One day America will have to come to terms with her sexualized gendered race hatred of Black American women and girls during slavery and segregation. Until then, the denial will continue to be a stumbling block in acknowledging that the various hues that Black people come in were the result of force, moreso than consent. Then again, why should so many Black people during those horrific times (and well into the present), want to acknowledge white blood, when those black people (considered black, due to the ODR), owed their existence to sexual coercion or a rapist?
And it is true, that there is some minimal amount of African blood to be found in American Whites (due to light-skinned Blacks passing and marrying Whites; more Whites in the general population than Blacks; “black” offspring thrown over into the Black community as some type of cast-off trash, and generally never acknowledged by the white father [especially when that black child was the first-born who stood to inherit property, personal effects, etc., from the White father.])
Acknowledging the white blood that flows in Blacks is not the only thing that must be contended with by Whites; they will also have to turn the mirror on themselves and acknowledge not only the black blood they themselves may carry. . . . .
. . . . .they will also have to acknowledge the brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles, nieces, nephews, aunts, grandchildren……….that are related to them from their White male relative’s atrocities.
Two professors in the discussion said it best:
Professor Mary Frances Berry:
“Historically, race-mixture stories have attracted sustained public interest only when some celebrity or a president, as in Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, is involved. Perhaps telling Michelle Obama’s story will lead to more admissions and discoveries of families even those thought to be white who have black ancestry.”
Professor Martha Hodes:
“Even the way we talk about these “connections” doesn’t nearly capture the trauma of such lives, and the idea of “racial intermingling” that “lingers in the bloodlines of many African-Americans” seems rather gently worded in the article. The often violent encounter of European and African ancestry linger in the family trees of white Americans, not just black Americans. In fact, these histories ought to make us pause over the very categories of “black” and “white.”
*************************************************************************************
October 8, 2009, 7:30 am
Updated: 11:57 am –>One Family’s Roots, a Nation’s History
By The Editors
Ted S. Warren/Associated Press Michelle Obama with her mother, Marian Robinson.Updated, Oct. 9, 1:30 p.m. | Ishmael Reed, author and poet, joins the discussion.
In an article published on Wednesday, The Times reported on Michelle Obama’s ancestry, tracing her maternal line back to her great-great-great-grandparents, a slave girl and a white man, and their son, Dolphus T. Shields, who was born in the 1850s.
While these findings tell of Michelle Obama’s roots, for many Americans her family’s story will also bring into focus a common narrative, which runs through the history of this nation. We asked some historians and writers, why has it taken so long for Americans to appreciate these deep multiethnic connections?
- Henry Louis Gates Jr., professor of humanities, Harvard University
- Annette Gordon-Reed, historian and author, “The Hemingses of Monticello”
- John McWhorter, author, “Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue”
- Martha Hodes, professor of history, New York University
- Mark D. Shriver, professor of anthropology and biology
- Mary Frances Berry, professor of social thought, University of Pennsylvania
- Ira Berlin, professor of history, University of Maryland
- Ishmael Reed, author
Shared Ancestries Revealed
Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard and the executive producer and host of “African American Lives” and “Faces of America,” to be broadcast in February on PBS, which will explore the ancestry of Stephen Colbert, Meryl Streep, Eva Longoria, Yo Yo Ma, Mike Nichols, Malcolm Gladwell, and six others.
As we have shown in the “African American Lives” series on PBS, fully 58 percent of African Americans have at least 12.5 percent European ancestry. Only 5 percent, in spite of widespread myths to the contrary, have as much Native American ancestry. And between 30 and 35 percent of all African American males can trace their paternal lineage (their y-DNA) to a white man who impregnated a black female most probably during slavery.
The illegality of miscegenation, the prevalence of sexual abuse and rape, guilt, shame, and disgrace kept these relationships hidden.
What this means is that, in defiance of the law and social convention, an enormous amount of “race-mixing” has long been occurring in the United States, about which we, as a society, have for just as long been in deep denial. I have never given an admixture DNA test of a black person who turned out to be 100 percent African, no matter how dark or “African” they appear to be.
Some of this inter-racial sexuality was voluntary, we now know, but far more was coerced, a reflection or a result of a profound imbalance of power. Because of a confluence of factors — the illegality of miscegenation, the prevalence of sexual abuse and rape as the source of these relationships, infidelity, guilt, shame, and disgrace — both black people and white people had a certain interest in keeping these relationships in the dark, as it were.
