Portraits of America
Detail from bronze of Phillis Wheatley by Meredith Bergman. Boston’s Women’s Memorial, Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts.
Gina Paige was able to squeeze us into her busy schedule the following day, just as she was setting off again to address a conference in Charleston, Virginia. To make things easier, we met in the refurbished splendor of the concourse at Washington’s Union Station, the most magnificent railroad terminus of our trip so far. The gilded ribs of the barrel-vaulted roof reflected the soft white floodlights and classical statues graced alcoves around the second-floor balcony. Gina met Ulla and me in one of the many concourse restaurants and, after ordering lunch, we got down to business. It was Halloween and the station was full of young men and women in elaborate costumes, which livened up the atmosphere but made it hard to hold a conversation without shouting.
Unlike Rick Kittles, the scientific brains behind African Ancestry, Paige had a business background with experience in several commercial areas, the last working for a bakery products company. She was frustrated that, in any of the major sectors, there were no truly new products. Innovations were merely minor modifications of existing products—a line extension or a new flavor whose marketing depended on exaggerating their basically trivial advantages. So when she was introduced to Kittles, she immediately recognized that genetic genealogy was a genuinely new market and that excited her. Combining their complementary skills, Kittles and Paige set up African Ancestry. Like so many African Americans, Paige felt passionately about her own community and was very aware of the sense of disconnection many black people felt. She could also see the potential to assuage that feeling by reinforcing their African origins through DNA. From the start, African Ancestry had a strong sense of mission.
Just as with Bennett Greenspan in Houston, all of us had shared some common experiences from customers, but Paige’s mainly African American customers were more anxious about what happened to their DNA than Greenspan’s largely white clientele. In her opinion, this had a lot to do with now-discredited medical research programs directed at African Americans. The most notorious of these was the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, a long-term study on the clinical progression of untreated syphilis among African Americans named after the Arkansas district where it took place. Begun in 1932 and not abandoned until 1972, the Tuskegee experiment offered various health-care benefits to participants in exchange for regular checkups and blood tests. However, one benefit that was not made available, and was in fact deliberately withheld, was treatment with penicillin, whose ability to cure syphilis was known as early as 1947. Doctors keen not to disrupt the long-term aims of the study did not offer a treatment that would have helped their patients. Many died who might have lived. When the experiment was finally exposed in the Washington Star and the New York Times, it was immediately terminated. In the aftermath, clinical trial and consent protocols were overhauled to prevent a recurrence, and, in 1997, President Clinton issued an apology on behalf of the U.S. government. Even now, the memory of Tuskegee makes African Americans very wary of the intentions of official health programs and suspicious about the potential for some sort of eugenic misuse.
I became aware of this danger myself when advising a UK Parliamentary Select Committee inquiry into the impact of genetics. In my position as special adviser it was part of my job to recommend particular fields that the inquiry might cover and one of these was the effect of prenatal screening programs for serious genetic diseases. As well as considering the usual suspects like cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy, I also suggested we take a look at sickle-cell anemia and another inherited disorder of red blood cells called thalassemia. Both these diseases offer some protection to carriers against malarial infection, which is why they are both common where malaria is endemic. Thalassemia is found in the Mediterranean islands of Cyprus and Sardinia and is a health problem in those parts of Britain, like some London boroughs, with high densities of Cypriot immigrants. As we saw earlier, the mutations persist even where malaria is absent. In another superb example of well-organized genetic screening, like Tay-Sachs among Ashkenazi Jews, thalassemia has been virtually eliminated in both Cyprus and Sardinia.
The situation with sickle-cell disease is scientifically similar, but has again exposed the suspicions of the black community. Sickle-cell anemia is very common in West Africa, and is therefore a health issue not only in Africa itself but also in countries, like the United States and Britain, where West Africans have settled, voluntarily or otherwise. The Select Committee had invited a spokeswoman from the National Sickle Cell Program to one of the regular evidence sessions held in the Gothic surroundings of the House of Commons in London overlooking the Members’ Terrace and the River Thames. In these sessions, each witness is interrogated by one member of Parliament with others joining in to ask supplementary questions. These are open meetings with members of the press and the public present, and all the evidence is published. From the dozens of distinguished witnesses and the hundreds of other submissions, I remember this particular session and the evidence from Marion McTair very well. I have a copy of the report on my bookshelves that contains a verbatim transcript of the evidence to the inquiry from McTair on behalf of the National Sickle Cell Program. The screening program was basically designed to replicate the very successful thalassemia and Tay-Sachs efforts to diagnose carriers and offer couples at risk of having a sickle-cell child some genetic counseling and also advice on the option of selective termination of affected pregnancies.
