In the years since I first learned about my father’s racial background, DNA testing has become increasingly popular among genealogists as a way to uncover their more distant ancestry once the paper trail goes cold, and dozens of companies have sprung up to accommodate their interest. The types of available tests fall into two categories: lineage tests that trace the geographic origins of the person on the top of your maternal or paternal line—i.e., your great-great-great-etc.-grandmother was Welsh, or belonged to the Kru tribe in Liberia—and “ancestral admixture” tests, which determine the percentage of your ancestors who were Indo-European, sub-Saharan African, Native American, and East Asian.
The genetic markers used by the DNA ancestry companies to link a person to a specific population group were developed with the same technology that allowed scientists to map the human genome. This is ironic, because while one of the most trumpeted findings of the Human Genome Project was that “the concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis” since, in President Clinton’s words, “all human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9 percent the same,” the results of DNA genealogy tests tend to reaffirm people’s notion that race is a biological fact. For me at least, they dangled the possibility of a definitive “scientific” answer to the question How black am I?
I waited on the phone in Brooklyn while my mother pried open the little ceramic jar in which she kept the leftover ashes from my father’s burial urn. Her willingness to sift through her dead husband’s ashes for some sizable pieces from which his DNA might be extracted initially surprised me. But after a lifetime of being on intimate terms with death, my mother wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty with it. She even took some pleasure in the job. She’d put the phone down and I could hear her swearing in the background.
“What happened?” I asked when she returned. “You didn’t spill them?”
She laughed wickedly. “I couldn’t get the top off. But I have it now. Yup, there are some b-i-g pieces here.”
“Are you sifting them through something? A colander?”
“Just feeling around with my hands.”
“You’re touching them?”
“Sure, why not?” She made some lip-smacking noises. “Yum, salty...”
“Mom, be serious.”
“Oh. This one looks like Daddy’s tooth.”
My mother mailed off an assortment of chunks to one of the companies that provide DNA ancestry testing. But it turned out that the pieces were too small and charred to yield any insight into my father’s genetic history. And even my mother—a hoarder who was particularly loathe to get rid of anything pertaining to my father—didn’t still have a hairbrush or sweater lying around that might contain some of his stray hairs (with the root attached). I had to settle for testing myself and some of my family. Nevertheless, the results came as a complete surprise.
It’s generally agreed among population scientists that, according to our DNA, human beings originated in East Africa. What we recognize as racial differences—skin color, hair texture, facial features, and body types—are mostly the result of adaptation to new climates as we migrated across the globe. For people living closer to the equator, darker skin helped to protect against potentially deadly exposure to the sun’s ultraviolet rays. Alternately, the farther north humans wandered, the lighter their skin became, to aid the development of essential vitamin D, which required absorbing adequate ultraviolet radiation. Curly or frizzy hair was better suited for hotter climates, since it trapped sweat near the scalp, prolonging the body’s natural cooling process.
According to the findings of the genome researchers, all these external differences only account for somewhere in the range of 0.1 percent of our genetic makeup, which is insignificant when compared with the thousands of genes that determine who we “really” are—our intelligence, our emotional sensitivity, our artistic talents—none of which can be sorted according to specific racial groups. Yet within precisely that 0.1 percent of difference also lie the clues about where our ancestors came from.
Two types of DNA that are exempt from recombination—the Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA—pass down unchanged from one generation to the next, providing an unbroken link to our past, similar to the way a surname is passed down through the paternal line. However, just as the spelling or pronunciation of a last name sometimes altered slightly as a family moved through a region or across the globe, so did these normally static types of DNA undergo small copying errors as the human family ventured forth from its original home of Africa. These “spelling” variations—which usually reside on the “junk” portion of the DNA and don’t affect our looks or character—function like passport stamps on our genetic code, allowing scientists to re-create the different migratory paths taken by human beings as they populated the earth and pinpoint where our ancestors lived thousands of years ago.
