'We are all Africans': genealogical research and DNA testing can reveal your ethnic connection to Africa

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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 droop 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."

This would have been news to "Bull" Connor and Orval Faubus and countless other racists from our past. It is also news to most of our White brothers and sisters today. But it is an undeniable fact. We are all, in a very veal sense, "Africans." The only question is how recently did our ancestors leave the Motherland? For the 35 million of us who are African-Americans--and for Black people in the Caribbean and Latin America--the answer is: very recently.

The first enslaved Africans arrived in the United States in the 17th Century. So, in historical terms, our ancestors arrived here from Africa virtually "yesterday." This means that we are among the oldest Americans; but it also means that our relation to our African ancestors is recent.

This also means that we have many genetic "cousins" walking around the African continent today--a fact that has long obsessed me. Like 130 million other people, I watched every episode of Alex Haley's Roots when it first aired m 1977. And like many other African-Americans, I have yearned ever since to trace my own roots, to identify where in Africa my own ancestors came from, what tribe they were part of. Why is it important to do this? Two reasons. First, almost as soon as an African-American steps off a plane in Africa, he can't help but realize how "African" our people still are. Despite the horrors of the slave trade, African slaves brought their culture with them: their music, dances, religious beliefs, the way they cooked food, the way they walked, the way they lived--and loved--even the way they buried their dead. And many of these customs and traditions have been preserved, or subtly transformed, by our African-American ancestors. Indeed, if you go to a dance club in Africa, attend church, or cat a meal with an African family, you will be surprised at how much you can feel right at home, as if you have just met long lost relatives. The feeling is uncanny--and intensely pleasurable.

But there is another, perhaps more powerful, reason to trace one's African ancestry. For centuries, racists attempted to prevent us from connecting with our past. The entire system of slavery was dedicated to preventing us from preserving any memories of Africa, our ancestors' tribal identities, the languages we spoke there, the customs we practiced, the gods that we worshipped, even our African names. Slavery was a carefully conceived effort to rob our people of all family ties and the most basic sense of self-knowledge. Slave owners didn't want their slaves building family trees. They didn't want them to marry or maintain deep, abiding relations with their mothers and fathers, their grandparents or their siblings. They wanted them to feel no bonds of kinship, especially to Africa or to other Africans. Why? Because a family unit is a bond--and an extended family is a larger bond--and out of such bonds, loyalty and resistance are built. And the last thing in the world slave owners wanted was resistance from our ancestors who were slaves. Slave owners wanted our ancestors to think of themselves as nameless objects of property, plain and simple, like a chicken or a cow.

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I am convinced that this still impacts our people today, crippling our ability to know ourselves by connecting with our family's past in the way that so many White Americans can. Ignorance and misunderstanding of our own history have served as a limitation on what we can achieve. We have internalized generations of doubt and fears about who we are as a people and what we can accomplish, just as White racists wanted us to do. And we continue to pay a terrible price for this.

Carter G. Woodson, the father of African-American history, famously wrote that a people cannot determine their future if they are ignorant of their past. This is why Malcolm Little took as his surname the letter "X'--which marked the hidden past of our people back through slavery to Africa, the past that racists sought to deny us. Malcolm wanted that "X" to serve as a constant reminder that it was our people's mission to fill in the blank slate that was the African-American collective past, the details of which, down to our family trees and our individual tribal origins, had been robbed or hidden from us. I believe that this is as true and necessary today as it has ever been, especially given our high school drop-out and teen-pregnancy rates.