justified by rendering less human the people they encountered. Even popes got in on this act.
Prior to this invasion, Polynesians, Japanese, Chinese, Norsemen, and even Africans were said to have made their way to “Turtle Island,” as many US tribes called the vast hemisphere. These early arrivals interacted and traded. Some stayed and had families. But they didn’t conquer or destroy, and none of them seemed to care about “pure blood.”
Another muddled idea is the misnamed “Western civilization.” While this term may not be solely about race, I’ve heard it used to mean “white” without explicitly saying so. For example, Iowa Republican congressman Steve King remarked during the 2016 Republican Convention: “Go back through history . . . where are these contributions made by these other categories of people that you are talking about? Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes then asked, “Than white people?” King responded, “Western civilization itself, rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and the United States, and every place where the footprint of Christianity settled the world.”
Unfortunately, Hayes didn’t challenge King’s assertions. He called them “self-refuting.” But they do need to be challenged. For as wrong as King may be, there are whole infrastructures in our country that keep these ideas palpitating. Even presidents of the United States espouse them.
Let’s be clear: what we consider Western culture was not born in a vacuum or developed solely by Europeans. So let me take on Congressman King’s challenge.
For thousands of years, Europeans absorbed song, science, medicine, religions, music, foods, and so much more from others—be they from Africa, China, India, the Middle East, Asia, the Pacific Islands, or the so-called New World—including appropriating them for advantage and exploitation. This was largely possible because Europe is the “world island,” contiguous to Asia and the Mideast and a stone’s throw from Africa.
Marco Polo’s travels to China, Jewish diasporas, Muslim rule in southern Spain and Italy, invasion of and theft from the so-called Americas, the opening and subjugations of India and Africa, all provided material as well as cultural wealth in the arts, literature, and sciences attributed to the European Renaissance of the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries. Just correlate the times and events.
Prior to that, from Africa and the Middle East arose three of the world’s most important religions: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. The first “cradles of civilization”—where the conditions converged to establish forms of writing, agriculture, architecture, governance, and more—were along the Niger River (West Africa), the Nile Valley (Egypt), the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers (Mesopotamia), the Indus Valley (India), the Yellow River (China), and in Mexico and Central America (“MesoAmerica”), and the Andes.
None were in Europe.
From South and East Asia came Buddhism, paper, fireworks, oranges, porcelain, fishing reels, suspension bridges, tea, and medicine, among others. From Native peoples of the “Americas,” the world obtained maize, tomatoes, avocados, potatoes, rubber, hummingbirds, democratic forms, irrigation, herbal healing, astrology, calendars, and more. From Africa came musical instruments (guitars, drums, harps), mathematics, astronomy, engineering, medicine, and navigation, to name a few.
Even Homer the “Greek,” considered the “Father of Western Literature,” whose stories were said to be conveyed orally for a thousand years beginning around the eighth century BC, may have had African origins. If this is not the case, such stories were similarly told for thousands of years in Africa through griots—poets and storytellers. It does not serve truth telling to insist on separation from the Mother Continent, even if later there were other directions and embellishments in such stories in the Mediterranean region or elsewhere.
European nations and companies looted the “New World” and Africa of gold, silver, diamonds, and other minerals, which made many of those countries the first world colonial powers and sparked capitalist development. There are still churches in Spain, as well as the Basilica in the Vatican, with inlaid gold and gold statues made from this theft. There are museums throughout Europe with the largest collections of preconquest artifacts anywhere, the majority hidden in basements and vaults.
And in the United States, we can’t forget the legacy of African enslavement, along with land stolen from Native Americans through genocide and mineral- and oil-rich territory conquered from Mexico (60 percent of Mexico’s natural resources were taken in the US invasion between 1846 and 1848, including oil reserves that would have made Mexico the world’s largest producer). Over time, these resources propelled the United States to the height of wealth and militarization among nations.
Free land, free labor, free access to minerals and oil—a country where bodies, land, and what the land provides have been owned—are enough to make any country “great.”
US culture is a product of the whole world, not just “Anglos.” If you’ve ever flown a kite, barbecued, surfed, participated in martial arts, bounced a rubber ball, chewed gum, eaten a chocolate bar, used a compass, witnessed a fireworks display, visited a library, smoked a cigarette, enjoyed a chili pepper, or drunk tea or coffee, then you’ve done things originally from Africa, South and East Asia, the Middle East, the Pacific Islands, and Native America.
When I was growing up, schools and other institutions hounded Blacks, Mexicans, Asians, Natives, and others to “assimilate” into so-called Anglo culture. This meant submitting to world cultures rendered through the prism, often violent, of US history, laws, and politics, including a race- and class-based lens.
