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black man finds out he is not african;no african DNA
Man as 'blackfor 50 years finds out he's probably not
Wayne Joseph, the principal of a big suburban high school in southern California, had an unequivocal sense of his black heritage, having written extensively about race in America.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/en/doc/...4d2a_black.jpgBut after seeing a TV story last April about a Florida company, DNA Print Genomics, which marketed an ancestry-by-DNA test, he began to wonder exactly how much of him was African, how much wasn't, and what else there might be in his genes.
"I sent away for their kit and received the kit, happened to swab both sides of my cheek and sent the swabs in," Joseph said.
A few weeks later, the results arrived at his comfortable Claremont, Calif., home.
"I just glanced at it, just a cursory glance initially didn't really notice it much," Joseph said. "Then, I went back to it, because all of a sudden it hit me exactly what I had read. And it read, 57 percent Indo-European, 39 percent Native American, 4 percent East Asian and 0 percent African.
After a lifetime as a black man, Wayne Joseph discovered he probably isn't black at all. '
Complete Shock
"I kiddingly say, if I was 21 instead of 50, I'd be in therapy," Joseph said, "because when you define yourself one way and then at 50, there are results that say you're something else, it does rock your whole world.
It also rocked the world of Martin and Kenya, his kids from his first marriage to a black woman.
"Honestly, I didn't know what to say," Kenya said. "I was in complete shock."
Joseph asked his mother, Betty, if he was adopted. "He is not adopted," she said. "Mother doesn't forget when she has a baby. And I had three babies. And he was one of them."
On both sides, the Joseph family is of Creole stock, which does not necessarily mean African ancestry. Yet, before DNA tests, in the segregated parishes of Louisiana they'd always defined themselves as black, or "colored" in the old-fashioned parlance, despite their light complexions.
Betty Joseph said at age 76, DNA results will not alter the way she's identified herself all her life. She is a black woman. Or so she insists.
"It's hard to break old habits at my age," Betty Joseph said.
But Wayne's kids seem to be doing a bit more identity searching.
"That really makes myself and my sister sit back and say, 'OK, what are we comprised of?'" Martin said.
"I think this opens up a lot of doors," Kenya said, "and forces people to look at things differently about how we classify people with regard to race."
Room for Doubt?
The DNA test is very sophisticated, but it is not accurate to the tiniest fraction of ancestral genes which means in this case, maybe there's room for doubt.
"There are some people who have said to me, 'Oh, Wayne, you know, [you've] got to get retested. I mean, it can't be right,'" Joseph said. "And so my response to them is, 'OK, let's say I get retested, I come back 9 percent African, 10 percent African, so I'm back in the club now?'"
Instead, Joseph is focusing on one of the old South's most enduring legacies. The so-called "one drop" rule, "says that anyone who has one black ancestor or any black blood at all is considered black in this country," Joseph said. "The interesting thing about it is the one-drop rule is a rule that was imposed by slave owners who did not want the white purity in some way blemished by black blood," Joseph added. "And we still, black people and white people in this country, still hold to that rule."
Some with black ancestors choose to identify themselves as white, thereby trying to avoid the racial penalties usually paid by African-Americans. It's an old and familiar theme in Hollywood in films like the latest of the genre, The Human Stain in which a college professor with African genes lives as white and Jewish.
Only in an absurd farce, like The Jerk, does a white man identify himself as black, though, in a way, that is precisely what Wayne Joseph proudly, if unwittingly, did for the last 50 years. The question is, what does he do now?
Joseph's birth certificate says he was born in New Orleans, and lists his race and color as "Negro." And his life has been that of a black American including his hair style as a college kid, which was about as close as he could get to an Afro.
He's had his exposure to racism as well.
"I've been called a n----r before by white kids," Joseph said. "I've experienced being rousted by the police, with some friends. I've had the so-called if there are typical, you know black experiences. I've had those."
And without having the chance to make a choice, he has passed on his pride in being a black man to his family.
"We were taught growing up to embrace our black heritage," Kenya said, "and really be proud of what that means, and the struggles that black people went through."
Ethnic Hodgepodge
Yet, Wayne Joseph did not espouse a black separatist ideology. His wife, Marcia, is white. They've been married for 17 years. The children have always lived with them and she helped raise them. Martin is married to a woman whose ancestry is German and Hispanic, and they have a daughter, Stephanie, Wayne Joseph's only grandchild so far. Kenya, studying for an MBA, is married to a man of Mexican descent.
