S
Someone once called my brother “that Spanish
kid.” A woman in Greece looked me up and down
and proclaimed, “You’re Brazilian, right?” For
years, family lore posited that our grandfather
was part Native American. When I worked at a
country club in high school, a member apologized
profusely to me after referring to Tiger Woods
as the big bad “N word.” One of my endearingly
naïve friends never knew I was a black kid until he
saw me standing next to my dark-skinned father.
My wife told me, not long after we first started
dating, that she was into me partly because of my
Mediterranean features. I’ve filled in the bubbles
for black, African American, other, biracial, and
multiracial on every kind of form and census and
survey and application.
What I’m seen as and what I know I am is a
recurring theme of my life and the lives of people
like me, those with parents of different ethnicities
and races and nationalities and colors.
But I’ve always been proud to have a black dad
and a Greek mom and to feel a uniqueness shared
only by me, my brother, and my sister. And when
my son was born three years ago, I was excited
to be able to pass along an affinity for all sides of
my family, to be able to give him a sense of his
African-American roots, in all its complexity and
shades and history and terror and triumphs, as
well as my mother’s deep and profound Greek
heritage, and my wife’s American grab-bag of
German, Italian and Irish ancestry.
This Christmas, after years of delving into my
genealogical history with what little research
I could muster online and the familial stories
and photographs I’d grown up with, I decided
a cool gift for my parents and my in-laws would
be a DNA test through Ancestry.com examining
the genealogy of my son, my little curly-headed,
one-kid melting pot. Something fun. Something
for the family to talk about. And, quite possibly,
something unexpected.
I saw the email on Monday morning, Dec. 4,
three weeks before Christmas, and well before
I expected the results. Although Ancestry.com
explained that the report would be available
after six weeks or more, it had arrived in less
than a month.
Thrilled, anxious, contemplative and unsure
what to do, I waited another day to look.
Wasn’t assuming anything about my son’s
results beyond what I knew, but the information
loomed over me, ready to bash the conceptions
of what I’d grown up to believe ab out my family.
None of it would affect my three-year-old, and
I doubted my wife would care much beyond
finding out something interesting about her or
my ancestry, but something was triggered in me,
and my hesitation at seeing the results began to
make sense.
For many biracial people, genealogy is a
complicated subject.
Dawn Turner Trice, a former Chicago Tribune
columnist, told NPR in 2008 that questions and
issues of representation and identification for those
with mixed ancestry have a “historical influence.
Some members of the black community are a
little sensitive about how biracial people identify
themselves if one of the parents is black.”
Even the most well-known biracial man in
history, President Barack Obama, self-identified as
an African-American, after a long interior struggle,
because of how others saw and treated him.
But because I was so attuned to all aspects
of my parents’ biographies, that struggle never
materialized for me. Yeah, I identified myself as
black because when you have a black dad, you’re
supposed to follow suit, but I always believed
myself to have the best of all worlds.
My dad is black, and his dad was part Native
American, and my mother is white, but she is
also a first-generation Greek American whose
mom came to the United States as a student in
the late 1940s and married my grandfather, a
Greek Cypriot.
I was black and I was white, but I never needed to
slap the latter on myself as a generic label because
my mom wasn’t just white, she was Greek. To
have a tangible connection to a place, a people,
elevated me and my siblings above such a term.
The doubt was still there.
I kept waiting to look at the report, kept poring
over family stories, and the cache of old black-
and-white photographs my grandmother had
entrusted to me. Stared at the dark faces, the great
aunts and uncles, great grandparents, dark men in
Army uniforms and wide-brimmed hats, women
in fancy dresses and pearls, my grandmother and
her best friend perched atop their bicycles, my
great grandmother posing with the white family
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