Is this what African Americans and Obama supporters really think? Tell the truth.

Let’s get serious
White folks may want to catch Dr. Henry Louis Gate's specials, "African American Lives" the next time it airs on PBS. Certainly because of this series, I understand some of this African-American anger. Thanks to Dr. Gates we have been given some scientific fact to work with, not emotion or wishful thinking, nor theory; rather, no nonsense, time-to-tell-the-truth DNA.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Louis_Gates%2C_Jr.



The series, produced by the talented, genial Gates, the Harvard professor, consists of re-enacted stories and utilizes modern genealogy computer technology programs, personal family histories, and DNA to connect with famous black Americans' family trees. I will focus on a few of Chris Rock's and Oprah Winfrey's family backgrounds here for the purposes of my argument.

I enjoyed seeing all the series subjects when they're sincerely surprised, especially when they were caught off guard in their moments of discovery and excitement when Dr Gates revealed each family's new document and photo. I admired their candor, and could relate to many of them because of my own love of genealogy and family and cultural history. As they were surrounded with their families, it was apparent the love they shared. I wished I could thank each of them for the opportunity for these views into their lives at this intimate time which after a time seemed almost too personal and intrusive.

In general, and this is the most exciting, fulfilling part, every one of the individuals came from people who were something. By that, I mean they BUILT something, or GAVE something or DID something for others, values tragically taken from then and lost during the shameful Jim Crow era and the black flight north.

One scene of Chris Rock looking at photos brought back my own memories of Thanksgiving evenings at my grandmothers when I was a little girl. We were getting somewhere, I thought. Chris is a lot like me--he really likes this stuff. I was impressed with Chris' mother, her beauty and elegance, and yet somehow related to her earthiness as he looked through their family photos at her comfortable home. It was clear he adored her this typical black matriarch. I could she her slap him upside the head as needed.

Later, however, I was startled by Rock's lack of reaction when he, alone in another, moodier shot with Dr. Gates, was informed that West African blacks sold blacks into slavery. It's almost as if he didn't hear it. He seemed to absorb it, but didn’t comment. I watch him more carefully during his silence.

Deep down is there a reaction? Of course, in my white mind, I regard this silence and stoicism as black man bravado...and beneath him? We're at the core of our problems here. I can feel it. He doesn't believe it. Nothing.

Dr. Gates bravely brings up his own more obvious Mulatto race--he has very light skin and has red hair (almost as if Dr. Gates wants to set a challenge for each person in the series--probably my wishful thinking again). Then he drops a bomb on Chris and presents him with DNA evidence which proves Rock's nearly as much Caucasian as he is African. Rock bristles. I bristle. Dr. Gates presses on.

My white mind wants Rock to acknowledge that his presence, his intelligent, heavenly, beautiful, glorious presence is the best of both OUR worlds--white and black.

But he won't do it. He won't give me a thing. Not one little piece of my whiteness is responsible for his success and presence. He just won't do it. Now I’m hurt. It’s his pride. And my pride. It's too much for me to ask, and I realize that. It's too much.

It was a white man or woman (who knows?) who presumably took his black grandmother or father to his bed and made Chris 50% white. And Chris just can't forgive his grandfather/mother for that even though look who Chris turned into regardless of who that white man or woman was. My God, pride, Man, pride! Why this pride? How many years ago was this?

Whatever, like Barack Obama, the man who states he is black, all black, all the time, yes, he does because he only appeals to African American issues and Chris Rock is really half white. Half white all of the time. The DNA says so.

Gates then engages in a hypothetical, asks Rock if he had just a drop of black blood, which race would be consider himself. Rock, as if his entire career depends upon it (doesn't it?) burst forth in that fabulous Chris Rock laugh and voice, "Why, blaaaacccck, Man, blaaacccck!, Of course. Man. Are you kidddin?!" I notice a look in his eyes here which says something like, "Do you know what I do for a living?"

And this is healthy why? Because he's a very wealthy comedian who makes money hating white people. Healthy for him and very bad for young black men and women who don't get it.

This fascinating series deals with five or six more African American people, one of whom is Tina Turner who was convinced she was at least half Indian. Come to find out she has much less than she was told, only 1/3.

In fact, very little Indian blood--less than 1%-- is found in African Americans, and it is a myth that has been circulating among African Americans for years. Rather a much, much larger proportion of black people are at least 50% white. Since I haven't lived in that community, I don't know what their internal prejudice is about, but I'll bet there's some. There's a form of it in all social groups regardless of what it's called. I have a hunch it's about color--dark and not so dark.

When Rock finds he has less than 1% Native American blood, he is crestfallen. Gates asks him why; he replies he thought he was more heroic because naturally Native Americans were persecuted by the white man and were heroic for fighting them. I felt sorry for him. Why must be fight so much?

So Mr. Rock connotes Caucasian blood with raping and Indian blood with heroism and that drop of black blood makes him what?

Remember, I said he ignored Dr. Gates information about blacks swiping blacks to sell to slave traders. That was immediately after they raped everyone. Then they sold them to the black and white traders. Denial is in Africa, after all.

