Gates has help popularize geneaology research and DNA testing for African-Americans through his program “African American Lives” which is in its second installment on PBS.
DNA testing as a reliable indicator of African ancestry may not be all it’s cracked up to be says Darryl Fears of the Sunday Age. He writes that “since the tests began in 2003, questions have been raised about their accuracy.”
The Guardian (London) – Final Edition
February 17, 2006 Friday
G2: New roots: Wealthy African-Americans are using DNA kits to trace their roots – all the way back to Africa. But, says Gary Younge the results may tell them things they don’t want to hear
BYLINE: Gary Younge
SECTION: GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGES; Pg. 14
LENGTH: 1689 words
Oprah is a Zulu. Never mind that she was born and raised in Mississippi and her great grandparents hailed from no further away than Georgia and North Carolina, Ms Winfrey, the queen of the televised confessional, is not just suggesting her lineage might stretch back thousands of years to a specific African tribe. She is asserting it as a definitive fact. “I always wondered what it would be like if it turned out I am a South African. I feel so at home here . . . Do you know that I actually am one?” she told an audience of 3,200 in Johannesburg last year. “I went in search of my roots and had my DNA tested, and I am a Zulu.”
This month in the US, Oprah has been joined by eight other African-American luminaries, including Quincy Jones and Whoopi Goldberg, in tracing their genealogy. Thirty years after Alex Haley famously traced the oral history passed down through his family back to Gambia to find his African ancestor, Kunta Kinte, who had been sold into slavery these celebrities will undertake a similar journey alongside Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr in a television series called African-American Lives. But unlike Haley’s Roots, few have been able to turn to family historians in search of their genealogical narrative.
So when the stories stop and the paper trail of slaves bought and sold runs out, the participants have turned to genetic science to trace their kin. But while these journeys into the past are essentially personal, they raise broader issues about racial authenticity and the genetic basis for racial categorisations. Furthermore, it addresses the fundamental issue of whether any of us can, ultimately, really say where we come from – and what use it would do us even if we could.
Over the past few years laboratories have begun to amass a database of DNA samples from around the world, including parts of West Africa, the area from which most slaves were caught, sold and shipped to the Americas.
The technology aims either to trace a person’s lineage through their genes or compile a statistical breakdown, by geographical region, of their genetic makeup. Alondra Nelson, an assistant professor of sociology and African-American studies at Yale, says results “could stretch from several thousand years to tens of thousands of years in a person’s ancestry”.
Mark Shriver, an assistant professor of anthropology and genetics at Penn State university, conducts geographical genetic tests on his students among others. He describes himself as white but his own tests reveal that his DNA is 86% white but also 11% west African and 3% indigenous American. “For most people it is consistent with what they thought,” he says. “How the west African DNA got into my family line was never explained to me.”
Another method of testing follows the genes back through gender lines. One, the patrilineal, follows the Y chromosome through your father, your father’s father, your father’s father’s father and so on. The other, the mitochondrial, follows DNA through your maternal line – or your mother’s mother, your mother’s mother’s mother and so on.
“It’s basically a matchmaking game,” Megan Smolenyak, an expert in family history research, told the New York Daily News. “I like to warn folks: be sure you can deal with the results . . . Some people don’t like what they find.”
The science, now commercially available, has become something of a boom industry. Growing numbers of relatively wealthy African-Americans have been buying up test kits that can cost up to $350 (£200) a throw.
While other Americans could travel to towns in Ireland, Italy or Germany in search of genealogical sustenance, slavery deprived African-Americans of a clear and precise geographical bond with their own ancestry. As Gates puts it: “There is no Ellis Island for the descendants of the slave trade.” Moreover, since slave-owners changed people’s names, regularly split up families and banned reading and writing, the usual methods of keeping family histories have not been available to African-Americans until relatively recently.
This new science, then, seemed to offer a means of telling a story that had been denied and hidden. Even as DNA evidence was freeing many – mostly black – prisoners from death row it was also unlocking historical secrets. For example, historians had insisted for 150 years that America’s third president, Thomas Jeffer son, could not have fathered children by his slave mistress Sally Hemmings. Many African-Americans claimed otherwise, however, and in 1998 scientists followed the Y chromosome DNA in Jefferson’s family line to establish a definitive link with the Hemmings family. Almost 200 years after Jefferson had cryptically parried accusations of the affair with the words “the man who fears no truth has nothing to fear from lies”, science had exposed the facts that a mixture of prejudice and politics had kept hidden.
In reality, however, the truths this science reveals are no less selective than those you will hear from a politician. Two years ago I swabbed my cheek with something that felt like a cotton bud and sent it off to a Washington-based organisation called African Ancestry. Several weeks later it sent me a letter telling me that the “Y chromosome DNA sequence that we determined from your sample matches with the Hausa people in Nigeria . . . This result means that you have inherited through your father a segment of DNA that was passed on consistently from father to son to you. This segment of DNA is presently found in Africa in Nigeria.”
They also sent me a map showing me where Nigeria is and a “certificate of ancestry” declaring that I “share paternal genetic ancestry with the Hausa people in Nigeria”. It went on,”You can display it with pride among other important family documents.”
