[Mb-civic] Beyond 'Roots' - Alondra Nelso - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  Beyond 'Roots'

By Alondra Nelson  |  February 10, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

NEARLY THREE decades after Alex Haley's book ''Roots" aired as a 
television miniseries and sparked a national conversation about race, we 
are seeing a new cultural moment as the result of Henry Louis ''Skip" 
Gates's PBS series ''African American Lives." But this time, the 
conversation has a new twist in the form of the double helix.

Three of the four episodes follow African-American celebrities -- Oprah 
Winfrey, Quincy Jones, and Chris Tucker, among others -- as they 
discover details about their extended kin through the use of 
conventional means of genealogical recovery, including oral history and 
painstaking archival research.

But in the fourth episode, which aired Wednesday, new genetic techniques 
only dreamed of 30 years ago are used to trace the subjects' ancestry. 
One technique traces matrilineal and patrilineal inheritance by 
analyzing mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosome DNA, respectively. A second 
test provides subjects with their percentage of ancestry from four 
racial groups.

Although a similar documentary ran on the BBC in 2004 (''Motherland: A 
Genetic Journey") and PBS has aired documentaries on how genetics can 
illuminate the relatedness and evolution of human populations (such as 
''The Journey of Man"), this is the first national consideration of how 
genetics might assist African-Americans in uncovering knowledge of 
ancestral lineages that were lost to slavery.

There is much that is laudable about this series. It is an innovative 
take on television biography that proceeds from the assumption that the 
answer to the question ''Who am I?" can be achieved by filling in gaps 
in a network of kin. Through the processes of familial reconstruction, 
we also learn a great deal about the subjects -- their respective 
backgrounds, formative experiences, mentors, familial culture, and their 
ascendance from modest origins.

As the documentary's narrator and host, Skip Gates plays a central role. 
In each of the episodes, he nimbly supplies the celebrities with 
information about their family tree. He also serves as a science 
educator of sorts, translating the genetic genealogical information to 
the subjects. In the final episode, perhaps lifting a page from 
''reality television" with a shocking ''reveal," he informs Sarah 
Lawrence-Lightfoot that, despite her cultural affinities and what she 
knows of her familial history, genetic analysis based on an 
unrepresentative DNA database concludes that she does not have Native 
American ancestry. He is also on hand with other celebrities to 
empathize and explain when they receive inconclusive results, as is the 
case when a genetic marker is found in Africa but on other continents as 
well.

Most people who are lining up to take the genetic genealogy tests will 
not receive such ''star" treatment. Consumers of genetic genealogy 
testing receive their results at home in the mail. So what happens when, 
standing in their kitchens at the end of a workday, they open the 
envelope to find shocking results that may fundamentally alter their 
self-conceptions?

Some recent studies based on Y chromosome analysis have revealed that up 
to a third of black men have white paternal ancestry. Most people, and 
especially African-Americans, understand (thanks in part to Alex Haley) 
that these findings reflect the historical collision of power, race, 
commerce, and sexuality that characterized slavery. But it's another 
thing to be confronted with this reality by a certificate of ancestry or 
a diagram of your racial composite received in the mail.

It is in these moments that black consumers could use a friend like 
Gates. Left to absorb the results on their own, to reconcile the genetic 
genealogical information with other ways of knowing about their 
families, many are faced with the choice of opting in or out of the 
genetic identity that has been sold to them.

What appears as a choice may in fact be a Faustian bargain. For as the 
final episode of ''African American Lives" suggests, the genetic 
ancestral information based on imperfect science becomes a trump card, 
diminishing the detailed genealogical inquiry of the preceding three 
episodes.

To be sure, we are all active agents in the formations of our 
identities, be it through performance, familial stories, and, yes, even 
genetics. Yet, given the social power of genetics, the science may have 
an edge.

Alondra Nelson, a teacher of sociology and African-American studies at 
Yale University, is author of the forthcoming ''Body and Soul: The Black 
Panther Party and the Politics of Race and Health." 

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/02/10/beyond_roots/
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