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How African Are You?
What genealogical testing can't tell you.
By John Hawks
Updated Wednesday, March 15, 2006, at 1:43 PM ET



Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Recently on PBS's "African American Lives," host Henry Louis Gates had his DNA tested to learn about his ancestry. Gates' family suspected its paternal ancestry could be traced to a white slave owner. But DNA testing showed that his Y chromosome did not match the man's white descendants. A second, newer test gave Gates another result he didn't expect: His DNA showed that only half of Gates' ancestry was African. The rest were apparently European.

DNA testing for genealogy has become increasingly popular, as a Newsweek cover story in February attests. Especially attention-getting have been efforts to trace genetic relationships along the male lineage. In January the New York Times wrote up attempts to trace Irish genealogy through the male line to Niall of the Nine Hostages, a fifth-century Irish warlord. Other tests have also shown that as many as 14 million men may share the Y chromosome of Genghis Khan. But tests that seek a single, Y-chromosome male lineage are limited: They leave out the vast majority of ancestors. Newer tests can survey all the DNA that can be inherited from either parent, but at a cost of precision: They don't tell which ancestors lived where, and they can't detect traces of ancestry.

The newer "genetic admixture tests" examine DNA from genes inherited from all of a person's grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on. A few of these genes reflect the part of the world where those ancestors lived. Like postcards, they track the movement of people from the lands of their ancestors to their current address. Scientists studying these genetic variations now focus on sites that vary between people by one chemical letter. They're called "single nucleotide polymorphisms," or SNPs. Some of these SNPs are important: They may contribute to traits like skin color or resistance to regional diseases like malaria. Others vary among populations just because of chance.

For geneticists, finding the SNPs that mark populations is a challenge. For the most part, the same SNP might be found in Africans, Europeans, and people from every other part of the world. It's now possible to test quickly for hundreds of SNPs by using special microchips that bind to the distinctive DNA sequences. These tests examine hundreds of SNPs at once; if among these a person has many that are common in Africa, it is likely that she has some African ancestors.

Admixture testing works best in groups like African-Americans, whose ancestors in Africa and Europe lived far from each other. Most of the ancestry of today's African-Americans can be traced to West or Central Africa, with a minority from other parts of the continent. (Gates' family is a bit exceptional in terms of origin.)

But for other groups things can get a lot more complicated. Many amateur genealogists are interested in whether they might have a Cherokee ancestor, for example. And for some people, admixture tests can give a relatively accurate answer about Native-American ancestry. But other people, including Greeks and Ashkenazi Jews, may have "Native American affinity," according to the tests, even if they and their ancestors have never been to America. As far as anthropologists know, there were no lost tribes connecting Greeks, Jews, and ancient Americans. So, maybe this "Native American affinity" reflects the scattering of alleles by prehistoric Asian nomads to the ancestors of Greeks and Jews as well as to American Indians. Maybe the SNPs that they share gave these groups a leg up in fighting diseases.

All we know for sure is that such genetic similarities can make ancestry testing very confusing. Suppose a person of mostly German ancestry discovers that his DNA has 6 percent Native-American affinity. Does he have a Native-American ancestor, or a Greek or Jewish ancestor, or all three? There's only one way the 6 percenter can know for sure: He has to know most of his genealogy already.

From a practical point of view, that is the biggest problem with today's genetic genealogy tests. In many cases, they can't tell you what you don't already know. And unlike DNA fingerprinting tests with error rates of one in a billion or less, the chance of misidentifying ancestral groups in these genealogy tests may be 5 percent or higher. With this chance of error, the test won't be wrong about a full Native-American grandparent, but it might be wrong about a great-great grandparent. In addition, SNPs that separate central Africans from northern Europeans aren't nearly as good at separating Ethiopians from Arabs. So, in the test results of some African-Americans, European means Europe, while in others, it may mean East African, or Arab, or Indian. Depending on where his African ancestors came from, Gates' apparently European origins might lie somewhere else entirely.

A deeper problem with admixture testing is its claim to identify the "ancestral components" of different populations. For example, admixture testing considers people from India to be a mixture of "Indo-European" and "East Asian" ancestors. And indeed, Indians have some alleles otherwise common in Europe, and some otherwise common in China. But Indian populations have been on their subcontinent for tens of thousands of years, and they have many alleles that don't come from anywhere else. Anthropologists studying genetic variation have always found complexity rather than simple one-plus-one racial mixtures. SNP-testing companies don't seem to have gotten that news.

