What we’re made of
Several years ago I was given the opportunity to do a DNA test through 23 and Me. I knew that I am mostly British and Irish, but I wanted to know which one was most predominant, and I unabashedly hoped that it was Irish.
Not that I have anything against the British, mind you, but I adored my red-headed grandmother, and also hoped for a legitimate basis for my occasionally fiery temper. Besides, I’d choose Guinness and stew over tea and crumpets any day of the week, so I was sure my roots must spring most deeply from the Emerald Isle.
I know you’ll be shocked to learn that I am officially 99.2% European, and 85.9% of that is British and Irish. Yep, it turns out that while the fine print pegs me most likely from Greater London, the genetics of the British and the Irish are so similar that they lump them together for the broader percentage.
I found that fairly anticlimactic, I must admit. There is enough likelihood that some of my ancestors hailed from the County Dublin for me to add a bit of its tartan to my wardrobe (it is actually a really nice teal, brown, red and plum combo that would go well with my coloring), but I’m not going to start dancing a jig with my clan anytime soon.
Also in my European melted mix is 11.3% German and 2% “Broadly Northwestern European,” which covers a number of areas that were highly migratory in their population, including the potential result of the Germanic invasions of the early Middle Ages.
Then we get down to the more interesting minute makeup, including 0.5% Indigenous American, 0.2% Senegambian & Guinean, and 0.1% Nigerian.
I don’t really sound very interesting, do I?
My book club recently read a fascinating book titled “Why Fish Don’t Exist” by Lulu Miller. It is based on the life and work of David Starr Jordan, a taxonomist who is credited with discovering nearly a fifth of the fish known to mankind throughout his 19th century research.
At the time, it was considered quite pious to try to bring order to the chaos of the natural world, as though ordering God’s creation would somehow give a deeper understanding of the design by which it was wrought.
Over the course of Jordan’s career, which included acting as the founding president of Stanford University, he became a devout proponent of the eugenics movement, which was the human version of attempting to bring order to the chaos of the world by limiting the progression of the “weaker” races, favoring the protection and promotion of the Anglo-Saxon/Nordic race.
It went to the extent of holding “Better Baby” and “Fitter Family” demonstrations alongside the livestock breeding exhibits at state fairs across the country in the 1920s.
While racism still exists, the idea of exhibiting wellbred families next to livestock is fairly disturbing in today’s society.
In my youth I would have met the visual criteria of these standards: long-limbed, blue-eyed and towheaded. But what I find most fascinating is to look at the background that built me, as I come from a long line of lessers.
When I was around 6 years old, I saw Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson on the TV at my grandparents’ home and mistook him for my Daddy Jack. The adults in the room died laughing, but it really made pretty good sense. They both had kinky, wiry hair, darkly olive skin and large man stature — but one was definitely considered Black, while the other was decidedly White.
In later years we have determined that they both likely came from the Melungeon ethnicity, a group of people in the southeastern United States made up of varying degrees of Portuguese, Turkish, Moorish, Arabic, Jewish, American Indian and African descent.
It has been determined that such lineage ran on my mother’s mother’s side of the family and Daddy Jack, my mother’s father, certainly carried the characteristics to suggest the same.
Melungeons were shunned right along with the African Americans in earlier days because it was, quite frankly, hard to tell them apart. If you were basing your opinion of a person on the color of their skin, it was best to lump them all together, because there was no way to trust the delineation.
Meanwhile, my mother’s great-grandmother was full-blooded Cherokee, at a time when there was very little love for the natives in their native land.
When I think about the genetic tree that produced the blue-eyed blonde that is me, it is clear that the attempt to catalog even humans by specific physical characteristics is futile at best.
I believed I was more Irish than British based purely on what I felt most akin to, but my genes determined otherwise. My mother is proud of her Cherokee heritage, but her genetics would show that she has only a small part of that lineage.
What we are made of, and what we each bring to the table, has very little to do with what you see, or what you don’t. As we celebrate our arrival in this land at the same time as recognizing the heritage of those who greeted us, it seems good to remember that we are all made up of a melting pot of those who came before us.
It is what we do with that heritage that makes us who we are, the choices we make and the way we treat our fellow blended beings. Be proud of what you’re made of, but be sure that you are making something good in who you are, because that is all that really matters.