When Ms. McTair, who is black, was asked by one of the MPs for her opinion of the screening program, she recalled a visit from a lady who was a sickle-cell carrier herself and was also married to another carrier. The rules of genetics mean, with her and her husband both being carriers, that she has a one-in-four chance of bearing a child with sickle-cell disease at every pregnancy. After their first child, who was affected, she became pregnant again and decided on a prenatal DNA diagnosis. This unfortunately identified the fetus as having two copies of the mutated gene and thus bound to develop sickle-cell disease. Reluctantly she agreed to a termination. Again she became pregnant, and again, very unluckily, the prenatal DNA test came back positive for sickle-cell. At this point the woman went to see Ms. McTair to ask her advice about what to do. She said, “I don’t want to abort it, I don’t trust the doctors.” “Why don’t you trust them?” “Because I can’t understand why this is the third time I’m carrying a child with sickle-cell disease. I think maybe the doctors don’t want me to have this child. It’s the wrong color, and it’s not the type of child they want in Britain today. They want white ones, bright ones and not black, daft ones.” Ms. McTair asked her why she said that and she could not say, but in her mind it was how she felt. What a contrast to the Ashkenazi Jews, who saw how genetic testing could help rid them of the scourge of Tay-Sachs and also to the Sicillians, who overcame their deep religious opposition to abortion, with the Catholic Church turning a blind eye, in order to achieve a comparable result and eliminate thalassemia from their island.
One in twelve African Americans carries the sickle-cell gene, which makes for about two million carriers. One in every 144 (i.e, 12 × 12) couples will both be carriers with a 25 percent chance of having a seriously ill child, so there is every reason to develop a screening program. But when the parliamentary committee came over to America for a week of evidence gathering, we heard that suspicion of a racially targeted eugenic motive lying behind a sickle-cell screening program in the United States had led to its suspension. Unlike the genetically parallel problem of Tay-Sachs disease among the Ashkenazim, where there have been no affected births for several years, even now, one in five hundred black babies in the United States is born with sickle-cell disease. This is a tragedy caused solely by the historical suspicion of the black community and one that doesn’t appear to be getting any better, as it has now become enmeshed in political arguments about the “slavery health deficit” and calls for reparations. Paige has to deal with this innate suspicion all the time, which is one reason why, like Oxford Ancestors, her company destroys its customers’ DNA samples as soon as the analysis is finished.
Paige is also in the front line of the sometimes angry reaction from African American men whose tests reveal that they carry a European Y chromosome, which roughly a third of them do. She knows very well that this is an emotional rather than an intellectual response, as most of her customers realize it is a possibility. And as with most emotional responses to unexpected news, things calm down after a while as people begin to accept the situation. After Paige has talked them through the initial stages of apprehension, they usually come to accept how it might be possible, especially when questions to other family members uncover half-forgotten tales of a white ancestor. This is not true for the reverse situation, as Paige explained with an example. A white man from Texas, with all his ancestors on both sides of the family white for as long as anyone knew, complained bitterly when his mitochondrial DNA came back as African. After the usual assertion that “there must be some mistake” and demands for retesting—which returned the same result—he still could not accept that he had a black ancestor. Of course this begs the question of why he chose to have his DNA analyzed by Paige’s company, African Ancestry, in the first place.
We finished our conversation by talking about the future of the genetic genealogy business. All “long-established” organizations like African Ancestry, Family Tree DNA, and Oxford Ancestors have felt the impact of new companies offering much cheaper rates. These are usually no more than agents who act as intermediaries between their customers and a lab but know nothing about the underlying science or how to interpret genetic results. All three of us—Bennett, Gina, and ourselves at Oxford Ancestors—get frequent calls from customers who have bought on price from a cheaper outfit and then want someone to explain what their results mean. In genetics, as in life, you get what you pay for.
