In some parts of the American South, about 1 out of 8 “white”
people have at least one black ancestor.
We’ve always known that some black folks have a white
granddad somewhere in the family tree.
Recently I read Clotel,
or The President’s Daughter, by William Wells Brown. It’s reputed to be the
first novel written by a black American. Brown, a former slave, published it in
1853.
In her foreword to the 1996 edition of Clotel, Dr. Joan Cashin notes: “Historians estimate that
perhaps 10 percent of the four million slaves living in the South in 1860 had
some white ancestry.”1 Brown extensively documented the
well-known inclination of some white male slaveowners to rape their female
slaves, and, with some regularity, produce mixed-race children.
We all know a little bit about dominant and recessive genes.
Some children of black-and-white parents are very dark-skinned, and some are
very light-skinned, and most are somewhere in between. The reality of “passing
for white” has been known for centuries.
Now Vox.com has offered a modern, complementary factoid: “…in
a lot of the South, about 10 percent of people who identified as white turned
out to have African DNA…” Researchers writing recently in the American
Journal of Human Genetics used DNA analysis to characterize the ancestry of
folks who think of themselves as white.
In South Carolina and Louisiana, about 1 out of 8
self-identified “white” folks have DNA from African-American ancestors.
Detailed DNA analysis showed that the initial white/black
unions “…generally occurred in the early 1800s…”
As we all know, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings weren’t
the only ones doing it.
1 - p.
xiii
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2014
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