Like most African Americans from the southeast coast of the United States I thought I knew my ethnic heritage. We have a lengthy heritage for the most part, entwined for better or worse, with the stodgy old plantation culture of colonial America. So, we have names like Smith, Brown, Black, and White but also Irish and Scottish surnames as well as plenty monikers from elsewhere across Europe. Some of us mixed right into Native American communities becoming Seminole, Creek, and Lumbee—a beautiful, undeniably tri-racial people. Back to the beginning of my story, we assume we know our heritage and by all indications it is West African with some English/Irish and Native American but before I put the period there, that has come to mean African American, right? Well, maybe not.
I’m writing a book about race; mixed raced, people called tri-racial and bi-racial in America. Along the way, I started paying closer attention to DNA ancestry tests and through paying attention I started to hear diverse conversations. The one that stuck in my mind, in my craw actually was the one where people defined culturally as “white” had tests coming back with smidgens of Sub-Saharan African (SSE). These people would then converse online chatting more freely in the virtual world than perhaps they do in the real world, about whether or not they had thick lips, frizzy hair and well ... a big butt. Some would write in to these different websites with riotous indignation: These tests are flawed, they’d assert, I’m pure white, white as a lily, all my heritage traces back to merry old England, I’ve got the paper work to prove it! Okay, so I paraphrase but only to make the point of what I was seeing.
At my writer’s desk I was relatively smug. I already knew and accepted that I was mixed. The typical, dare I say, all American mix, Black, White, and Red. End of story ... but not quite. I kept reading those chats. It became almost compulsive must-read material. I found African American-orientated websites with pissed off people too—ones where folk couldn’t find their haplogroup to be Sub-Saharan African. If you’re not up on all this lingo, if you can’t find your haplogroup in the place you feel is your origin—well, some one has some explaining to do or you have to do some research on your own. These people who could not find their haplogroups in typical Sub-Saharan African lineage, for example the “L” group, where pissed with a capitol “P.”
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