The Remarkable Ways My DNA Taught Me About Racism
Excerpt from Calling of Ancestors: Finding Forgotten Secrets in My DNA
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
— Mark Twain
While sleuthing for my unknown slave ancestor these past few years — upon discovering my 1.6% Nigerian DNA — I also began seeing relatives pop up whose DNA was closer to forty and fifty percent African. I had assumed we were all from the same slave ancestor, but when I looked more closely at one of the DNA matches, I noticed he had just as much shared DNA as another person in my family whom I knew to be my second cousin.
Who could this be if we were that closely related?
Only the grandparents appeared on his family tree, but one name looked familiar. I went back to the census of my grandfather’s hometown of Harrellsville, North Carolina — maybe 1910, no. 1900. Holy crap. There it was. My great-grandfather, Robert Lee Clay, lived right next door to this family before buying land and building a house, long before he married my great-grandmother. So, although the census showed a Black married couple with their two children living next door, the DNA doesn’t lie. The one-year-old born in 1899 must have been the child of my great-grandfather and the woman next door. Now my wheels were spinning wildly.
So that meant —
That child was my grandfather’s half-brother. My grandfather, whom I considered having been quite racist, had a “mulatto” half-brother. (The census of that era indicated “B” for Black, “M” for mulatto or what we would now call mixed race or biracial, or “W” for white.) They lived in the same tiny town. Did my grandfather know? Could he have known? Did people know? The more I thought about it, the wilder my speculation became.
My son-of-a-sharecropper grandfather had a black half-brother.
My half-great-uncle was black.
Did my grandfather know when he wrote his so-called book of fiction Black Son in the 1970s that the very story he was writing could well have been his own? He wrote of how the landowners all had “Negress” mistresses and often got them pregnant, adding to the litter of babies they already struggled to raise. He mentioned young mulatto children visited by older white folks and a black boy raised by a white mother.
When the book came out, I was still a child, so these things didn’t register with me when I first read it. Now I devoured every detail, especially the end, involving a will that revealed a mulatto half-sibling in the family. I couldn’t resist the urge to write out the family tree as described in the book. It matched up exactly with the one I had just discovered.
Now whether my grandfather knew he had this half-brother while growing up, or if he had heard lore, as though it was someone else’s story, or perhaps even came upon the information later in life and wrote the book as a result — we shall never know. My aunt swore he did not know. She talked to him up and down about this book many times while he was alive, and there was never any sign that it was anything but fiction. On the other hand, I might be more inclined to agree with my uncle.
“Of course, he knew! He had to — living in that tiny town where everybody knows each other.”
In actuality, the firstborn boy (the mixed-race child sired by my great-grandfather) was born almost twenty-five years earlier, an entire generation before my grandfather. However, his son would have been relatively close in age to my grandfather. I suppose they wouldn’t have gone to school together since they were segregated, but I can’t imagine our families didn’t at least know of one another. I grew up in a town of 100 people, and my childhood friends and I can still name every family that lived in every house.
Now I felt it was my duty to track down this cousin of mine of 44% African descent, who probably knew nothing of his white great-grandfather.
In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, I was uncomfortably bursting at the seams, eager to connect with Black friends and listen to what they were thinking and dealing with during this horrible time in history. I also found it cosmic that what was going on in the world was happening as I discovered ancestral mysteries that may never have seen the light of day in my generation or lifetime had I not gotten curious about my DNA. It struck me as my responsibility to get loud about it. There was too much at stake in the world for stories like ours not to come out and teach us something or have people pay attention differently.
After finding my cousin on Ancestry, I sought him out on Facebook, sending a click-worthy message to entice him to respond. I waited as long as I could without following up too soon and risking sounding like a crazy white woman looking for her blackness, and tried again. This time he answered, and said yes, he’d be open to a FaceTime conversation.
Fred lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, but he grew up in Harrellsville, so he’s still connected to the place and local and family history. He and his wife were expecting a baby any day, and I could hear his wife in the background. I wondered what she thought of all this as I told him the story of how I discovered our connection, about Robert Lee Clay living next door to his great-grandmother.
Fred knew his lineage up to his great-grandparents. Still, like many Black Americans — according to renowned Harvard scholar and genealogist Henry Louis Gates, Jr. — any knowledge of the family line almost always stops at the Civil War. Gates frequently talks about this on his PBS show “Finding Your Roots.”
In all my excitement, though, I felt a bit nervous, wondering if Fred would see my genuine interest in exploring family history together. Or would it seem like I’m this white woman excited about having some “ethnicity,” all eager to meet a Black cousin on social media so I can tell him about his white great-grandpappy who was getting it on with his great-grandmother — and now yippee, we’re second cousins?
I hoped he would realize my fascination and wonder more than anything. I wanted to share it with him and discover even more together.
I posed the possibility of rape or sexual advantage — at the very least, a lack of accountability on the part of our great-grandfather — but Fred interrupted my thoughts, telling me how the story went on his end.