Elsewhere in the letter, however, came information that would seem to minimise the entire enterprise if not negate it altogether. “The Y chromosome may represent less than 1% of your entire genetic makeup” it said. That is to say that I had possibly been awarded an ancestry courtesy of a fraction of my DNA.
Herein lies one of the central problems with tracing ones roots through DNA. Science can only tell you so much. Stop the genealogical wheel at an inconvenient moment and some of the world’s greatest black icons could be rendered not African, but European. Muhammad Ali’s great grandfather was Irish; Bob Marley’s father was British. According to Shriver, Gates – the most prominent black academic in the country – has DNA that is 50% European and 50% West African. Both his matrilineal and paternal lines came back to Europe.
“I’ve spoken with African Americans who have tried four or five different genetic genealogy companies because they weren’t satisfied with the results,” says Nelson. “They received different results each time and kept going until they got a result they were happy with.”
“There are some people who are black who may have only 10% African ancestry,” says Shriver. “It helps create an understanding that race is an illusion and that there isn’t any real difference between races. They show that we’re all mixes.”
Critics of Shriver’s work say he is actually achieving the opposite – elevating race from a social construct – a difference created to justify racism – into something that appears both real and even calculable. Paul Gilroy, the Anthony Giddens sociology professor at the London School of Economics, says: “To make all these claims is to realign science with the racial categorisations of the 18th century.”
Shriver defends his work. “That is a potential problem,” he admits. “The labels are arbitrary. It’s a model. We have taken these four categories that mean something for New World people. But I don’t respect people who don’t want to explore this issue and see what happens. There’s quite a lot of hubris out there when it comes to genomic work and ethics.”
Neither the mixing nor the denial is exclusive to descendants of former slaves or issues of race. Everyone could claim African ancestry given that civilisation is deemed to have started there. Although Mediterranean Europeans define themselves as white, they share a long heritage with North Africans.
“Everybody is mixed, but not everybody counts as mixed,” says Gilroy. “These things are interesting but the truth is that no one can say with any certainty where they come from.”
Like Nelson, Gilroy does not deny the need for these tests. “Some people say knowing made them feel complete,” she says. She tells of one African-American woman whose match took her to an area of Sierra Leone where many of the women were accomplished potters. This woman came from a family of skilled potters. “I don’t know how you like those two facts,” says Nelson. “But I know it was very meaningful for her.”
Which brings us back to Oprah. Last week she gave author James Frey a dressing down on her couch for the memoir he wrote and she helped promote that turned out to owe far more to fiction than fact. Angry, and at times tearful, Oprah asked the author of A Million Little Pieces to explain why he felt “the need to lie”. “It is difficult for me to talk to you because I really feel duped,” she said. “But more importantly I feel that you betrayed millions of readers.” Whatever Oprah’s belief about her ancestry, her assertion that she is Zulu is no less misleading.
According to most historical accounts, the Zulu nation was consolidated only after the departure of slaves from West Africa to the Americas. Moreover, there is little in the way of genetic lineage that comes close to matching a particular linguistic group such as the Zulu nation. When Oprah had her DNA tested for the programme, the results suggested her most likely match was from the Kpelles tribe of Liberia. Indeed she was told that she could not have come from South Africa. None of this is likely to stop her claiming the Zulus as her kith and kin. “I’m crazy about the South African accent,” she said. “I wish I had been born here.”
Perhaps her new-found relations, and those of her fellow celebrities say less about the power of science than something both far more elusive and compelling – the desire for identity
LOAD-DATE: February 17, 2006
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/02/10/beyond_roots/
The Boston Globe
February 10, 2006 Friday
THIRD EDITION
BEYOND `ROOTS’
BYLINE: BY ALONDRA NELSON
SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A19
LENGTH: 717 words
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.
LOAD-DATE: February 10, 2006
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
NOTES: 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.”
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper
Interesting interview with Henry Louis Gates in Time Out New York:
http://www.timeout.com/newyork/articles/time-in/25980/the-mothership-connection
# Time Out New York / Issue 644 : January 30, 2008 – February 5, 2008
# The mothership connection
# Henry Louis Gates Jr. puts a human face on history in African American Lives 2.
#
# By Andrew Johnston
#
FORWARD INTO THE PAST Tina Turner, left, and Gates chart the singers family tree.
Black History Month always yields an avalanche of documentaries with an “eat your vegetables” feel to them, but there’s nothing dull or stuffy about Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s African American Lives programs. In the original 2006 series, Gates—director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard—gathered a group of notable African-Americans that included Oprah Winfrey, Whoopi Goldberg and Quincy Jones, and used DNA testing and genealogical research to trace their families through the Great Migration, Reconstruction and slavery, all the way back to Africa. The results were hugely entertaining, with unexpected echoes of TV classics such as What’s My Line? and This Is Your Life. For the sequel, Gates has assembled an even more impressive roster of guests, among them Morgan Freeman, Don Cheadle, Tina Turner and Chris Rock. TONY recently called Gates at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to discuss the new African American Lives 2.
One of the things I love about the African American Lives programs is how much fun they are because of your showmanship—it’s obvious you really enjoy revealing all that unknown information to your guests.
