Ted S. Warren/Associated Press Michelle Obama with her mother, Marian Robinson. Updated, Oct. 9, 1:30 p.m. | Ishmael Reed, author and poet, joins the discussion.
In an article published on Wednesday, The Times reported on Michelle Obama’s ancestry, tracing her maternal line back to her great-great-great-grandparents, a slave girl and a white man, and their son, Dolphus T. Shields, who was born in the 1850s.
While these findings tell of Michelle Obama’s roots, for many Americans her family’s story will also bring into focus a common narrative, which runs through the history of this nation. We asked some historians and writers, why has it taken so long for Americans to appreciate these deep multiethnic connections?
- Henry Louis Gates Jr., professor of humanities, Harvard University
- Annette Gordon-Reed, historian and author, “The Hemingses of Monticello”
- John McWhorter, author, “Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue”
- Martha Hodes, professor of history, New York University
- Mark D. Shriver, professor of anthropology and biology
- Mary Frances Berry, professor of social thought, University of Pennsylvania
- Ira Berlin, professor of history, University of Maryland
- Ishmael Reed, author
Shared Ancestries Revealed
Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard and the executive producer and host of “African American Lives” and “Faces of America,” to be broadcast in February on PBS, which will explore the ancestry of Stephen Colbert, Meryl Streep, Eva Longoria, Yo Yo Ma, Mike Nichols, Malcolm Gladwell, and six others.
As we have shown in the “African American Lives” series on PBS, fully 58 percent of African Americans have at least 12.5 percent European ancestry. Only
5 percent, in spite of widespread myths to the contrary, have as much Native American ancestry. And between 30 and 35 percent of all African American males can trace their paternal lineage (their y-DNA) to a white
man who impregnated a black female most probably during slavery.
The illegality of miscegenation, the prevalence of sexual abuse and rape, guilt, shame, and disgrace kept these relationships hidden.
What this means is that, in defiance of the law and social convention, an enormous amount of “race-mixing” has long been occurring in the United States, about which we, as a society, have for just as long been in deep denial. I have never given an admixture DNA test of a black person who turned out to be 100 percent African, no matter how dark or “African” they appear to be.
Some of this inter-racial sexuality was voluntary, we now know, but far more was coerced, a reflection or a result of a profound imbalance of power. Because of a confluence of factors — the illegality of miscegenation, the prevalence of sexual abuse and rape as the source of these relationships, infidelity, guilt, shame, and disgrace — both black people and white people had a certain interest in keeping these relationships in the dark, as it were.
Histories Distorted
Annette Gordon-Reed is the author of “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family,” which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. She is currently the Charles Warren Visiting Professor of Legal History at Harvard Law School.
The family stories of black Americans and the findings of population geneticists make clear that Michelle Obama’s family history is far from unique. The vast majority of black Americans whose ancestors were enslaved in North America have some degree of mixed ancestry.
Appearances deceive. People get thrown off merely looking at the surface. Do you have dark skin? Only people who are fair-skinned are thought to have white ancestry. And anyone who “looks” white can’t
have any African ancestry. Those presumptions go nicely with the country’s historic racial program: to fit everyone into their racial “place” to determine how they should be treated.
Certain presumptions go nicely with the country’s historic racial program: to fit everyone into their racial “place.”
That a person who looks like Mrs. Obama is not “all” black destabilizes things, especially when one considers the implications. Are people who look “all” white really that? I remember speaking with one white Virginian who insisted that the white Virginians’ fetish for genealogy stems from a desire “to prove who is white.”
That we’ve just started speaking openly about the complexity of black ancestry doesn’t surprise. After all, white Americans, through law and social customs, invested heavily in promoting the idea that people of African descent were fundamentally different (inferior) types of human beings than whites. Slavery enforced that notion, and that’s what segregation was all about.
What happens when you recognize that you and fellow whites share a bloodline with the people you are claiming are so different? And then there’s the fact that none of this has made much difference to black Americans. Having a white father or great-great-great grandfather didn’t mean much: they were defined as “negro” or “black” and kept their place in the racial hierarchy.
Our Non-Post Racial Climate
John McWhorter, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is the author of “Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English.”
If America now appreciates the mixing of races in our history, it isn’t clear to me just what the appreciation consists of.
Appreciating the mixing of races in our history does not eradicate racist feelings in the present.
One idea might be that if we appreciate, or acknowledge, the racial mixture in the past, then it will help eradicate racist feelings in the present. Surely, however, no one truly believes this could happen to any significant degree. The notion has a noble ring to it, but who supposes that a white person who harbors anti-black sentiment would change his mind upon being informed that slave masters often impregnated their female slaves? Or that genetically he probably has a bit of “black” in him from such interactions in the past?
Another thing that keeps us from appreciating such stories is that they are so often painful or embarrassing, involving coercion and illegitimacy. There is a story of this kind in my own family background, which my older relatives were reluctant to dwell on in conversation. To us now, it would seem like a complex tale of interaction between the races in the old South. To my grandfather, however, it was not a New Yorker think-piece story, but the beginning of a tough childhood he was happy to have escaped.
Of course there were less unsavory kinds of racial mixture in the past. I just finished reading Marcus LiBrizzi’s new book “Lost Atusville” about a small town in Maine founded in the 18th century, where black-white couples were hardly uncommon and occasioned little remark. But ironically, what keeps us from appreciating things like that as relevant to us is that we are as hung up on race in some ways as the people in Michelle Obama’s great-great-great-grandmother’s day were.
