slavery and dna

SLAVERY AND DNA

npr.com
the answers to your dna is tied up in your genome
how those amino acids are all tied to together tells the story 
sometimes the story is good
sometimes the story is bad

if you are black and your trace your ancestry back in time it commonly ends in a dead end
the dna just seems to disappear
sometimes that dna ends where you dont want it to

sometimes the ancestor you find is a white person
commonly a slaveowners dna

that means usually a nonconsensual union of dna

i watched finding your roots on pbs recently
a black actors ancestry dna ended up being a white slave owners dna
who according to records owned the black relative 

it is usually quite disturbing to the person searching their ancestry
one black actor was so disturbed he walked off the set crying 
he could not handle the answer 

my historian brother is a black historian and a good amateur ancestry person
he always says
dont do your dna if you cant handle what you find

its common that a black person has a slaveowner in his dna tree

its also common if you are white and you live in the south that your ancestor was a slave owner and may have been a perpetrator of this forced dna exchange

i had my dna done and my historian brother takes care of it for me

he has done an extensive ancestral tree

so
i know where my ancestors come from
i know the bad things that are in there

it is sobering to know that my kinfolks some of them owned slaves
and 
yes our dna is shared with black ancestry trees

this usually means a nonconsensual sharing of dna

i expected all of this 
im saddened by it

i grew up in the deep south ie arkansas
there was no social interaction with black people
there was forced integration when i was in high school
at that time you could go to a white school or the black school
a few brave black people came to our school

when i was in high school i checked out a book in our library that was about a black writer who moved to mostly white maine
this started me thinking a lot about racism
im sure that book and others i read in high school would be banned now
one book i read was called black like me
the author who was white took a drug that turned his skin dark 
he then traveled throughout the south as a black person
documenting his journey 

those two books and the social uprising that was going on made me think a lot about race

after graduation i moved to california to live with my historian brother 
he was stationed in the military there
the people i interacted with at work and socially and at school were multiracial

i saw a different world that changed how i thought about race

i try to think back about when i was younger and i dont remember how i handled all this growing up

i also wandered what i would be like if i lived during the civil war area
i know what i would do now
i would support the union and the us and not be a slave owner

but

what would i do if i had been there
would i have owned slaves living in the deep south
would i have fought for the confederacy

i would lie if said i wouldnt
i dont know

i enjoy talking to my historian brother as he can explain the accurate history of that time
even leading up to the civil war and afterwards

the history he taught is real history with all its bumps and thorns that sometimes gets smoothen over

when i was in college i took a lot of history classes as electives
one was a course called african american history
im sure thats not a woke description now

but
it was taught by a black professor who told the truth
the truth thats now being attempted to be removed in many states

if i could talk to my black relatives i would apologize 
but
would welcome them into our family

so
if you do your ancestry dna beware that you may or should i say you will find things you dont want to know
if you cant handle it dont do your dna

for me
i want to know the good and the bad

what i decided to do is now that i know the past
i want to learn from it
then
i only want to look forward but remembering the past as i gaze into the future

the organicgreen doctor