In my own family, Jane Gates–my great-great grandmother, born in 1818 as a slave — gave birth to several children who were fathered by one white man, including my great grandfather, Edward Gates. We know that he was an Irishman because of my father’s DNA. Because of shame, most probably, she took his identity with her to the grave. But using DNA tests, we have the chance of finding his identity, which we are pursuing in our next “African American Lives” program.
The first lady’s family tree — and the social and sexual complexity it reflects — is quite typical for a majority of African Americans. I am happy for her that her ancestors — long lost — have now been found by Megan Smolenyak. There is a certain inexpressible joy in knowing from whom you have descended, knowing where you come from. I have two missions: first, to help African Americans to uncover the roots and discover the branches on their family trees, and to help all Americans to learn to marvel at — and accept — the complexity of race relations in the nation’s history, a complexity registered in their DNA, a complexity writ large on the very face of Black America.
Histories Distorted
Annette Gordon-Reed is the author of “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family,” which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. She is currently the Charles Warren Visiting Professor of Legal History at Harvard Law School.
The family stories of black Americans and the findings of population geneticists make clear that Michelle Obama’s family history is far from unique. The vast majority of black Americans whose ancestors were enslaved in North America have some degree of mixed ancestry.
Appearances deceive. People get thrown off merely looking at the surface. Do you have dark skin? Only people who are fair-skinned are thought to have white ancestry. And anyone who “looks” white can’t have any African ancestry. Those presumptions go nicely with the country’s historic racial program: to fit everyone into their racial “place” to determine how they should be treated.
Certain presumptions go nicely with the country’s historic racial program: to fit everyone into their racial “place.”
That a person who looks like Mrs. Obama is not “all” black destabilizes things, especially when one considers the implications. Are people who look “all” white really that? I remember speaking with one white Virginian who insisted that the white Virginians’ fetish for genealogy stems from a desire “to prove who is white.”
That we’ve just started speaking openly about the complexity of black ancestry doesn’t surprise. After all, white Americans, through law and social customs, invested heavily in promoting the idea that people of African descent were fundamentally different (inferior) types of human beings than whites. Slavery enforced that notion, and that’s what segregation was all about.
What happens when you recognize that you and fellow whites share a bloodline with the people you are claiming are so different? And then there’s the fact that none of this has made much difference to black Americans. Having a white father or great-great-great grandfather didn’t mean much: they were defined as “negro” or “black” and kept their place in the racial hierarchy.
There’s also a lot of white Southern anxiety in denials of these tangled blood lines. Acknowledging them requires admitting what went on in the South; both the prevalence of the rape of black women and, in some instances, long-term connections between white men and black women in slavery and outside of it.
The evidence indicates that Southern white men of the 18th and 19th centuries were more used to sleeping with black women than white men today in all regions of the country; despite the popular notion that we’re living in a brand new age of interracial mixing. Some of those planters really were living like polygamous patriarchs of old with wives and concubines and bunches of kids. That’s the truth of early American history.
Our Non-Post Racial Climate
John McWhorter, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is the author of “Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English.”
If America now appreciates the mixing of races in our history, it isn’t clear to me just what the appreciation consists of.
Appreciating the mixing of races in our history does not eradicate racist feelings in the present.
One idea might be that if we appreciate, or acknowledge, the racial mixture in the past, then it will help eradicate racist feelings in the present. Surely, however, no one truly believes this could happen to any significant degree. The notion has a noble ring to it, but who supposes that a white person who harbors anti-black sentiment would change his mind upon being informed that slave masters often impregnated their female slaves? Or that genetically he probably has a bit of “black” in him from such interactions in the past?
Another thing that keeps us from appreciating such stories is that they are so often painful or embarrassing, involving coercion and illegitimacy. There is a story of this kind in my own family background, which my older relatives were reluctant to dwell on in conversation. To us now, it would seem like a complex tale of interaction between the races in the old South. To my grandfather, however, it was not a New Yorker think-piece story, but the beginning of a tough childhood he was happy to have escaped.
Of course there were less unsavory kinds of racial mixture in the past. I just finished reading Marcus LiBrizzi’s new book “Lost Atusville” about a small town in Maine founded in the 18th century, where black-white couples were hardly uncommon and occasioned little remark. But ironically, what keeps us from appreciating things like that as relevant to us is that we are as hung up on race in some ways as the people in Michelle Obama’s great-great-great-grandmother’s day were.