SNP-based tests can help you find out where your great-grandfather came from. But his distant ancestors ultimately came from other places. So, most of your genetic ancestry will still be a question mark, no matter how many tests you shell out for.

There are Afro-Americans who have found out they had no African (historical times) ancestry. Not all dark skinned people were brought over from Africa.


Black Like I Thought I Was
By Erin Aubry Kaplan, LA Weekly
Posted on October 7, 2003, Printed on March 21, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/16917/

Wayne Joseph is a 51-year-old high school principal in Chino whose family emigrated from the segregated parishes of Louisiana to central Los Angeles in the 1950s, as did mine. Like me, he is of Creole stock and is therefore on the lighter end of the black color spectrum, a common enough circumstance in the South that predates the multicultural movement by centuries. And like most other black folk, Joseph grew up with an unequivocal sense of his heritage and of himself; he tends toward black advocacy and has published thoughtful opinion pieces on racial issues in magazines like Newsweek. When Joseph decided on a whim to take a new ethnic DNA test he saw described on a 60 Minutes segment last year, it was only to indulge a casual curiosity about the exact percentage of black blood; virtually all black Americans are mixed with something, he knew, but he figured it would be interesting to make himself a guinea pig for this new testing process, which is offered by a Florida-based company called DNA Print Genomics Inc. The experience would at least be fodder for another essay for Newsweek. He got his kit in the mail, swabbed his mouth per the instructions and sent off the DNA samples for analysis.

Now, I have always believed that what is now widely considered one of slavery's worst legacies -- the Southern "one-drop" rule that indicted anyone with black blood as a nigger and cleaved American society into black and white with a single stroke -- was also slavery's only upside. Of course I deplore the motive behind the law, which was rooted not only in white paranoia about miscegenation, but in a more practical need to maintain social order by keeping privilege and property in the hands of whites. But by forcing blacks of all complexions and blood percentages into the same boat, the law ironically laid a foundation of black unity that remains in place today. It's a foundation that allows us to talk abstractly about a "black community" as concretely as we talk about a black community in Harlem or Chicago or South-Central (a liberty that's often abused or lazily applied in modern discussions of race). And it gives the lightest-skinned among us the assurance of identity that everybody needs in order to feel grounded and psychologically whole -- even whites, whose public non-ethnicity is really ethnicity writ so large and influential it needs no name. Being black may still not be the most advantageous thing in the world, but being nothing or being neutral -- the rallying cry of modern-day multiculturalists -- has never made any emotional or real-world sense. Color marks you, but your membership in black society also gives you an indestructible house to live in and a bed to rest on. I can't imagine growing up any other way.

Wayne Joseph can't, either. But when the results of his DNA test came back, he found himself staggered by the idea that though he still qualified as a person of color, it was not the color he was raised to think he was, one with a distinct culture and definitive place in the American struggle for social equality that he'd taken for granted. Here was the unexpected and rather unwelcome truth: Joseph was 57 percent Indo-European, 39 percent Native American, 4 percent East Asian -- and zero percent African. After a lifetime of assuming blackness, he was now being told that he lacked even a single drop of black blood to qualify.

"My son was flabbergasted by the results," says Joseph. "He said, 'Dad, you mean for 50 years you've been passing for black?'" Joseph admits that, strictly speaking, he has. But he's not sure if he can or wants to do anything about that at this point. For all the lingering effects of institutional racism, he's been perfectly content being a black man; it has shaped his worldview and the course of his life in ways that cannot, and probably should not, be altered. Yet Joseph struggles to balance the intellectual dishonesty of saying he's black with the unimpeachable honesty of a lifelong experience of being black. "What do I do with this information?" he says, sounding more than a little exasperated. "It was like finding out you're adopted. I don't want to be disingenuous with myself. But I can't conceive of living any other way. It's a question of what's logical and what's visceral."

Race, of course, has always been a far more visceral matter than a logical one. We now know that there is no such thing as race, that humans are biologically one species; we know that an African is likely to have more in common genetically with a European thousands of miles away than with a neighboring African. Yet this knowledge has not deterred the racism many Europeans continue to harbor toward Africans, nor the wariness Africans harbor toward Europeans. Such feelings may never be deterred. And despite all the loud assertions to the contrary, race is still America's bane, and its fascination; Philip Roth's widely acclaimed last novel set in the 1990s, The Human Stain, features a Faustian protagonist whose great moral failing is that he's a black man who's been passing most of his life for white (the book has been made into a movie due in theaters next month).