The Y chromosome is passed from father to son; therefore my brother’s would lead me back to the region of origin for our very distant paternal great-grandfather. But I already knew from my genealogical research that the trail would almost certainly end in Europe. As with the vast majority of black Americans with European ancestry, the mixed-race pairings in our family tree occurred between white men and black women. I decided instead to test my father’s mitochondrial DNA (which is inherited by both men and women from their mothers) to trace the geographic origins of my grandmother’s maternal family tree.
Because men don’t pass along their mitochondrial DNA to their children, I had to obtain a sample from my father’s sister Shirley. She volunteered a swab of her cheek cells to send to African Ancestry, a company launched by a Howard University geneticist named Dr. Rick Kittles, which promised to connect her maternal lineage to a specific tribe in Africa. While at it, I collected another sample from her to send to DNAPrint Genomics, a company based in Florida that performed the ancestral admixture test.
Ignoring the Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA, DNAPrint analyzed the rest of the genome for variations called single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that could be sorted into the four basic population groups. Ideally these Ancestry Information Markers were present in all members of one group and absent in all members of the other groups. Again the markers don’t typically appear on portions of our DNA that control specific traits, so the company wasn’t considering genes for hair texture, skin color, or any of the other physical characteristics associated with race. At the same time, however, the degree of admixture does seem to affect physical appearance. According to DNAPrint, a person begins to exhibit recognizable traits of a population group at 30 percent ancestry.
Given that my father could pass for white, I expected him to fall somewhere below 30 percent African ancestry. By comparing Shirley’s results to those for my mother, my brother, and me, the scientist at DNAPrint, Matt Thomas, was going to try to infer my father’s ratio. It was strange to think that in a matter of weeks, I could have an answer to the question that I’d been grappling with for more than a dozen years.
News stories about DNA ancestry testing often include someone who didn’t receive the results they were expecting. Richard Gabriel, the CEO of DNAPrint, told me that the mostly frequently disappointed group was people who expected to find Native American roots; about half the time, the results come back negative. The company had even coined the term American Indian Princess Syndrome to describe these customers’ determination to prove this branch of their family tree. Their motivation might extend beyond an attachment to their family lore: with Indian gaming revenues reaching almost $20 billion annually, tribal membership can mean access to lucrative payouts. In 2006 the New York Times reported a story about an increasing number of individuals who hoped to leverage trace amounts of minority ancestry, discovered through DNA testing, to bolster their chances of obtaining college financial aid or new employment as a minority applicant. DNAPrint has found that about 5 percent of customers who self-identify as white show up with some African ancestry. More frequently people who think of themselves as black turn up with European and Native American roots.
In 2003 ABC’s Nightline program featured a story about a Los Angeles high school principal who had recently obtained his “ancestral admixture” from DNAPrint. Like some of my Broyard cousins, the man’s family were Creoles from Louisiana who had moved to California in the 1950s to escape Jim Crow segregation. He was very light-skinned, but he always thought of himself as black and raised his children to be proud of their black heritage. According to DNAPrint, however, he was 57 percent Indo-European, 39 percent Native American, 4 percent East Asian, and not black at all. The news program’s requisite qualifications about margins of error and the estimated nature of the percentages notwithstanding, the principal told Nightline that the results had “rocked my world.” He even questioned his seventy-six-year-old mother about whether he was adopted. He said that he would mark off “Native American” on future census forms “because no one will doubt that I’m a native of this country or that my story is uniquely an American one.”
I worried that I wouldn’t show up with any African ancestry either. And in the first result I received from DNAPrint, I didn’t. But then again neither did my aunt Shirley. I was 90 percent Indo-European and 10 percent Native American, and she was 94 percent Indo-European and 6 percent Native American. “But how can I not have any African?” asked Shirley. It didn’t make sense, especially since we’d also received the results of her mitochondrial DNA analysis. According to African Ancestry, her and my father’s maternal lineage traced back to the Hausa tribe, who could be found in present-day Nigeria.