We left Paige at the station and in the gathering dusk, walked back past Capitol Hill and along the Mall to our hotel. Halloween parties were breaking out all over the place. You take it far more seriously in the United States than we do in Britain.
Paige had very kindly put us in touch with two of her customers with strong views on genetic testing among the African American community, and the next day we met up with them. The first was Toby Cooper, a bubbly and engaging woman who ran her own government contract business. The location was our hotel lobby, but this was an arranged meeting rather than a piece of DNA hustling. Toby already knew about her own mitochondrial DNA through African Ancestry, which had located her matrilineal roots to Cameroon in central West Africa. Her father’s Y chromosome had its closest matches on the slave island of Bioko off the Cameroon coast. She was a great fan of this kind of testing and the solid links it had made to her African roots. After I had explained chromosome painting, she was equally keen to have a go at that. “I can’t wait. Isn’t it amazing what you can find out about yourself these days,” she effervesced. She went to the ladies’ room to provide the saliva sample, and when she returned with it safely in the tube, I asked her more about herself.
She had grown up in Aurora, Colorado, where there were very few blacks, and it was only when she moved to Washington, D.C., to complete her MBA that she became fully aware of the complexities and contradictions of being an African American woman. I was half expecting to hear her experiences of racial discrimination at the hands of whites, but instead she reserved her anger and frustration for the behavior of African Americans themselves. This began to be clear when she told us about a male friend, another African American, who said that he did not like her beautiful head of curly black hair, which she wore in a bob. He told her that he was embarrassed to take her to dinner at an upscale restaurant unless she blow-dried it straight. It was fine to be seen with her and her natural hair at a basketball game, but in his mind the elevated social circles to which he aspired demanded a more Eurocentric look.
She soon told him to get lost. This was the hair that had protected her ancestors against the tropical sun. That was why it was curly and dense in the first place, a natural helmet against the searing solar radiation. Looking at Ulla with her blond Scandinavian locks, she quite rightly said that fine and straight European hair would have been no good under the African sun. It would have let the damaging rays straight through and toasted the scalp. She was proud that she had inherited the hair of her ancestors, ancestors who had built the great civilizations of Africa. Cooper despaired of the multitude of black women she knew who, although they did not have enough for a computer or even for proper food, nevertheless found the money for long straight hair extensions every month, because they thought it made them prettier, more acceptable. Not to whites, she emphasized, but to other black men. This, Toby said, was very prevalent in Washington, where shops had swatches of long Asian hair hanging on the wall and more than a few black women buying them. They would staple, glue, and tape the hair to their heads, even if this meant they ended up with scalp infections and went bald. In Toby’s opinion, they had been brainwashed into thinking, “the more white-like I am, the better I am.” I was amazed by what Cooper was telling me, but then this was the first time I had ever had a conversation anything like this with a black woman. It turned out that this was also the first time she had ever discussed these things with a white man.
Toby knew from the work of African Ancestry that a third of African American men carry a European Y chromosome, and she had very strong views of how this came about. It was not just that European men had used their position as slave owners to force themselves on the women in their charge—though that would have accounted for a great number of the Y chromosomes but also that these couplings were at times part of a sexual bargain manipulated by black women themselves. According to Cooper, even before they were put on the slave ships, black women had figured out that if they became pregnant by a European man, there was less chance of being transported. Once in America, she told us, this particular type of relationship between black women and white men continued to flourish under slavery. “We knew,” Cooper confided as if suddenly talking for a bygone generation of ancestors, “that if we could soften up the overseer or even let them sleep with us, they might not beat our husbands or our sons.” Although there were no formal marriages between black slaves, I knew what she meant by “our husbands.” In this way black women had made sacrifices to protect their men. “We knew how to manipulate and maneuver and use sex on behalf of our race,” she continued. This did not end with the abolition of slavery, Cooper added, as white households were happy to allow black maids into the house, but not black men.
While black women could get domestic work, their men either toiled as low-paid sharecroppers or had no work at all. It was the women who supported their families through the hard times of the Reconstruction after the end of the Civil War, and it made Cooper angry that this seems to have been forgotten when today’s black men try to get their girlfriends to make themselves look more European. Working as a maid brought with it opportunites for sexual contact between white and black, whether consensual or forced. That, in her view, was the explanation for the abundance of European DNA in African Americans.
