That is just weird

I Don’t Need a DNA Test to Tell Me How Black I Am

There's a photo and the author is a light colored young woman.

Her first paragraph.

When my sister called me a few months ago to say, a little breathlessly, that she had gotten back her results from 23andMe, I snapped at her, “I don’t want to know!” 

She kept trying to share, but I kept shutting her down, before saying I had to go and hanging up. 

Afterward I felt a little shaky, as if I’d narrowly escaped disaster.

This come later. It's still weird.

I was a little embarrassed that I couldn’t take the news, whatever that news turned out to be. 

And then I realized that was it: I didn’t want to “turn out to be” anything more than what I was. 

I didn’t want my blackness divvied up or deconstructed any more than it has already been, not just in my lifetime but in the history of the Creole people of Louisiana I descend from.

I don’t need a DNA test to tell me that I come from everywhere. Creoles are the original American racial mélange of black and European — French and Spanish mostly — and frequently Native American. 

But this mélange has hardly been celebrated. 

Instead, it was the measuring stick for the limits to which Jim Crow laws had to go to police racial lines in Louisiana and the wider South (see one-drop rule, tragic mulatto, Plessy v. Ferguson). 

Yeah, when are we going to knock it off with the one-drop rule inherited and persisting in America from its past of slavery and racism?

I'm mostly French, so I say I'm French.

But I have some English folks and some Scots and maybe (maybe not) an Indian rattling around among my ancestors.

Nothing is simple, so I just go with the bulk.

Creole multiracialism has been viewed not as quintessentially American but as something that undermines what quintessentially American should mean. 

And yet it should be.

Both blacks and whites viewed Creoles with special contempt and more than a little suspicion, as if we were trying to join a club we could never belong to, because of our color.