The folks at DNAPrint suspected that my father and his sister’s African ancestry may indeed have been little more than “one drop.” It was certainly below the range for recognizable traits, perhaps even too negligible to be picked up. It was also possible that DNAPrint’s current test wasn’t always able to distinguish between Native American and sub-Saharan African ancestries. The accuracy of their Ancestry Information Markers depended on the purity of the people in their sample pools. Finding unmixed Native Americans presented a particular challenge, given a colonial history of the New World that not only wiped out many of the original inhabitants but also resulted in the frequent intermixing of natives with people of European and African descent. The absence of civil or sacramental records in most cases made it difficult to confirm the genealogy of Native Americans who believed themselves to be unmixed. DNAPrint decided to run our DNA samples again with a new version of the test that more than doubled the number of Ancestry Information Markers, which should significantly increase the accuracy of the results.
This time I showed up with 13 percent sub-Saharan African ancestry, which made more sense—until I compared my results to those for my brother and my aunt Shirley. Todd—who with his blond hair, blue eyes, and pale skin looked even less black than I did—had 18 percent African ancestry, while my aunt Shirley—who, although light-skinned, looked phenotypically black—turned up with only 9 percent African ancestry (and another 9 percent Native American). The results were too ambiguous to help in calculating my father’s own admixture. It seemed that the inheritance of Ancestry Information Markers depended on the luck of the draw, which made these genealogical DNA tests feel more like a parlor game than the kind of hard science that I was hoping, against my better judgment, would unlock my family secrets once and for all.
Even so, both my aunt and my brother planned on mentioning the particulars of their admixture during their next visit to the doctor, in case the genetic hand they’d been dealt also contained a propensity for one of the diseases prevalent among members of their “invisible” ancestries. Shirley’s cardiologist, for example, might want to take into account her majority European descent before prescribing BiDil, a heart medication that was approved by the FDA exclusively for black patients. And Todd’s internist might want to consider screening Todd for prostate cancer at the recommended age of forty-five for black men versus fifty for white men.
The results of these genealogical DNA tests are destined to become more accurate and meaningful as the science evolves and the databases of sample pools grow larger and more diverse. The National Geographic Society is currently in the middle of a five-year, $40 million effort to collect 100,000 DNA samples from indigenous populations in order to create an atlas of humankind’s migrations across the globe. The completed genographic database, which will represent “the world’s largest collection of DNA samples,” will allow scientific communities (and genealogical DNA companies) to greatly refine the genetic markers used to pinpoint a person’s ancestral origins.
Perhaps then I’ll be able to solve a new family mystery that arose during my DNA genealogical adventure. I had tested my mother in the process of trying to infer my father’s ancestral admixture. She grew up thinking that she was Norwegian on both her maternal and paternal sides—a lineage that was no doubt particularly attractive to my father. But according to DNAPrint, she’s 13 percent Native American, which could mean that one of her great-grandparents was a full-bloodied Indian. “How about that!” she exclaimed when I shared her results. “And you thought you got all your diversity from your father!”
My mother’s father’s family migrated from Norway to Minnesota in 1849, when the state was still a territory mostly populated by the Sioux and Ojibwe tribes. Although I haven’t yet unearthed any genealogical records or buried family stories to support DNAPrint’s findings, they do seem within the realm of possibility. But my mother doesn’t attribute much significance to her newfound Native American heritage; she doesn’t plan to acknowledge it on future census questionnaires nor has it affected how she thinks of herself. That her family’s Indian ancestry—because of the particulars of the mixing or the attitudes of the surrounding culture—doesn’t seem to have affected their lives whatsoever allows her to regard it as an intriguing but mostly benign revelation.
But obviously this wasn’t the case in my father’s family. History, law, and public opinion made the fact of his black blood matter, whether it was 50 percent, 13 percent, or only one drop.