Where sex is involved the potential for hypocricy is enormous, as Cooper reminded me when she told the story of Strom Thurmond. Senator Thurmond had died in 2003, aged one hundred, the only senator in the history of the United States to reach that age while still in office. He was vehemently opposed to racial mixing and a savage opponent of the Civil Rights Bill of 1967, conducting the longest-ever solo filibuster in the history of the Senate, lasting over twenty-four hours. Only after his death was it revealed that when he was twenty-two, he and his family’s sixteen-year-old black maid, Carrie Butler, had a daughter, Ellie May. Thurmond never publicly acknowledged her, though he did pay for her college education among other things. After his death, his family acknowledged Essie Mae, making her eligible for membership of the exclusive organization Daughters of the American Revolution through her lineage descent from Thurmond.
Our interview had lasted just thirty minutes, cut short because I was due at a radio studio, but I learned more about African American women in that half hour than I had in my whole life. I was very glad indeed that Gina Paige had put me in touch with Toby Cooper, and very grateful to Cooper for being so frank and open. As she got up to leave, she handed me a copy of White Women, the vivid account of her observations and experiences that she wrote in 1998 and which lays them out even more forcefully than she had in our interview.1
After Toby left, we got straight into a taxi and headed for the studios on the other side of town. Gone were the wide boulevards near our hotel, a stone’s throw from the White House. The streets were narrower and the buildings crowded in on us as the taxi weaved in and out of the traffic. By now it was dark and the people on the street hard to see. Any sense of unease was soon dispelled by the bright lights of the Sirius XM building and, once inside, we were ushered up to Mark Thompson’s studio. I had gotten to know Thompson, though only briefly, through a live radio show for the BBC World Service in which he, Gina Paige, and I had taken part a few months before. It was a discussion and phone-in called Africa Have Your Say, and the topic was the familiar one of the impact of DNA on reinforcing African identity. I didn’t think it was a particularly good show; it suffered from poor participant selection, so too much time was taken up by rants and irrelevances from the phone-in contributors. On the topic of African Americans who visited their tribal homelands, as identified through DNA, I was surprised to hear what an evidently agitated native African caller had to say. In strident tones he told the world that he was fed up with wealthy Americans coming over to his village and embracing their “ancestors,” then hightailing it back to the airport as fast as they could. When asked by the flummoxed adjudicator what he would have liked from his African American cousins, his reply was both brief and direct. “A green card.”
Thompson had impressed me by his evident strength of feeling about what his own DNA connection had meant. In an echo of Oprah Winfrey’s famous declaration, Mark answered the increasingly bewildered adjudicator’s question of what he felt about his own identity after the DNA test. “I am African,” he retorted without a moment’s hesitation. The slot on his show went well enough, I thought, but there were a lot more things I wanted to ask than there was time for. Besides, it was his show, so he was asking the questions. Very generously for such a busy man, Thompson agreed to come around to our hotel for breakfast the next day.
Thompson arrived and joined Ulla and me around the table. He told me that his father and mother had met in Washington when she was a student of fashion design. Thompson was born at the Freedmen’s Hospital, which building now houses Howard University’s School of Communications, a coincidence not lost on the broadcaster. He and his mother moved back to her family in Nashville, Tennessee. His father was meant to follow but he did not, so his maternal uncle, his mother’s brother, took on that role, a custom that Thompson later discovered was almost the norm in Africa. Nashville is a college town with Fisk University and Meharry Medical College (Roy King’s alma mater) being among the first universities, like Howard in Washington, specifically created for black students. Thompson grew up in faculty condos on the campus where, for more than thirty years, his mother was on the administrative staff. This was the early seventies, when black cultural and intellectual activism was reaching a zenith after the civil rights legislation of the late sixties. Everybody involved in the civil rights movement passed through Nashville at one time or another, and the young Thompson was there to see them in the flesh. This infused him with a strong sense of African American culture and of black activism that has stayed with him ever since.
