All Sixteen
whose house she cleaned.
I knew some of the names and faces, many were
a mystery, but the unexplored DNA test results
seemed like a threat to all those who’d come before
me, a genetic Magic Eraser set to wipe away the
people who’d struggled and fought for a place in
America, a place I know I take for granted.
I went to college on a full scholarship, studied
journalism in graduate school, have worked as a
sports reporter and a freelance writer.
Those pictures were of men and women who
suffered to earn a living, fought in wars, shoveled
coal for the railroad, poured molten steel for John
Deere, cooked in family restaurants, operated
a numbers game, farmed on land they didn’t
own. I was afraid my son’s DNA would contain
a startling lack of color. I was afraid he wouldn’t
be black enough.
16
In his 2017 cover story for The Atlantic titled,
“My President Was Black,” author Ta-Nehisi
Coates examined the constant tightrope walked by
President Obama during his eight years in office,
the impact of race and identity that followed him
during those two terms, and the very conscious
decision he’d made decades earlier to enmesh
himself in the African American experience.
“If black racial identity speaks to all the things
done to people of recent African ancestry, black
cultural identity was created in response to them,”
Coates wrote. “It is incredibly hard to be a full
participant in the world of cultural identity without
experiencing the trauma of racial identity.”
I’d seen that trauma firsthand, had experienced
a little of it, but now wondered why I was so eager
for my son to join me in this identity.
He isn’t as brown as me, and it’s doubtful he’ll
ever be identified as African American like I’ve
been, but I worried he’d be missing something if
the numbers came back and didn’t reflect more
of me, of my dad, of my grandparents, of those
who’d endured so much.
I sat at the kitchen counter, finally ready, opened
my laptop, signed into the website and clicked on
my son’s ethnicity estimate. Saw the pie chart. The
blue-tinged map. The colored circles representing
all the regions of the world that my son was
connected to. All sixteen of them.
It took me several moments to gather all the
names, all the countries, to think of that little
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EXTOL • FEBRUARY/MARCH 2018
“It will be up
to him to take
that history and
build his own
self, an identity
unencumbered
by the
weight and
expectations
of DNA and
ethnicity and
genetics. I can’t
wait to see what
that looks like.”