“My great-grandmother had three sets of children with three different men. One of them was a ‘traveling salesman’ (whom we now know to have been Robert Lee Clay). She always said she’d already had two sets of dark babies, and she wasn’t going to have any more.
“So the third possibility — and there’s always a third possibility,” Fred continued, in response to the plausibility of rape or recklessness, “is that I’m the product of genetic engineering.” Fred suggested that his great-grandmother Lucille knew precisely what she was doing when she got pregnant with a white man’s baby. (Coincidentally, she had the same name as my great-grandmother, who came along later.)
“Everybody knew lighter-skinned children would have more advantages in life,” he added. “Black people have this self-hatred, you know, about the color of their skin.”
Self-hatred, yes, sounded familiar, its reasons within the Clay family too labyrinthine to disentangle, but also imbued with racial hatred.
After we ended the call, Fred sent me a photo of his grandfather — the son of Robert Lee Clay and Lucille, the woman who lived next door. In the photo was a handsome young man with very light skin, like my cousin Fred’s. It was hard to tell in the picture that he was biracial because he was so fair.
I dug out a photo as well, one that an elder cousin had recently shared with me. It was of my grandfather when he was a boy, a photo I had never seen before. I had pictures of him in the Navy, but nothing earlier than that; I supposed because they were too poor to own a camera, or it just wasn’t part of life on the farm. But in this photo, my grandfather appeared to be of adolescent age. His hair was a lighter brown, though still very wavy and thick up top. Comparing the images side-by-side, the resemblance between these half-brothers was unmistakable.
Outside on the streets, people were angry. I was angry. Why couldn’t people understand the simplicity of the sentiment, the movement “Black Lives Matter”? It’s just a statement. And why such vilifying of the “organization” called Black Lives Matter? It’s a group mobilized to act in the face of constant injustices against Black people at the hands of police. Instead of hearing the pleas of ordinary Black people about what life has been like for them, people pointed to anger that erupted in looting and violence. I would say, however, we’re damn lucky that Black people haven’t erupted in rage and violence commensurate with what we’ve committed against them.
Most Black folks would likely say they just want to be left alone and not fear for their lives when they go out. They wish to be treated like everyone else.
Can people really not see that we don’t treat Black people like everyone else?
Seeing the ‘white’ of my eyes
I knew when I got white privilege for the first time. It was when I was talking with a Black girlfriend of mine and reminiscing about a time many years previously when we got lost driving around Lancaster, Pennsylvania. As I drove into one neighborhood, I turned into a driveway so I could turn around. My friend in the backseat and her husband in the front both raised their hands, laughing, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! We’re just Negroes!” which cracked me up, and we all just laughed even harder.
In my 2020 conversation, however, my girlfriend added, “Yeah, Black people would never drive a car into someone’s driveway and turn around.”
Then it hit me. That was white privilege. That was me getting to live the privilege of whiteness that I don’t have to think twice about ordinary things like turning around in someone’s driveway. Until that conversation with my friend, I had heard about white privilege as something that was “outside” of me, something obvious like racial prejudice and racist things said and done. Now I understood it included the invisible aspects of “white life” I never knew until my friend pointed it out. And then I felt foolish for the time all those years ago that I didn’t or couldn’t get it. I laughed because we always laughed and had fun together. But they were pointing to something even more significant, and I didn’t grasp the enormity of the joke.
Suddenly I realized all the things that might constrain Black people’s lives and self-expression. I could imagine none of it. That’s white privilege. It’s the air we breathe. We take no notice of it because we think it’s all “normal” — but it isn’t for people of color.
So who are we to rail against Black lives mattering? When my own great-grandfather sired multiple Black children that he took no financial responsibility for? Black children are born into a legacy of downtrodden that they must spend their whole lives shaking off — let alone shake off the still-existing outright prejudices, racist rhetoric, and threatening behaviors specifically aimed at Black people. To suggest that “all lives matter” in this context is just downright stupid.
If the Black experience in America were metaphorically represented as female, it is fair to say that we came along and raped her repeatedly for hundreds of years, then told her to get up, get back to work and act like nothing happened. And why should that not affect her children?
And while some might make the case that we are not directly responsible for the behavior of our ancestors, I assert that we are collectively responsible for everything about our existence in this country and how it all came to be. What we have inherited, what’s been built, what exists materially, all the things we take pride in that our ancestors provided — we must equally accept responsibility for that which wasn’t our proudest moment. Not cherry-pick and benefit from the good stuff and put the blame for the rest on someone else. Then yes, we can all move on.
Kennerly’s first ebook, a Kindle Single called Calling of Ancestors: Finding Forgotten Secrets in My DNA is coming out in July 2021. She is currently working on a memoir about fathers, families and alcoholism, due on Father’s Day 2022.
Find out about advance review copies.
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