At eighteen Thompson moved back to Washington as a student at Georgetown University, and it was not long before he clashed with the authorities. This was the time when the tide of international opinion was moving against apartheid in South Africa and there was pressure on the U.S. and British governments to impose economic sanctions. Ronald Reagan was president at the time, with Margaret Thatcher his opposite number in Britain. They were both against sanctions, advocating instead the policy euphemistically referred to as “constructive engagement.” Their refusal to condemn apartheid, or at least not to do much about it, sparked a wave of popular protests on both sides of the Atlantic. Thompson got involved when the student body at Georgetown put pressure on the university to pull out from its substantial investments in South Africa. The crunch came when Reagan’s secretary of state for Africa, Chester Crocker, arrived in Georgetown to give a speech, only to be met by crowds of students chanting, “Free Nelson Mandela.” Thompson covered Crocker’s speech for the student newspaper, and his account grew into an in-depth article criticizing U.S. foreign policy toward South Africa, an article that the State Department asked the university not to run, which only served to fan the flames of protest.
Within a few weeks the Georgetown students took over the university’s School of Arts and Sciences, built a South African–style shanty on the campus, shut down the schools, and forced the administration to disinvest. They got their way, but they all went to jail for a spell. As we all know, Nelson Mandela was freed and became the president of his country, going on to become one of the world’s most venerated public figures. But it was not always like that. As the final twist in Thompson’s account of his days as a student activist, he told me that he met Mandela when he visited Washington and that the meeting took place in this very hotel, not ten feet away from where we were sitting having breakfast.
Thompson had already started broadcasting on a black talk station when he got his own show on Sirius XM Radio in Washington in 2001. Not long after that he met Gina Paige and began working closely with her because he felt very strongly that African Americans needed to reestablish their links to Africa, not only for themselves but also for the people of Africa. He had visited the notorious Elmina Castle on the coast of Ghana and found the experience both moving and troubling. In one part of the castle, he told me, is the “door of no return” that leads from the dungeons where the slaves were held and opened straight out onto a ramp down to the shore. Once through that door, there was only one way to go, onto the waiting ship and across the Atlantic to the New World. On Thompson’s visit he and the others in his group had talked about what would have happened if, instead of going to the New World as slaves, their ancestors had stayed where they were. At this point a group of children gathered around offering candies for sale. Thompson asked one of them, a girl of about fourteen, what was her name. “Elizabeth,” she replied. That was Thompson’s mother’s name, his grandmother’s, and that of his female ancestors for as many generations back as he knew. The same was true of the small girl, her mother and grandmother were both Elizabeth. It was she, not Thompson, who then said that perhaps, if they were able to go back far enough, they would find that they were both descended from the same ancestor.
It was very clear to me that Mark Thompson senses the feeling of a severed connection with Africa and that one of his ambitions in life is to help African Americans to regain it, which is the reason he supports and works so closely with Gina Paige and African Ancestry. He has become fascinated by the link between science and spirituality, especially since he became ordained as a minister, and he understands the special qualities of DNA. I now asked him the key question. All through his career as a political activist he had concentrated on his African roots. How would he feel if the DNA test that we were about to do showed that he had other ancestors too, maybe Native American or Asian or, more likely, European? Thompson told me that his mother was very pale-skinned for an African American, but she was raised black. As he was growing up as a kid, people would ask him whether his mother was white, although it was always clear from the way she spoke and carried herself that she was a black woman. It isn’t something that many black people want to acknowledge, but given how fair his mother was, he thought he probably did have some European in his DNA. His father was much darker skinned, and his own pigmentation, he told me, was somewhere in between.
Thompson then went on to tell me that he was doing a little family history research of his own. His maternal grandmother’s surname was Polk, and her family had lived in rural Tennessee since at least the 1800s. James Knox Polk was the eleventh president of the United States, and his family had a plantation in the same part of Tennessee. During his White House years, between 1845 and 1849, it was Polk’s brother William who looked after the plantation. Thompson’s family traced back to a William James Polk, living at about the same time. Though Thompson knew that it was commonplace for slaves to take on the surname of the plantation owner, there was a distinct possibility that, rather like the descendants of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, Mark might also have a direct line back to a president of the United States. Any European DNA that we found might possibly have that special pedigree.
