Taking pride in our ancestry

The results are in. My paternal and maternal DNA results have all come back now, from three separate identifiers (I originally used NatGeo and have since used Ancestry and 23andMe).

As for how I “look”, I appear to be white. As in “white as white can be”. And according to each DNA testing result, my most recent ancestors all come from Northern and Central Europe. Yes, as in “all”. There is not even as much as a one percent listing from anywhere else on all the globe. To have all three distinctly different DNA testing kits largely agree on my ancestry seems to me to increase the likelihood that their combined results are reasonably reliable and true.

England, Ireland, Scotland, France, Germany, Scandinavia; those are my top six DNA tracers, in order. No wonder I like cold snowy hikes. And having some rowdy fun (London and Dublin were listed as being especially dense areas of ancestral concentrations - no wonder I like Shakespeare and an occassional nip of Irish whiskey).

It seems we all tend to feel a bit of pride regarding our DNA ancestry (whatever it may be for each of us). Yet, truly, none of us had anything to do with where we came from. So I’m not even sure “pride” is the proper emotion to feel about something we each personally had absolutely nothing in the world to do with.

However, I also felt a tinge of disappointment at my test results. I showed no Native American DNA. No Asian. No Latino regions. No African.

Yet, I also know the truth runs much deeper. I know that if I go back far enough, I will find my most ancient ancestral origins. Thousand of years. Tens of thousand of years. Even a hundred thousand years or more. The truth is there. For us all.

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People who live on or anywhere near the equator today have much darker skin than me. That is easily explainable from a scientific view; darker skin is a wonderfully adaptive and extremely efficient way to protect humans from the strong ultraviolet (UV) light and folate depletion that constantly occurs near Earth’s equator.

However, if successive generations of people live far enough away from the equator for thousands of years, they become adapted to less direct sunlight; therefore they have much paler skin. Alas, my most recent ancestors. And my own skin color today.

During a parent-teacher conference, I once had a parent look up and say to me. “You know, Mr. Talley, it’s no wonder the Black kids generally score lower on all these standardized school tests. Everybody knows that they don’t have the intellectual capacity that you and I have. It’s like you’re a racist if you say it out loud. Now I love Black kids but they just aren’t as smart as white kids. The tests prove it. All over the country it’s the same data.”

I was so stunned that at first I couldn’t even answer.

I finally gathered myself enough to agree with this man, at least with the first part of what he said - that Black kids generally score lower than whites on standardized testing (I learned long ago that the best way towards “winning” any disagreement is to first find out where you both agree). Then I forged onward, trying to educate this man that the difference he purported to measure had absolutely nothing to do with skin color, but had everything to do with the fact that many Black kids - by nature of the socio-economic culture into which many are born in America - often have many less educational resources available at home than do the majority of their white counterparts. (If whites were truly superior, we wouldn’t have so Black people in America who qualify as geniuses - like Neil deGrasse Tyson.)