Although I am a septuagenarian, I never really took an intense interest in my ancestry until very recently when my only nephew, my older brother’s only child, informed me that he knew nothing of our family background because my brother (from whom I am estranged — don’t ask) never talked about it. He had become curious and hoped that his father’s only sibling, me, could tell him something about our forebears.
I knew a bit of family history going back a few generations from both my mother and from my father’s siblings (we lost him when I was two). From the stories, I’d been taught, my mothers ancestors were Castilian Spanish, French and English. My father’s family story ran back to my 2nd Great Grandfather in the direct male line, who allegedly emigrated from Spain. My father’s mother was allegedly Irish.
Before I passed any of this on to my nephew, a lifetime of lawyering impelled me to do whatever research I could to verify, or not, what I thought I already knew, and uncover anything new that I could. As my research added branches and twigs to our family tree, a fair amount of what I thought I knew seemed confirmed. Census records did identify my father’s first American ancestor, with our name, as born in Spain. I did, indeed, identify one of my mother’s nth Great Grandfathers as a Huguenot refugee who fled to England from Bordeaux France.
I found a lot of English ancestors for both my mother and father, not surprising given their families’ deep roots in Colonial New Jersey and North Carolina, respectively. But my own jet black hair (well, not anymore) and deeply tanned complexion made me hopeful that ancestors other than pasty, white, British, gingers might actually prove significant. I figured a DNA analysis might confirm even more Southern European or other roots. Maybe there was even a Moor back there somewhere. So, I spit into the tube and sent it off. Perhaps you wonder why finding color in my DNA should matter to me.
A lifetime of growing up and living as a white man in America steadily eroded any esteem I might have ever held for such origins. Visiting my father’s family in the Jim Crow South, in the 1950s, imbued me with an early, persistent loathing for how Europeans behaved when they came to North America, toward any and all who didn’t look just like them. Attending university and law school and practicing for many years in Oklahoma, while studying, living, befriending and working with and around many Native Americans, only heightened such feelings. After 1984, when we adopted our first child, an African-American baby girl, I obtained yet another perspective on what it means in America to be white, and not to be.
Truly, of course, no American’s ancestors were white, at least not where they came from. They made themselves white after they arrived in America, so as to distinguish themselves from Black and Native people. In the same year my daughter was born, James Baldwin expressed this idea more clearly than I could in his essay, On Being “White” . . . and Other Lies. Consider this brief excerpt —
America became white—the people who, as they claim, "settled" the country became white—because of the necessity of denying the Black presence, and justifying the Black subjugation. No community can be based on such a principle—or, in other words, no community can be established on so genocidal a lie.
This moral erosion has made it quite impossible for those who think of themselves as white in this country to have any moral authority at all—privately, or publicly. The multitudinous bulk of them sit, stunned, before their TV sets, swallowing garbage that they know to be garbage, and—in a profound and unconscious effort to justify this torpor that disguises a profound and bitter panic pay a vast amount of attention to athletics: even though they know that the football player (the Son of the Republic, their sons!) is merely another aspect of the money-making scheme. They are either relieved or embittered by the presence of the Black boy on the team. I do not know if they remember how long and hard they fought to keep him off it. I know that they do not dare have any notion of the price Black people (mothers and fathers) paid and pay. They do not want to know the meaning, or face the shame, of what they compelled—out of what they took as the necessity of being white—Joe Louis or Jackie Robinson or Cassius Clay (aka Muhammad Ali) to pay I know that they, themselves, would not have liked to pay it.
So, when I sent in my DNA, I was hoping that some ancestral strain would turn up to give me ties to anyone but my greedy, exploitive, murderous and oppressive Western and Northern European ancestors. Anything at all.
But it was not to be. The results transcended even my worst fears. Of more than 500 regions used for comparison, the report said that all of my ancestors came from just 9, with 83% from just two, comprising England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland. Most of the rest is from the Baltic area, with Sweden coming in at a robust 5%, the biggest single surprise result. As for those murderous Norwegian pricks, mentioned by Mr. Baldwin in his essay, yeah, they’re in there. Spain and France made appearances, too, but at only 2%.
The whole DNA ancestry thing is just a game of course, at this point. Whatever value my life has derives from my treatment of my fellow humans, regardless of their complexion or mine. If I can’t change who my ancestors were or how they behaved, I can at least continue to consciously strive to treat every person I encounter in accordance with the content of their character and entirely individually. In this regard, my family tree is no more significant to me than to my adopted children with whom I share a family, but no genes.
Now I have to figure out how to explain all of this to my nephew.
Nota bene — One of my 14th Great Grandfathers was Lord Chief Justice of England under Henry IV (the winning side in the War of the Roses). As a retired attorney, myself, I do take slight pride in his reputation for adhering to the law even when his King wished otherwise.