I was very impressed by Thompson and by his thoughtful devotion to his African roots. He had discovered through Gina Paige’s DNA test that his Y chromosome points to an ancestral origin in Sierra Leone while his mitochondrial DNA has come down a long line of matrilineal ancestors from further south, in Cameroon. Before that, like many African Americans, he had cemented his ties to Africa by adopting an African name, Matsimela Mapfumo, which is a blend of South African and Zimbabwean meaning “Firmly Rooted Soldier.” When his DNA results told him that his African ancestry, at least for the two lines tested, was from West Africa rather than the South, the news, if anything, strengthened his feeling of connection. As he explained, when you adopt an African name you choose where you would like to have come from, but when you find out through DNA, then you know. Through his show, the activist in him was beginning to challenge African Americans to become involved and accept some responsibility for the part of Africa that Paige’s DNA tests had identified as their ancestral homes. As we spoke, he was trying very hard to find African Americans whose genetic lines went back to the Congo, the country that, in his view, was in the biggest trouble. He despaired of the minimal coverage given to Africa by the famously insular American media and said he relied on the BBC for most of his information. This was one legacy of British colonialism that he approved of, he said with a wry smile as we left.
In the planning stage for DNA USA I had come across a reference to a working group on genetics and genealogy organized by the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute of African and African American Studies at Harvard. The group had been convened by the institute’s director, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and it looked both exciting and relevant, so I made a mental note to get to see him if I could arrange it. Before I had done anything about it and completely out of the blue, I got a message from a television production company in New York asking whether I would be willing to participate in a documentary with the same Dr. Gates. Of course I was delighted and accepted immediately. Another piece of serendipity. “If you build it they will come.”
The chosen location for this televised encounter was the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and the date proposed fitted perfectly with the end stages of the journey back to Boston for the return flight to England. Ulla and I arrived at the museum first and waited in the lobby by the dinosaur skeletons. I looked outside to see a film crew gathering at the foot of the steps. A car pulled up, and out stepped Dr. Gates. He was elegantly dressed in a dark blue suit, a beautifully pressed white shirt with a maroon tie, and a matching handkerchief neatly folded in his jacket pocket. In his left hand he carried a cane. In complete contrast, having spent three months living out of a suitcase, both I and my outfit could be summed up in a single word: crumpled.
Since filming could not begin until after the doors had closed, the museum had been hired for the evening, and we took over the lower ground floor with its charmingly old-fashioned dioramas of the African plains and the jungles of Borneo, exhibits of a sort that have sadly disappeared from most modern museums. The filming went pretty well as far as I could tell, with each of us kidding the other as we talked about why it was that mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosomes fell into distinct clusters all started off by one person. We filmed late into the night, after which Dr. Gates gave Ulla and me a lift back to our hotel. There was no time for a long conversation in New York, so we arranged something for a few days hence.
As it was, it would be several months before we met again. This was when Ulla and I returned to Boston to meet up with the New England volunteers to go over their DNA results, which, by that time, had come back from the lab. I had timed our visit to coincide with the Annual Dinner of the New England Historical and Genealogy Society, where the main speaker was to be Annette Gordon-Reed, whose biography of the Hemings family and their relationships with Thomas Jefferson I had read and admired. Dr. Gates had also been invited to the dinner as a guest, to be honored with a specially commissioned genealogy by the society. I took this opportunity to arrange to visit him in Harvard a couple of days later with the promise of an interview.
Between our meeting in New York and the approaching rendezvous in Boston, I had read up on Dr. Gates and soon realized quite what a prominent and highly regarded individual he was. He is foremost a scholar, the author of fourteen books so far, including The Signifying Monkey, a theory of literary criticism that went on to win the American Book Award, and The Trials of Phillis Wheatley, an appraisal of America’s first published black poet. However, he has always had a great personal interest in genealogy, and his highly acclaimed television documentary series introduced him to an audience far beyond the narrow confines of academe.