I think I understand that. Perhaps it's a coping mechanism. Rock's ancestors had been kidnapped, tortured by their own, then tortured again by nasty white people. And after the 25TH beating, who'd care who's responsible?

Yet in the long run, his black ancestors in Africa, 40% to 50% of him, were no better than his white ones. It's a conundrum. How can a person hate so much of himself, which is precisely what many African Americans must deal with eventually. They can't run from the truth, like it's some unfortunate truth.

The Daughter of a King
Let's move on to the most successful woman, not black woman, woman in television and media.

"Oprah's Root's" kept my heart snapping a bit and here’s why. After telling about her childhood family showing her mother, the nuclear family and extended family, Dr. Gates slowly moved his finger along the map of Africa up from the tip at Capetown, north then westward and gently urged Oprah to say hello her real west African roots.

Oprah’s DNA evidenced she was snatched from a Senegalese village along with her family, maybe sisters, rather than nurtured in the royal Zulu birthing hut in South Africa as she had fantasized. I felt compassion for this little Mississippi girl who always said she learned things the hard way, and the utter sadness she must have felt in her obvious disappointment.

But she needn’t have been disappointed, only shocked maybe as she herself stated she was when Dr. Gates asked her--"No! I'm just sh-shocked!"

I wondered if she started her own urban myth. Or did the Zulu princess thing come up at a advertising or publicist meeting that some make believe artist came up with? Or did a that little girl with pigtails conjure this up sitting in front of the mirror in her little bedroom and finally believe so well that she got herself a tiara and sash at a beauty pageant? Why do we need to make up lies about ourselves to be okay?

I'll venture to say that if Oprah hadn't invented herself into a Zulu princess, she might have met someone like Chris Rock, and her life would've been over. His anger would kill any ideal she had of overcoming anything in life, let alone being a happy, successful black or white woman.

Personally, I think Oprah became who she is because of her wonderful father. Its clear Oprah's pop made his peace with who he is, black, Mulatto, whatever. He was just a good man. After him, Oprah is where she is because of one person: Oprah!

Some of us need to know where we come from
Some folks don't give a whit about any of this stuff. I do.

It was deeply moving to me to find out who my kin were. Not the ones I knew, but the ones I didn't know. The ones I imagined after I saw their names on the 1790 Census Form in the state they lived in and then rush to history books, now the Internet, and drill down to their very village and lives. Their truth in their time literally changed how I thought about things. It made a material difference in my life--no, not money.

For what ever reason the people at the time kept their secret, by the way, that is their business. Years later, however, the truth had to be told. As it turned out, no one really cared and life goes on.

And then there is another mystery in my very typical American family that I want to solve and that's why I have hold some kind of hope for a maturity in the truth that Dr. Gates and his work will bring to more serious African Americans. It's a start.

I also have Indian blood, Chris!
I'm hoping the development of new technology will reveal a way to determine the DNA of my maternal grandparents. Not likely. Those peoples are long gone. How ironic. I'll probably never know who I really am. That's a bad feeling, if you let it be.

My earliest known maternal grandparents lived and died in western Pennsylvania in Ft. Duquesne area and left a little girl named Massa who was taken in as an infant by Europeans, Swedish missionaries perhaps or an American soldier and his wife at the fort, maybe Scots.

My Native American grandparents, surmising from American history, were probably Algonquin, Iroquois or Delaware and most likely were killed or slaughtered. The violence in the region was such that assumption is not out of the question. I choose, however, to assume they got sick with a fever. Who knows? Not an educated guess.

Massa, I mean Mary, later married a white man in Ohio and birthed my great grandmother, who was called a half-breed, which could not have felt very good. In honor of that half breed woman who lived life on the frontier and was my mother's grandmother and favorite person in world beside herself, I blessed one of my daughters with a middle name, Isabelle, and one of my beloved daughters, God bless her, has given one of her daughters a middle name, Isabelle. What else can you do?

Unfortunately, some people on this earth will never find comfort regardless, but due to the immaculate record keeping of the slave traders, shippers and buyers (Nazis and people like this are anal retentive, another reason to keep a real messy desk like mine) we now have a way to locate the origins of more and more African-American origins each month.

What do you want to be when you grow up, beside rich?
Chris Rock said he would rather identify himself as black if his body contained just one drop of black blood than if his entire being held 50% of white blood. I don't know where to go with that as white person. That shuts down the conversation, doesn't it? That is pretty shocking. I mean, if we’re ever going to get along. I think we have to keep working at this. Sounds like they all just want to get even.

http://www.barackobama.com/factcheck/2007/11/12/obama_is_a_patriot.php

But it's difficult to think we'll ever go beyond terrible rhetoric and racial insults of Wright, Rock and and all the folks who honestly believe white people are to be the most hated people in the modern world. I frankly am not interested in giving them power over my life.

And that is why people like Reverend Jeremiah Wright hanging around Barack Obama give white people the heebie jeebies.

Thanks for the read.