I love it. It’s a fantasy for me. When I was a kid, I loved Watch Mr.Wizard—he’d tell you how electricity worked, that sort of thing, and he was amazing at being able to reveal something complex to a broad audience. Years later I remember watching Jacob Bronowski in The Ascent of Man on PBS and thinking, Man, if I could do that, I’d have died and gone to heaven. As fate would have it, I was put in the position to be a TV host, and because my early programs were successful, I was able to become an executive producer and take control of my own narrative instead of being like a celebrity entertainer who just reads someone else’s words.
I imagine you already had a lot of the necessary skills from years of trying to keep your students interested.
Bored students vote with their feet or they vote with their sleep, and you can see them all when you’re standing there, so you do have to be a bit of an entertainer. And I like talking to people—my father, who’s 94, is one of the world’s great storytellers, and my mother, who died in 1987, was a great storyteller as well. So I grew up with folks who didn’t ring a bell and say, “Now it’s story time”—they just told stories all the time.
Every family in this country has a couple of great stories about how they became part of America, but it seems African-American families have more because of the pattern of hardship.
I ask people what they know about their families and they tell me these stories that 99 percent of the time turn out to be myths. And then the actual historical record turns out to be more compelling than the myths their family made up over the years. Where there’s smoke there’s fire sometimes—Maya Angelou remembers that her white-looking mulatto ancestor was German, but she was of Irish descent raised in a German-American community. But then there’s the African-American–Native American fantasy. My uncle David who’s in the film says, “Yeah, we’re Cherokee,” but the Cherokee were nowhere near West Virginia. Only 5 percent of African-Americans have Native American ancestry, but 58 percent have white ancestry. All 19 people in both series claimed to have Native American ancestry except for Oprah Winfrey, and she and Chris Tucker had more than anyone else.
After Oprah said yes to the first series, I can’t imagine anyone saying no.
It certainly helped. I picked people I admire, and we make charts of people by occupation and their color. We didn’t want all people with light complexions or all people with dark complexions. We wanted the rainbow spectrum of the African-American community because of the DNA testing. We never know in advance what we’re going to get, and yet we got incredibly good stories. You say “Thank you, Jesus,” you know?
This time, you had a contest to choose an average person to profile alongside the celebrities. Have you thought about asking the public who they’d like to see? A lot of people have jokingly called Bill Clinton the first black President, and it’d be interesting to see if there’s any percentage of truth to that.
I would love to do that. And I’d love to do Jewish American lives, since Russian and Eastern European Jews have no paper trail. I think it could be a real contribution to black-Jewish relations.
African American Lives 2 premieres Wed 6 at 9pm on WNET Channel 13.
mtDNA test (“motherline”), $300/€230/£150
Y test (“fatherline”, men only), $300/€230/£150 <!–
Autosomal test (“admixture test”), $300/€230/£150 details… –>
-Single MatriLine™ DNA analysis-based determination of ancient maternal clan. 180.00 each
-MatriLine Plus™ ONE MatriLine™ analysis and ONE MatriMap™ print. 195.00 for the two
-Single Y-Clan™ DNA analysis-based determination of 10-digit Y-Clan™ signature allowing assessment of ancient paternal clan. In addition, the 10-digit signature can be used as an aid to genealogical research. 180.00 each
-Y-Clan™ Plus ONE Y-Clan™ analysis and ONE PatriMap™ print. 195.00 for the two
MatriLine™/Y-Clan™ Combo ONE MatriLine™ and ONE Y-Clan™ analysis. 340.00 for the two
-MatriLine Plus™/Y-Clan™ Plus Combo ONE MatriLine™ analysis, ONE MatriMap™ print, ONE Y-Clan™ analysis and ONE PatriMap™ print. 370.00 for the four
Genographic Project
www3.nationalgeographic.com/genographic
The Participation Kit costs U.S. $99.95 (plus shipping and handling and tax if applicable). The kit includes:
Companies aimed specifically at African Americans include AfricanAncestry.com.
AfricanDNA.com Prices:
ADNA - 25-marker Paternal Line Test....$189.00
ADNA - HVR1 and HVR2 Maternal Line Test....$189.00
ADNA - Combined Paternal and Maternal Test....$378.00
ADNA - Genealogy Rpt + Paternal/Maternal Test....$888.00
ADNA - Genealogy Rpt + Paternal/Maternal Test....$888.00
ADNA - Genealogy Rpt + Paternal/Maternal Test....$1,077.00
It appears that DNA testing as a reliable indicator of African ancestry is not all its cracked up to be, according to an article from the Sunday Age located in Melbourne, Australia. The article goes on to say:
“But since the tests began in 2003, questions have been raised about their accuracy: specifically whether tracing mitochondrial DNA, which is passed from the mother’s side of the family, can reliably pinpoint tribal origins.
Those doubts were given a public voice this week with the publication of an article in a British peer review journal. It said a study found that fewer than 10 per cent of black Americans whose mitochondrial DNA was identified matched perfectly with a single African ethnic group, and 40 per cent had no match.”
This is a test and only a test of the emergency broadcast system…….