Gates could not have been more accommodating when Ulla and I met him at the Du Bois Institute in Harvard. He took us on a whistle-stop tour of the institute, where we saw the world’s only hip-hop archive, with recordings, memorabilia, and even the footwear of famous rap stars, and, in separate libraries, a fabulous collection of African and African American art, including one project titled The Image of the Black in Western Art. I met his staff, again extremely helpful, and all clearly devoted to Gates. Next we dashed to his house to check on his own DNA results. He had already had his chromosome portrait painted and also his mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosomes analyzed. There wasn’t time for me to look in detail, but I did immediately recognize from the mutations in his mitochondrial DNA that we were both members of the same clan and closely related through our maternal ancestors. No wonder we were getting on well. To Ulla and me he was completely charming, open and extremely helpful. He had enjoyed The Seven Daughters of Eve and, in a very gracious gesture, offered to put my name forward for a fellowship at the institute, an offer that I gratefully accepted.
Gates is well known across the United States as the host of the successful PBS documentary series African American Lives (2006), African American Lives 2 (2008), and Faces of America (2010) in which I made a brief appearance. In these shows Gates introduces a number of prominent Americans to their own ancestry. He was quick to realize the special place that DNA can play in connecting African Americans to Africa and injected that element into all three programs. The genetic component of the most recent program had been helped a great deal by the proximity at Harvard to the Broad Institute, a high-throughput DNA research facility founded by two luminaries of genetics, Eric Lander and David Baltimore, which is devoted to untangling the genetics of common disease. I had known these two distinguished scientists as champions of the human genome and also a third, George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School who was affiliated with the Broad. Through his membership of Church’s Personal Genome Project, Gateses junior and senior were the first father and son, and the first African Americans, to have their entire genomes sequenced. Since then, the Du Bois Institute has gone on to cosponsor the Roots into the Future initiative, a large-scale program of genetic testing, directed specifically at African Americans, that is searching for sophisticated correlations between genetics and treatment in this community that has, thus far, been distressingly underrepresented in the genetics data.
In African American Lives Gates employs mitochondrial and Y-chromosome tests on his guests in a way that is familiar to us. He also used the AIMs markers to estimate the ethnic composition of their genomes. Remember that when these documentaries were made, in 2006 and 2008, chromosome painting was not available. Even so, I was keen to ask Gates about himself, his experiences making the shows, how his guests had reacted, and lots of other things. We met over dinner with some of his colleagues from the faculty. The location was the Charles Hotel on Harvard Square, and the diners, other than Dr. Gates, Ulla, and me, were Marcyliena Morgan, an anthropologist, a professor of African and African American Studies, and the director of the hip-hop archive; Lawrence D. Bobo, W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard and a member of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences; and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, a professor of History and chair of the Department of African and African American Studies. On paper, this was a high-class academic gathering with more degrees around the table than pieces of cutlery. However, it was no dry encounter but one where serious discussion was punctuated by witty repartee and loud peals of laughter. Ulla and I have rarely had such an entertaining evening.
I had prepared a list of questions in my notebook. The first of these referred to Gates’s own DNA. As mentioned a short while back, he and I are closely related through our mitochondrial DNA. That is not because I have an African matrilineal ancestor, but because Gates is a member of one of the seven European clans and shares my clan mother, Tara. It is quite unusual for an African American to have a European mitochondrial DNA, but that was not the point of my question. Rather, it concerned the way this news was relayed to him by the lab. One of the first things people want to know when they get their DNA results, naturally enough, is who they match and where their newfound relatives are from. When Gates had asked this question, he was told he had a match in Nubia, a region of Sudan on the River Nile to the south of Egypt. What he was not told was that he also had hundreds of other matches in Europe, which is no surprise for a descendant of Tara. I was interested in the reason for this omission. When Gates saw a map of the Old World with his mitochondrial DNA matches marked on it, sure enough there was one red spot in Nubia, but to the north and west, the spots were so dense that, in his own words, “it looked as if Europe had smallpox.” So why was he not told about these genetic matches in Europe? When he challenged the lab, not the Broad on this occasion, they said that they thought he might be disappointed. “Were you?” I asked. “No, not at all,” he replied, but it still struck me as interesting that the lab thought he might have been.