That is, we still have a kind of one-drop rule. Of late, the category “biracial” is gaining ever more of a foothold in the national conversation, but not so long ago (i.e. when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s) people with one white parent and one black one were considered “black” — and black people were as stringent about that as whites, often suspicious of mixed people who stressed that they truly were half-black.
A reader comment I get often these days is a white person asking why I refer to Michelle Obama’s husband as black rather than as half-black and half-white. The reason is because he presents himself as black. He talks about the white part of his heritage, of course, but if he had gone out campaigning explicitly talking himself up as “half-white” (a la Tiger Woods’ “Cablinasian” notion) a great many black Americans would have felt him as primly distancing himself from black culture, and would never have taken him to heart. The typical comment about blacks disavowing full membership is “Wait till he gets pulled over by the cops — then see how white he feels.”
In our decidedly non-post-racial climate, I doubt we’ll be seeing the fact that white and black people were making babies in the 19th century as something to appreciate — or even acknowledge.
What Remains Buried
Martha Hodes, a professor of history at New York University, is the author of “The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century” and “White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South.”
Why have these multiethnic connections been so long buried? The answer can be found quite readily within the story of Michelle Obama’s genealogy. We learn, first, that one man listed a 6-year-old child among his legal possessions, right alongside livestock and farming tools. We learn next that the child was shipped, like freight, away from her loved ones, and then that another white man had sex with her when she was a teenager. Why should we wonder at the impulse to bury such pain?
The often violent encounter of European and African ancestry is found in the family trees of white Americans, as well as black Americans.
Nor did the descendants of slavemasters break the silence within their own families. Mary Chestnut of South Carolina famously wrote in her 1861 diary that “every lady tells you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household, but those in her own she seems to think drop from the clouds.” As Helen Heath, the 88-year-old woman who attended church with Michelle Obama’s great-great-grandfather, said so plainly: “people didn’t want to talk about that.”
Even the way we talk about these “connections” doesn’t nearly capture the trauma of such lives, and the idea of “racial intermingling” that “lingers in the bloodlines of many African-Americans” seems rather gently worded in the article. The often violent encounter of European and African ancestry linger in the family trees of white Americans, not just black Americans. In fact, these histories ought to make us pause over the very categories of “black” and “white.”
By the way, silence surrounds the history of sex between white women and black men, too. Such liaisons were often loving ones, and shameful for that very fact. When I uncovered the story of Eunice Connolly, a white woman from Massachusetts who married a black sea captain from the West Indies in 1869, I eventually found her great-grandniece, Jane Cushman. Jane treasured her family’s past, and shared many documents with me, but she didn’t know that her great-great aunt had married across the color line.
In fact, she didn’t know that Eunice existed at all — she and the sea captain had been erased from family history. Jane was thrilled to learn of Eunice, but that sentiment was new. For generations, people just didn’t want to talk about that either.
In Some Ways, Race Really Is Skin Deep
Mark D. Shriver is associate professor of biology at Morehouse College and associate professor of anthropology at Pennsylvania State University. He and his wife Katrina Voss are working on a short online educational video series, “Reading Between the Genes: Genetics Evolution and Public Health.”
We face a number of difficulties in talking and even thinking clearly about population differences. We face a history that is marred by forced emigration, slavery and dehumanization. To make matters more complicated, some conceptual blocks result from an incomplete appreciation of what we have learned from the study of evolution.
85 percent to 95 percent of human genetic variation is shared across all populations.
In the early 1970s new methods for assessing genetic variation on the molecular level demonstrated that 85 percent to 95 percent of human genetic variation is shared across all populations. Contemporary society has taken this as scientific evidence that there is no “biological foundation for race.” How do we reconcile this cognitive dissonance? Is science telling us that our perceptions are wrong — that we can’t see “race”?
The resolution to this dilemma is not the mantra, “differences don’t exist.” Nor is the lesson, differences are not essential and easily distinguished. The genome is not singular and different genes have independent evolutionary histories. We humans evolved upright walking before evolving modern brain size.
This same principle holds for the evolution of traits and characteristics across populations with superficial traits changing rapidly. For instance, the light skin color of Europeans and East Asians evolved recently (less than 20,000 year ago) and only after the ancestors of these populations separated. Traits on the surface of an organism (for example, skin) are in direct contact with the environment, exposed to greater levels of natural selection. These traits are also exposed to the eyes of others; that is, to the force we call sexual selection. It is not at all surprising that visible differences exist from one population to the next nor should it be surprising that these differences might be mistaken as evidence for an essential divide.
