Why Race Isn't as 'Black' and 'White' as We Think
Why Race Isn't as 'Black' and 'White' as We ThinkThe New York Times
October 31, 2005
Editorial Observer
By BRENT STAPLES
People have occasionally asked me how a black person came by a "white" name
like Brent Staples. One letter writer ridiculed it as "an anchorman's name" and
accused me of making it up. For the record, it's a British name - and the one
my parents gave me. "Staples" probably arrived in my family's ancestral home
in Virginia four centuries ago with the British settlers.
The earliest person with that name we've found - Richard Staples - was hacked
to death by Powhatan Indians not far from Jamestown in 1622. The name moved
into the 18th century with Virginians like John Staples, a white surveyor who
worked in Thomas Jefferson's home county, Albemarle, not far from the area
where my family was enslaved.
The black John Staples who married my paternal great-great-grandmother just
after Emancipation - and became the stepfather of her children - could easily
have been a Staples family slave. The transplanted Britons who had owned both
sides of my family had given us more than a preference for British names. They
had also given us their DNA. In what was an almost everyday occurrence at the
time, my great-great-grandmothers on both sides gave birth to children
fathered by white slave masters. I've known all this for a long time, and was not surprised by the results of
a genetic screening performed by DNAPrint Genomics, a company that traces
ancestral origins to far-flung parts of the globe. A little more than half of my
genetic material came from sub-Saharan Africa - common for people who regard
themselves as black - with slightly more than a quarter from Europe.
The result that knocked me off my chair showed that one-fifth of my ancestry
is Asian. Poring over the charts and statistics, I said out loud, "This has
got to be a mistake."
That's a common response among people who are tested. Ostensibly white people
who always thought of themselves as 100 percent European find they have
substantial African ancestry. People who regard themselves as black sometimes
discover that the African ancestry is a minority portion of their DNA.
These results are forcing people to re-examine the arbitrary calculations our
culture uses to decide who is "white" and who is "black."
As with many things racial, this story begins in the slave-era South, where
sex among slaves, masters and mistresses got started as soon as the first slave
ship sailed into Jamestown Harbor in 1619. By the time of the American
Revolution, there was a visible class of light-skinned black people who no longer
looked or sounded African. Free mulattos, emancipated by guilt-ridden fathers,
may have accounted for up to three-quarters of the tiny free-black population
before the Revolution.
By the eve of the Civil War, the swarming numbers of mixed-race slaves on
Southern plantations had become a source of constant anguish to planters' wives,
who knew quite well where those racially ambiguous children were coming from.
Faced with widespread fear that racial distinctions were losing significance,
the South decided to define the problem away. People with any ascertainable
black ancestry at all were defined as black under the law and stripped of basic
rights. The "one drop" laws defined as black even people who were blond and
blue-eyed and appeared white.
Black people snickered among themselves and worked to subvert segregation at
every turn. Thanks to white ancestry spread throughout the black community,
nearly every family knew of someone born black who successfully passed as white
to get access to jobs, housing and public accommodations that were reserved
for white people only. Black people who were not quite light enough to slip
undetected into white society billed themselves as Greek, Spanish, Portuguese,
Italian, South Asian, Native American - you name it. These defectors often
married into ostensibly white families at a time when interracial marriage was
either illegal or socially stigmatized.
Those of us who grew up in the 1950's and 60's read black-owned magazines and
newspapers that praised the racial defectors as pioneers while mocking white
society for failing to detect them. A comic newspaper column by the poet
Langston Hughes - titled "Why Not Fool Our White Folks?" - typified the black
community's sense of smugness about knowing the real racial score. In keeping with
this history, many black people I know find it funny when supposedly white
Americans profess shock at the emergence of blackness in the family tree. But
genetic testing holds plenty of surprises for black folks, too.
Which brings me back to my Asian ancestry. It comes as a surprise, given that
my family's oral histories contain not a single person who is described as
Asian. More testing on other family members should clarify the issue, but for
now, I can only guess. This ancestry could well have come through a 19th-century
ancestor who was incorrectly described as Indian, often a catchall category
at the time.
The test results underscore what anthropologists have said for eons: racial
distinctions as applied in this country are social categories and not
scientific concepts. In addition, those categories draw hard, sharp distinctions among
groups of people who are more alike than they are different. The ultimate
point is that none of us really know who we are, ancestrally speaking. All we ever
really know is what our parents and grandparents have told us.