Of course, most peoples of the world have adapted to, assimilated into, or appropriated from other peoples—yet few to the extent that Europeans or US people of European ancestry have done. Does this mean that Europeans didn’t contribute anything significant? Of course not—Europeans and European-descended peoples in the United States have deep, formidable imprints in technology, industry, science, governance, literature, and art.
You can’t take anything away from anyone.
But that’s the point—include everyone! To address Congressman King, or anyone else who claims otherwise, European contributions (or misrepresentations of such) cannot be an argument for superiority. Only conquests and power dynamics sustain such thinking. All of us, from whatever culture or so-called race, have added to the world’s layered development, both good and bad, both marvelous and disastrous.
And what about “white nationalism”? Well, show me this “white” nation. Europe today is made up of people of all skin colors, religions, outlooks, and more, as is the United States. And I get particularly perturbed when people talk about the “white” working class. There is only one working class—and it’s made up of whites, blacks, Latinx, Asians, Native Americans, men, women, all sexual/gender orientations, migrants, and immigrants. Any talk about a “white” working class serves only to put a wedge between lighter-skinned workers and the rest of us. That way our interests as a class are divided along superficial lines.
Again, you wouldn’t know this if you went by official history books or textbooks, or watched most TV shows and movies, in which the roots, trunks, and branches of human history and development, its multiplicity and flowering, are erased or diminished. The lies are pushed on us by elaborate systems calculated to dictate our lives. They are maintained by force. Hence we in the United States have the world’s greatest military power and domestic police state. Schools, media, and the entertainment industry sustain these fabrications. Now and then, we are allowed entry as well as a good time. We’re bribed into believing this is all inviolable.
It’s a massive con. Billions of dollars are spent to keep us under its spell. Still this brainwashing is less and less available or effective, forcing direct power to be deployed against people deemed disloyal or a threat. This is not about any “deep state.” It’s about the whole state—what you see and what you don’t. Our loyalty, our passivity, our turning a blind eye, being victimized and loving it, is the end game. Like many Americans—and people around the world—I’m done with being manipulated, used, with being the chump who keeps buying into a system that keeps slapping me in the face.
A big antidote to the lies, this poison, is truth, which isn’t hard to uncover despite the vast expanse of doctored videos, alternative facts, and cherry-picking of reality or books in social media, TV, radio, and in the halls of government. Do the work! The antidote is here, among us, with those who do not overvalue or undervalue humanity based on class, race, or sexual preference. The antidote is with those of us who have our dignities intact—and don’t try to take away anyone else’s dignity.
Now for those DNA results. Interestingly, Trini and I have similar breakdowns. The biggest chunk of our DNA is Native American, close to half of our total DNA. This is native from the whole hemisphere; the tests at the time didn’t break down “Native America” more precisely. Still, they revealed almost 50 percent of our DNA is tied to all indigenous people of so-called North, Central, and South America.
The tests indicated we also have African DNA—mine was linked to North Africa, Benin-Togo, and Mali. Trini’s was from Benin-Togo, North Africa, and Southeastern Bantu. This makes sense due to the African presence in Mexico. We also have remnants from the Middle East and Asia. With all this, we each have close to 60 percent DNA from people of color. As for European strands, we are as diverse as you can imagine: Trini has traces of Eastern European, Scandinavian, Western European, British, and European Jewish DNA. She is about 25 percent from the Iberian Peninsula (Spain/Portugal), but she is also 9 percent from Italy/Greece. I have traces of Western European, Scandinavian, Eastern European, European Jewish, and Irish DNA, and 8 percent from Italy/Greece.
What threw me off is this—13 percent of my DNA is from the Iberian Peninsula. I thought it would be more. But the kicker is that I am 13 percent from Great Britain (England/Scotland/Wales). I have no idea where this strand of my history came from, but there you have it.
According to these samples, Trini and I have the whole world in our DNA. What a fascinating mix of humanity. Even if the tests are not totally accurate, we are still citizens of the planet, unbounded in many ways. With these DNA results you can see the tremendous impact of worldwide migration patterns, trade, wars, conquests, and other interactions, good and appalling, across history. We embody many stories, a rich tapestry of colors, dialects, skins, and beliefs.
Nevertheless, our biggest DNA bloc from these tests is Native American. It shows we have ties to this land as deep as anyone’s. As we stay attendant to the indigenous, we can also appreciate the rest of humanity that came together at one time or another so both of us could be born, marry, have children, and help shape the world.
However, when Trini and I related our DNA results to our Diné elder Anthony, he remarked that this was charming, entertaining perhaps. But he also admonished us—we are not fractured persons, with this drop of blood and that drop of blood. We are not mixed up (mestizos). The Diné recognize each other through an extensive clan system, which includes clans for Hopis, Pimas, Zunis, and Mexicans (Naakai dine’é), among others, due to intermarriage. None of this means we are less or more.
“Remember,” our elder said, “you are whole and complete as you are.”