Grappling With the Meaning of Race
Mary Frances Berry is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought at the University of Pennsylvania and former chairwoman of the United States Commission on Civil Rights.
The wide dissemination of the story of Michelle Obama’s white, black and Native American roots informs the public of a rather common occurrence among African-Americans. Surely, however, white Americans must have noticed that few African-American descendants of slaves are anything other than of mixed race. This is true though the one-drop rule made us all black, however fair of complexion.
Perhaps telling Michelle Obama’s story will lead to more admissions and discoveries of white families who have black ancestry.
Many historians and descendants have written about the subject and I have discussed many such stories in my writings on race and the law. In my own family on my father’s side, one grandfather was descended from a white slave owner and an African-American slave and the other from a Creek and freedwoman.
Historically, race-mixture stories have attracted sustained public interest only when some celebrity or a president, as in Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, is involved. Perhaps telling Michelle Obama’s story will lead to more admissions and discoveries of families even those thought to be white who have black ancestry.
So far, however, race-mixture stories have not led to grappling with the difficult subject of the meaning of race. It will be interesting to see the result this time.
A Jumbled History
Ira Berlin, a professor of history at the University of Maryland, is the author of the forthcoming ”The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations.”
Historian-geneologist Megan Smolenyak’s extraordinary detective work featured in The Times article is a great gift to the First Family and to all Americans. It reminds us of who we are and how we became who we are. We are a jumbled people, a product of violent and occasionally loving relations that we are only beginning to unravel.
There is much to be learned from Melvinia’s tale, and not just for the First Family.
The story of Melvinia and her descendants is a common one in the long history of American slavery. It speaks to the violence of slavery, an institution that necessarily rested upon — indeed, could not exist without — slave masters enjoying a monopoly of violence and being willing to use it in unconscionable ways. In this case, as in others, Melvinia’s fate reveals the presumption that white men believed it was their prerogative to have sexual access to black women.
However, it tells us nothing about the nature of the relationship that emerged from such unions — relations that begin in force sometimes turn in strange ways and can even conclude with respect and love. As Professor James Gillmer noted in the article, “these relationships can be complex.” Melvinia’s story also reminds us of how close slavery is, how few generational jumps it takes to get back to the era of slavery — a period, which encompasses the majority of American history.
Finally, it should be noted, that Melvinia’s tale points us as much to the history of white people as it does to that of black people. From various descriptions and from his picture, it is clear that Dolphus T. Shields, son of an enslaved black woman and a free white man, could have passed as white, and enjoyed the many benefits of white skin. He did not, but many others did. Their descendants often have no knowledge that they — as historian Edward Ball discovered — are as much descendants of Africa as they are of Europe, with a good portion of Native America thrown in.
For too long, the American people have divided themselves into imaginary categories that have no basis in any genetic reality. This reality has led some historians to conclude that a goodly portion — perhaps a majority — of Americans descended from slaves are presently “white.” There is much to be learned from Melvinia’s tale, and not just for the First Family.
A New People
Ishmael Reed is the author of “Mixing It Up, Taking On the Media Bullies.”
The revelations about Michelle Obama’s white ancestors come as no surprise to most African-Americans who have white, usually Irish or Scots Irish, or Native-American ancestors, or both. Such a revelation debunks most books, opinion columns, and think tank papers about race that are based upon the myth of the uninterrupted African ancestry of those whom we mistakenly designate as “African-Americans.” Put them all in the trash can and let’s get real.
In his great novel “Black No More,” George Schuyler made a wager to his white readers that they could not trace their ancestry without uncovering black relatives. William Loren Katz and Noel Ignatiev have written about race mixing among Americans. Novelists Chester Himes and Joel Williamson have claimed that it has occurred so frequently that those whom we refer to as black or African Americans are indeed, as Williamson has written, “a new people.”
Ann
I have often wondered what was up with the white plantation (and other slave owners) forcing themselves upon the slave women? If they genuinely thought that the blacks were inferior, beneath them, and worthy of all sorts of mistreatment, then WHY ON EARTH would the WANT to engage in sexual relations with them? It simply “does not compute.”
That said, my own opinion has long been, “so what?” on the subject of interracial marriage and breeding. It seems to me, the more of mingling that goes on, the less defined we will all become, and after a number of generations, all the colors will have blended, so there will be no further need or excuse for racial predjudice, because all the races will have become one.