We then moved on to how African Americans reacted to discovering the extent of their European ancestry. It is very unusual for them to have non-African mitochondrial DNA, but very common for African American men to carry European Y chromosomes, which roughly a third of them do, as we have seen. In my conversations with Gina Paige and Rick Kittles, they were very aware of the potential for disappointment that people felt when confronted with this particular piece of news. That chimed with my much more limited experience when I had been asked to do the same test on some Afro-Caribbean celebrities in Britain for a BBC documentary, Who Do You Think You Are? In one case I remember, a top-class athlete had an obviously European Y chromosome, but the producers kept that from him and it was never shown. Yet Dr. Gates’s view was that it really didn’t matter all that much and that African Americans would, or should, be very comfortable with discovering that some of their ancestors had European roots. Behind his answer was, I think, one of the founding principles of the Du Bois Institute that is so central to Gates’s vision: African American culture was not merely African across the Atlantic but a separate culture, worthy as a subject of scholarship in its own right, irrespective of the identity of the scholar or student. In other words, you didn’t need to be an African American to study the culture any more than you had to be English to appreciate Shakespeare.
However much African Americans know about the general conditions of their ancestry, Gates found—as Rick Kittles had done, and as I had done on a much smaller scale—that they can sometimes be shocked when they first hear that so much of their DNA is rooted in Europe. We have already seen the sequence of reactions from initial surprise or even anger to eventual acceptance among the customers of African Ancestry. But there are some African Americans who are sure that absolutely all their ancestors are from Africa. Probably the most famous of these is Oprah Winfrey. She is also numbered among Dr. Gates’s friends and was one of the guests on the first series of African American Lives and the subject of his book Finding Oprah’s Roots. For this she took a mitochondrial DNA test the day before she was due to leave for South Africa to visit the orphanage that she was sponsoring. As soon as she arrived in South Africa, she made her famous quote “I am a Zulu”, which was flashed around the world, much to Gates’s surprise. As the golden rule of DNA television is to keep the results a secret until the on-camera “reveal,” he immediately rang the lab to ask if they had given the results to Oprah. They answered that they certainly had not, and, in any event, as the DNA sample had only just arrived, it would be several days before they had the results. When the lab results did come back, it was obvious that Oprah’s mitochondrial DNA matched others from West Africa, in particular Liberia, much more closely than anyone from Zululand. That was always the more likely origin. Zululand, which is situated in South Africa far from the coast, is a long way from the main centers of slavery. Showing a certain amount of surprise but certainly not indignation at having her roots moved halfway across the continent, Oprah quickly and graciously assimilated the new information. She may not have been a Zulu, but she was certainly African, a point reinforced when an AIMs test found no trace of European DNA. A remarkable woman in more ways than one.
At this point I slipped my own DNA into the conversation. From a genetic point of view, I was part African myself. My own chromosome portrait had revealed that a DNA segment at the end of the short arm of my chromosome 11 was half European and half African. “If I were an American, would I qualify as an African American?” I inquired. Bobo, who laughs even more zestily than Gates, said that the infamous “one-drop” rule would almost certainly have classified me as a slave in the old days. The short arm of chromosome 11 is packed with important genes, one of which controls insulin production. Thus one of my two copies of the insulin gene is African, and since the only place insulin is made in the body is inside the pancreas, I considered myself, metaphorically at least, to have a black pancreas.
As the evening progressed, we meandered through a wide range of topics: The situation in Brazil, where there are an astonishing 134 unofficial racial categories. The case of P.B.S. Pinchback, the first black acting governor of any state, Louisiana, who was sworn in during 1872 and who, although the son of a slave, appeared very white indeed. “You would look like Michael Jordan next to him,” quipped Gates. The sad case of the writer and critic Anatole Broyard, whose daughter Bliss wrote the touching biography One Drop. Broyard was diagnosed with prostate cancer and, because of his appearance, treated as a white man. Had his doctors been aware of his true ancestry, which was partly black, they may have treated his cancer more aggressively and in so doing perhaps saved his life.
As the party eventually broke up, I felt so very fortunate that my profession had brought me into contact with such wonderful company. The long reach of genetics, far beyond the confines of the laboratory bench, had led me all over America and the world. Neither at supper that night, nor in any of the revealing conversations that I had been privileged to have with African Americans during my journey, had we gotten anywhere near “solving” the relationship between genetics and race. There is no “solution.” But knowing that at least one of my ancestors had been black, and that my own pancreas depended on that legacy, had certainly blurred the edges of my perception and, not for the first time, brought home to me the myriad threads that bind us all into the same human family.