Wayne Joseph's circle of friends is a racial and ethnic hodgepodge many blacks and most whites do not have though, they didn't quite get it when he told them about his DNA test after knowing him for so many years as an African-American.
In their close knit camaraderie, where one friend man named his son after Joseph, about the only difference they ever recognized is that Joseph doesn't put mustard on his hot dogs and he won't eat the icing on his cake. Is that racial?
"We should have known right then there was something wrong with him," a friend joked.
Who's Black? Who's White?
But all kidding aside, Joseph's DNA discovery raises a serious challenge to the way American culture seems to insist on a racial identity for everyone.
"We are very dichotomous in the United States," said Mark Shriver, the DNA test co-inventor. "You're either black or white. And understandably, less than 200 years ago, that meant life or death, basically who was master, who was slave."
Shriver cautions the test does not always provide exact results always. Still, about 7,000 people have taken it, including Joseph.
Tony Frudacas, the other test co-creator and the director of DNA Print Genomics, said the company gets a lot of hate-mail these days from white supremacists who've heard about the test and don't like it.
"They might be afraid of what they might find in their own genomes," Frudacas said. "Five percent of European Americans exhibit some detectable level of African ancestry." That means about one in 20 so-called white Americans have African genes.
Wayne Joseph's circle of friends is a racial and ethnic hodgepodge many blacks and most whites do not have though, they didn't quite get it when he told them about his DNA test after knowing him for so many years as an African-American.
In their close knit camaraderie, where one friend man named his son after Joseph, about the only difference they ever recognized is that Joseph doesn't put mustard on his hot dogs and he won't eat the icing on his cake. Is that racial?
"We should have known right then there was something wrong with him," a friend joked.
Frudacas' test told him he has about 6 percent Native American ancestry.
"My first thought when I saw that result was that I wasn't going to really be able to watch a cowboys and Indians movie the same way again, because I was affiliated with both groups," Frudacas said.
Shriver discovered his ancestry is 10 percent African, which means that under the old one drop rule, he's more of a black man than Wayne Joseph, who may not be a black man at all.
So how will Joseph fill in the race space on his census form? It is, he says, a question of choosing between the past and the future. "The future is my grandchildren," Joseph said. "I want them to be able to say that my grandfather made a choice, one way or the other. If I'm given that census form, I'm going to mark 'Native American.' Because no one will doubt that I'm a native of this country or that my story is uniquely an American one."
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/en/doc/...ent_294229.htm
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Carol Channing "I am african american"
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Re: black man finds out he is not african;no african DNA
Actually he's a mulatto. New Guineans are black but not African.
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Re: black man finds out he is not african;no african DNA
I always thought Carol Channing was from Mars.
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Re: black man finds out he is not african;no african DNA
I knew about Carol Channing. She looked very different as a young woman and had a major nose job done along the way.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...olchanning.jpg
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Re: black man finds out he is not african;no african DNA
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Re: black man finds out he is not african;no african DNA
forgive my ignorance, but what exactly is Indo-European?
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Re: black man finds out he is not african;no african DNA
Damn good question. What is indo-euro
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Re: black man finds out he is not african;no african DNA
All humans have African ancenstry if you go back far enough. What a pointless story... :/
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Re: black man finds out he is not african;no african DNA
it was not worded properly
WE KNOW HE HAS AFRICAN DNA /ANCESTORS
he does not have the direct african trait
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Re: black man finds out he is not african;no african DNA
The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey
Spencer Wells (born April 6, 1969 in Georgia, United States) is a geneticist and anthropologist, an Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society, and Frank H.T. Rhodes Class of '56 Professor at Cornell University. He leads The Genographic Project.
Wells also wrote and presented the PBS/National Geographic documentary of the same name. By analyzing DNA from people in all regions of the world, Wells has concluded that all humans alive today are descended from a single man who lived in Africa around 60,000 - 90,000 years ago, a man also known as Y-chromosomal Adam.[3]
Spencer Wells - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia@@AMEPARAM@@/wiki/File:Spencer_Wells_2007.jpg" class="image" title="Spencer Wells at the TED Global conference in Arusha, Tanzania in 2007"><img alt="" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b7/Spencer_Wells_2007.jpg/225px-Spencer_Wells_2007.jpg"@@AMEPARAM@@commons/thumb/b/b7/Spencer_Wells_2007.jpg/225px-Spencer_Wells_2007.jpg
YouTube - ‪The Eyes of Nye - Race (Part 1 of 3)‬‏
YouTube - ‪Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey (Part 13 of 13)‬‏
"I was able to trace the family trees of several prominent African Americans deep into slavery, following the paper trail. And then when the paper trail ended, we tested their DNA in an attempt to discover the origins of their mother's line or their father's line on the African continent."
Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.Director,
W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research
everyone regardless if you are white ,Spanish ,Mexican or Asian
can traced there origins back to two Ethiopians ,a man and a women.
these two Ethiopians are everyones ancestors
http://www.africandna.com/tests.aspx
http://www.africandna.com/tests.aspx
http://www.africandna.com/
http://www.africandna.com/history.aspx
http://www.africandna.com/history.aspx
http://www.africandna.com/tests.aspx
Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr., (born September 16, 1950) is an American literary critic, educator, scholar, writer, editor, and public intellectual.
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Re: black man finds out he is not african;no african DNA
Think of the Whitest person you know: someone with blond hair, blue eyes and almost translucent skin, not a drop of Black ancestry in them. Now think of the darkest person you know: someone richly endowed with traditional African features, not even a drop of White ancestry in their past. Well, guess what? Scientists now trace the origins of both of these people-and of all human beings who have ever walked the face of the earth-to Black Africa, to the region around what is now Ethiopia. As Spencer Wells, the director of National Geographic's massive Genographic Project, puts it: "Our species evolved in Africa, and a subset of Africans left that continent around 50,000 years ago to populate the rest of the world. Our earliest ancestors probably looked very much like modern Africans."
Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr., (born September 16, 1950) is an American literary critic, educator, scholar, writer, editor, and public intellectual. He was the first African American to receive the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship. He has received numerous honorary degrees and awards for his teaching, research, and development of academic institutions to study black culture. In 2002, Gates was selected to give the Jefferson Lecture, in recognition of his "distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities."
As the host of the 2006 and 2008 PBS television miniseries African American Lives, Gates explored the genealogy of prominent African Americans. Gates sits on the boards of many notable arts, cultural, and research institutions. He serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University, where he is director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.
http://www.africandna.com/tests.aspx
http://www.africandna.com/tests.aspx
http://www.africandna.com/
http://www.africandna.com/history.aspx
http://www.africandna.com/history.aspx
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Re: black man finds out he is not african;no african DNA
White skin appeared just 20,000 to 50,000 years
White skin appeared just 20,000 to 50,000 years ago, as dark-skinned humans migrated to colder climes and lost much of their melanin pigment.
http://discovermagazine.com/2007/feb/20-things-skin
see there is no biological basis for the idea of a white or black or asian
Race is an old concept that should be discarded. It was
created by people who had a very limited knowledge of their world. If you
look at any genetic map (mitochondrial or Y chromosome DNA), you can
see there is no biological basis for the idea of a white or black or asian
race.
Here's a map
http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/journey/
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Re: black man finds out he is not african;no african DNA
WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE series/episodes
Lisa Kudrow ("Friends") serves as executive producer for this series, based on a popular show in the U.K., in which viewers get a look at the family histories of popular celebrities. Kudrow, Matthew Broderick, Spike Lee, Sarah Jessica Parker, Susan Sarandon, Brooke Shields and Emmitt Smith are among the celebrities whose genealogies are explored
http://www.bing.com/tv/episodes?q=Wh...ue&FORM=DTPTVO
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Re: black man finds out he is not african;no african DNA
How we became white people
Part of complete coverage on
Census: Who Am I?
How we became white people
By Christian Lander, Special to CNNApril 30, 2010 10:44 a.m. EDT
Editor's note: America's 300 million-plus people are declaring their identity in the 2010 census. This piece is part of a special series on CNN.com in which people describe how they see their own identity. Christian Lander is a writer living in Los Angeles. His book "Stuff White People Like" is published by Random House.
(CNN) -- I am white. I know that's a terribly big surprise, considering that I write a blog called Stuff White People Like, but I mean it, I'm white.
Like really white.
I'm not attempting to assert some sort of superiority through my whiteness; quite the opposite actually. Thanks to my liberal upbringing, I am imbued with the appropriate amount of guilt and shame about my ancestors and their actions in the New World.
Even in my home, I can't offer a blanket to a nonwhite friend without the fear that they will look at me and say "no smallpox on this right?" A joke, but I still want to apologize.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Christian Lander.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/04/2...x.html?npt=NP1
http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/04/2...x.html?npt=NP1
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Re: black man finds out he is not african;no african DNA
All of a sudden he started showing up to school on time.