Joseph recognizes this, and while he argues for a more rational and less emotional view of race for the sake of equity, he also recognizes that rationality is not the same thing as fact. As much as he might want to, he can't simply refute his black past and declare himself white or Native American. He can acknowledge the truth but can't quite apply it, which makes it pretty much useless to other, older members of his family. An aunt whom he told about the test results only said that she wasn't surprised. "When I told my mother about the test, she said to me, 'I'm too old and too tired to be anything else,'" recalls Joseph. "It makes no difference to her. It's an easy issue."

After recovering from the initial shock, Joseph began questioning his mother about their lineage. He discovered that, unbeknownst to him, his grandparents had made a conscious decision back in Louisiana to not be white, claiming they didn't want to side with a people who were known oppressors. Joseph says there was another, more practical consideration: Some men in the family routinely courted black women, and they didn't want the very public hassle such a pairing entailed in the South, which included everything from dirty looks to the ignominy of a couple having to separate on buses and streetcars and in restaurants per the Jim Crow laws. I know that the laws also pointedly separated mothers from sons, uncles from nephews, simply because one happened to be lighter than the other or have straighter hair. Determinations of race were entirely subjective and imposed from without, and the one-drop rule was enforced to such divisive and schizophrenic effects that Joseph's family -- and mine -- fled Louisiana for the presumably less boundary-obsessed West. But we didn't flee ourselves, and didn't expect to; we simply set up a new home in Los Angeles. The South was wrong about its policies but it was right about our color. It had to be.

Joseph remains tortured by the possibility that maybe nobody is right. The essay he thought the DNA test experience would prompt became a book that he's already 150 pages into. He doesn't seem to know how it'll end. He's in a kind of limbo that he doesn't want and that I frankly wouldn't wish on anyone; when I wonder aloud about taking the $600 DNA test myself, Joseph flatly advises against it. "You don't want to know," he says. "It's like a genie coming out of a bottle. You can't put it back in." He has more empathy for the colorblind crowd than he had before, but isn't inclined to believe that the Ward Connerlys and other professed racial conservatives of the world have the best interests of colored people at heart. "I see their point, but race does matter, especially with things like medical research and other social trends," he says of Connerly's Proposition 54, the much-derided state measure that seeks to outlaw the collection of ethnic data that will be voted on in the recall election next Tuesday. "Problems like that can't just go away." For the moment, Joseph is compelled to try to judge individually what he knows has always been judged broadly, to reconcile two famously opposed viewpoints of race not for the sake of political argument -- he has made those -- but for his own peace of mind. He's wrestling with a riddle that will likely outlive him, though he doesn't worry that it will be passed on to the next generation -- his ex-wife is black, enough to give his children the firm ethnic identity he had and that he embraced for most of his life. "The question ultimately is, are you who you say you are, or are you who you are genetically?" he muses. The logical -- and visceral -- answer is that it's not black and white.

© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/16917/

Oto, Indo European and East African are quite similar..

not very

quote from above

In addition, SNPs that separate central Africans from northern Europeans aren't nearly as good at separating Ethiopians from Arabs. So, in the test results of some African-Americans, European means Europe, while in others, it may mean East African, or Arab, or Indian. Depending on where his African ancestors came from, Gates' apparently European origins might lie somewhere else entirely.

"You are not an African because you are born in Africa. You’re and African because Africa is born within you!"

Runoko Rashidi

Many East Africans are of Indo-European stock. When geneticists test for African genes, they are basically testing for Sub-Saharan African genes. Therefore many researcher on the subject use African to mean Sub-Saharan African.

don't you find it odd how some scientist tend to disconnect northern Africa from the Sub-Saharan part of the continent?

I find that quite odd indeed.

Before I RESPOND, what EXACTLY do you mean by this...are you REFERRING to CURRENT Egyptians or from the time of KEMET??

I'm dealing with present population. The people who currently live in East Africa.

I would suggest people grouping Africans by regional affiliations get a map and look at it and look at the various ethnic groups in those regions. There is no such thing as East/West African, only ethic groups and/or clans. Just as an example, Nigeria and Sudan are about as far east and west one could go yet have similar ethnic groups, as well as Kenya and Liberia are but have similar clans... same for Senegal and Rwanda/Burundi

And this is STILL not CORRECT.

I'm actually curious about that getting that kind of thing done...
How expensive is it?

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http://1lny.webs.com

Only the populations that have recently admixed.

Not neccessarily. THere are specific markers in East Africans not present in Indo Europeans like the M1 Haplotype.