What Remains Buried
Martha Hodes, a professor of history at New York University, is the author of “The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century” and “White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South.”
Why have these multiethnic connections been so long buried? The answer can be found quite readily within the story of Michelle Obama’s genealogy. We learn, first, that one man listed a 6-year-old child among
his legal possessions, right alongside livestock and farming tools. We learn next that the child was shipped, like freight, away from her loved ones, and then that another white man had sex with her when she was
a teenager. Why should we wonder at the impulse to bury such pain?
The often violent encounter of European and African ancestry is found in the family trees of white Americans, as well as black Americans.
Nor did the descendants of slavemasters break the silence within their own families. Mary Chestnut of South Carolina famously wrote in her 1861 diary that “every lady tells you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household, but those in her own she seems to think drop from the clouds.” As Helen Heath, the 88-year-old woman who attended church with Michelle Obama’s great-great-grandfather, said so plainly: “people didn’t want to talk about that.”
Even the way we talk about these “connections” doesn’t nearly capture the trauma of such lives, and the idea of “racial intermingling” that “lingers in the bloodlines of many African-Americans” seems rather gently worded in the article. The often violent encounter of European and African ancestry linger in the family trees of white Americans, not just black Americans. In fact, these histories ought to make us pause over the very categories of “black” and “white.”
In Some Ways, Race Really Is Skin Deep
Mark D. Shriver is associate professor of biology at Morehouse College and associate professor of anthropology at Pennsylvania State University. He and his wife Katrina Voss are working on a short online educational video series, “Reading Between the Genes: Genetics Evolution and Public Health.”
We face a number of difficulties in talking and even thinking clearly about population differences. We face a history that is marred by forced emigration, slavery and dehumanization. To make matters more complicated, some conceptual blocks result from an incomplete appreciation of what we have learned from the study of evolution.
85 percent to 95 percent of human genetic variation is shared across all populations.
In the early 1970s new methods for assessing genetic variation on the molecular level demonstrated that 85 percent to 95 percent of human genetic variation is shared across all populations. Contemporary society has taken this as scientific evidence that there is no “biological foundation for race.” How do we reconcile this cognitive dissonance? Is science telling us that our perceptions are wrong — that we can’t see “race”?
The resolution to this dilemma is not the mantra, “differences don’t exist.” Nor is the lesson, differences are not essential and easily distinguished. The genome is not singular and different genes have independent evolutionary histories. We humans evolved upright walking before evolving modern brain size.
Grappling With the Meaning of Race
Mary Frances Berry is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought at the University of Pennsylvania and former chairwoman of the United States Commission on Civil Rights.
The wide dissemination of the story of Michelle Obama’s white, black and Native American roots informs the public of a rather common occurrence among African-Americans. Surely, however, white Americans must have noticed that few African-American descendants of slaves are anything other than of mixed race. This is true though the one-drop rule made us all black, however fair of complexion.
Perhaps telling Michelle Obama’s story will lead to more admissions and discoveries of white families who have black ancestry.
Many historians and descendants have written about the subject and I have discussed many such stories in my writings on race and the law. In my own family on my father’s side, one grandfather was descended from a white slave owner and an African-American slave and the other from a Creek and freedwoman.
Historically, race-mixture stories have attracted sustained public interest only when some celebrity or a president, as in Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, is involved. Perhaps telling Michelle Obama’s story will lead to more admissions and discoveries of families even those thought to be white who have black ancestry.
A Jumbled History
Ira Berlin, a professor of history at the University of Maryland, is the author of the forthcoming ”The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations.”
Historian-geneologist Megan Smolenyak’s extraordinary detective work featured in The Times article is a great gift to the First Family and to all Americans. It reminds us of who we are and how we became who we are. We are a jumbled people, a product of violent and occasionally loving relations that we are only beginning to unravel.
There is much to be learned from Melvinia’s tale, and not just for the First Family.
The story of Melvinia and her descendants is a common one in the long history of American slavery. It speaks to the violence of slavery, an institution that necessarily rested upon — indeed, could not exist without — slave masters enjoying a monopoly of violence and being willing to use it in unconscionable ways. In this case, as in others, Melvinia’s fate reveals the presumption that white men believed it was their prerogative to have sexual access to black women.
However, it tells us nothing about the nature of the relationship that emerged from such unions — relations that begin in force sometimes turn in strange ways and can even conclude with respect and love. As Professor James Gillmer noted in the article, “these relationships can be complex.” Melvinia’s story also reminds us of how close slavery is, how few generational jumps it takes to get back to the era of slavery — a period, which encompasses the majority of American history.
A New People
Ishmael Reed is the author of “Mixing It Up, Taking On the Media Bullies.”
The revelations about Michelle Obama’s white ancestors come as no surprise to most African-Americans who have white, usually Irish or Scots Irish, or Native-American ancestors, or both. Such a revelation debunks most books, opinion columns, and think tank papers about race that are based upon the myth of the uninterrupted African ancestry of those whom we mistakenly designate as “African-Americans.” Put them all in the trash can and let’s get real.
In his great novel “Black No More,” George Schuyler made a wager to his white readers that they could not trace their ancestry without uncovering black relatives. William Loren Katz and Noel Ignatiev have written about race mixing among Americans. Novelists Chester Himes and Joel Williamson have claimed that it has occurred so frequently that those whom we refer to as black or African Americans are indeed, as Williamson has written, “a new people.”