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Re: black man finds out he is not african;no african DNA
I always thought it was culture not race which makes the person
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Re: black man finds out he is not african;no african DNA
Quote:
Originally Posted by
russtafa
I always thought it was culture not race which makes the person
You know what Russ seems you're not all bad, i like that comment;)
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Re: black man finds out he is not african;no african DNA
his roots/ancestry are African and his race is indo-european
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Re: black man finds out he is not african;no african DNA
Quote:
Originally Posted by
loveboof
All humans have African ancenstry if you go back far enough. What a pointless story... :/
True say but what a funny story black man finds out he is not black:confused::)
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Re: black man finds out he is not african;no african DNA
I have been thinking of doing DNA testing through
http://www.africanancestry.com/ to see what country
in Africa my ancestors were from.
http://africanheritageculturalcenter...frica-Maps.jpg
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Re: black man finds out he is not african;no african DNA
Quote:
Originally Posted by
loveboof
All humans have African ancenstry if you go back far enough. What a pointless story... :/
Yeah, so I guess there's no such thing as race, and we are all one big family. Right.....
Here in the real world, at least the part that is in the US, race matters a lot more than we'd like to think.
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Re: black man finds out he is not african;no african DNA
Quote:
Originally Posted by
dgs925
Yeah, so I guess there's no such thing as race, and we are all one big family. Right.....
Here in the real world, at least the part that is in the US, race matters a lot more than we'd like to think.
It only matters as much as we think it does.
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Re: black man finds out he is not african;no african DNA
Quote:
Originally Posted by
loveboof
It only matters as much as we think it does.
http://i80.photobucket.com/albums/j1...g?t=1242060188
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stated "The United States still has trouble dealing with race because of a national "birth defect" that denied black Americans the opportunities given to whites at the country's very founding."
"Black Americans were a founding population," she said. "Africans and Europeans came here and founded this country together Europeans by choice and Africans in chains. That's not a very pretty reality of our founding."
As a result, Miss Rice told editors and reporters at The Washington Times, "descendants of slaves did not get much of a head start, and I think you continue to see some of the effects of that."
"That particular birth defect makes it hard for us to confront it, hard for us to talk about it, and hard for us to realize that it has continuing relevance for who we are today," she said.
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Re: black man finds out he is not african;no african DNA
Quote:
Originally Posted by
peggygee
http://i80.photobucket.com/albums/j1...g?t=1242060188
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stated "The United States still has trouble dealing with race because of a national "birth defect" that denied black Americans the opportunities given to whites at the country's very founding."
"Black Americans were a founding population," she said. "Africans and Europeans came here and founded this country together Europeans by choice and Africans in chains. That's not a very pretty reality of our founding."
As a result, Miss Rice told editors and reporters at The Washington Times, "descendants of slaves did not get much of a head start, and I think you continue to see some of the effects of that."
"That particular birth defect makes it hard for us to confront it, hard for us to talk about it, and hard for us to realize that it has continuing relevance for who we are today," she said.
That's a very important and largely unrecognised fact. I never thought I'd be applauding Condoleeza Rice - ok, she was the only acceptable face of the Bush regime - but I do wholeheartedly on this occasion.
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Re: black man finds out he is not african;no african DNA
Quote:
Originally Posted by
peggygee
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stated "The United States still has trouble dealing with race because of a national "birth defect" that denied black Americans the opportunities given to whites at the country's very founding."
"Black Americans were a founding population," she said. "Africans and Europeans came here and founded this country together Europeans by choice and Africans in chains. That's not a very pretty reality of our founding."
As a result, Miss Rice told editors and reporters at The Washington Times, "descendants of slaves did not get much of a head start, and I think you continue to see some of the effects of that."
"That particular birth defect makes it hard for us to confront it, hard for us to talk about it, and hard for us to realize that it has continuing relevance for who we are today," she said.
To be honest, I think calling the problem a 'birth defect' undermines our responsibility and our level of control over it.
We're not talking about some horrible natural disaster, or some genetic disease! We're talking about our own attitude.
We should be in complete control of this; and as much as I recognise that there are still strong racial prejudices at work in the world today, thankfully they diminish with each passing generation...
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Re: black man finds out he is not african;no african DNA
Black, White, Red, Yellow, Green, Pink, Blue....It doesn't frickin' matter!!! We all bleed RED!!!:shrug
