November 22, 2023
Finding your DNA roots is proving interesting. It used to be that the racists said that if you had a drop of African blood you were black. Well a dear friend of mine is white but she found via the 1870 census that her great great great grandmother is listed as mulatto yet she still considers herself as white. On a hunting trip with a father and son, they found that their DNA listed them as one percent African. They joked about it and still consider themselves as white, not black. I am one percent Native American – presumably Cherokee – but am still black. I wonder why if all these other people have African blood, why aren’t they not African-American? Obviously they are not or else they would be able to dance much better than they can right now.
So who is really African-American? I don’t use the term for myself even though I am 50 percent African. If I go to Togo, Benin or the Congo, none of the residents look vaguely like me. No one is going to come up to me and say welcome home my brother in whatever language they speak. We blacks in America are a unique race, having been thoroughly mixed up. I have 10 distinct DNA strains. My mother was 32 percent British but never claimed that nationality. In fact the term African-American was first used by racists at emancipation to denigrate the newly minted black citizens as being a lesser American. Isn’t it interesting that we have adopted the same term?
When the term “black” was first used in the civil rights era my father refused to call himself that. In those days, the terms “Negro” and “colored” were used. My Dad used to say “well what are we calling ourselves this week? The term black then denoted something that was not positive. He finally came around to using “black”. I find African-American as ignoring all the other DNA strains. I guess I am a Mongrel-American but that term will never get traction.
A friend of mine said that for him African-American denoted all of us who have African roots and whose ancestors were enslaved. So I guess that excludes all blacks who were not the product of slavery. What of the blacks who came as indentured servants and were never slaves? Are they African-Americans too? What about the black immigrants? Are they African-Americans?
What all this means is that the one drop of blood no longer defines what is an African-American but neither does slavery. What are we and what should we call ourselves? The term African-American is a cop-out and is the product of intellectual laziness. Yet it is convenient. I will still use the term black but I am a dying breed.
What do you call yourself? I know Italian-Americans, Greek-Americans, Asian-Americans, Native Americans and other hyphenated Americans. Yet few if any are “pure”. They claim the dominate DNA gene. One person I know mother’s side came from Italy and his father’s side came from Poland. What is he? His last name is Polish but he doesn’t consider himself a Polish-American. He actually says he has closer ties to his mother’s side of the family yet he doesn’t say he is Italian-American. This country has been truly a melting pot and perhaps one day all this racial distinction will fade and we will all recognize ourselves as a mixed breed. Obama had an African father and a white mother. Is he mixed race? Tiger Woods has a Thai mother and a black father. Is he mixed race? What about the rest of us? American-Americans anyone?
haroldblackphd.com 