Mixed Race Studies

Exactly How ‘Black’ Is Black America?

The Root
2013-02-11

Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research
Harvard University

100 Amazing Facts About the Negro: Find out the percentage of African ancestry in black Americans.

(The Root) — 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro No. 18: How much African ancestry does the average African American have?

A few years ago, it occurred to me that it might be fun to try to trace the family trees of a group of African Americans all the way back to slavery, and then when the paper trail disappeared, analyze their DNA through biologist Rick Kittles’ company, AfricanAncestry.com. The payoff would be to reveal the ethnic group from which their maternal or paternal slave ancestors descended back in Africa. We would trace their family trees using the massive number of records now digitized by websites such as Ancestry.com, and supplement the paper trail using new tools of genetic science to find more distant details about each person’s ancestry. My goal was to create a contemporary version of the television series Roots — think of it as Roots in a test tube, Roots for the 21st century.

The result has been four PBS series on genealogy and genetics, starting with African American Lives 1 and 2, featuring guests such as Oprah Winfrey, Quincy Jones, Maya Angelou and Tina Turner, and Faces of America, in which we included guests from across the ethnic spectrum, such as Meryl Streep, Yo-Yo Ma, Dr. Oz and Stephen Colbert. These four-part series proved to be popular enough for PBS to ask us to do a weekly program, Finding Your Roots, which aired on Sunday nights for 10 weeks this past spring. And soon we will be filming season two.

Making these series has been quite a learning experience for me, especially in terms of the genetic makeup of the African-American people. So, for The Root, I asked five DNA companies who analyze our guests’ ancestry if we could publish for the first time their findings about the ancestral origins of the African-American community. (By “African American,” I mean descendants of African slaves brought to this country before the Civil War, not recent African immigrants.) How African — how “black” — is the average African American? The results astonished me, just as they have surprised the guests on our TV show, and I think they’ll surprise you as well. But before revealing those results, I want to provide a short introduction to the secrets that DNA holds about a person’s ancestry…

…So what do the collective genomes of the African-American community reveal about the mix of ancestral populations — of mingled genes — that we have inherited? Here are the surprising results from five DNA companies.
 
Exactly How “Black” Are Black Americans?…

…And for our African-American male guests, there has been still another astonishing fact revealed about their paternal ancestry — their father’s father’s father’s line — through their y-DNA: A whopping 35 percent of all African-American men descend from a white male ancestor who fathered a mulatto child sometime in the slavery era, most probably from rape or coerced sexuality. In other words, if we tested the DNA of all of the black men in the NBA, for instance, just over one-third descend from a white second or third great-grandfather. In my own case, he was my great-great grandfather, and he was most probably of Irish descent, judging from our shared y-DNA haplogroup.

I find two things quite fascinating about these results. First of all, simply glancing at these statistics reveals that virtually none of the African Americans tested by these DNA companies is inferred to be 100 percent sub-Saharan African, although each company has analyzed Africans and African immigrants who did test 100 percent sub-Saharan in origin. Ranges, of course, vary from individual to individual. Spencer Wells, director of National Geographic’s Genographic Project, explained to me that the African Americans they’ve tested range from 53 percent to 95 percent sub-Saharan African, 3 percent to 46 percent European and zero percent to 3 percent Native American. So there is a lot of genetic variation within our ethnic group, as is obvious to anyone even casually glancing at black people just walking down the street…

Read the entire article here.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 14th, 2013 at 22:10Z and is filed under Anthropology, Articles, Media Archive, United States. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.