Have you ever thought of getting your DNA tested?  Well, I thought about it and actually did it!  My Mother always talked about the women in our family having a Native American heritage, so I really expected to see results that included Native American – maybe 10% or more!

The structure of part of a DNA double helix. May be subject to copyright.

I took advantage of the tests offered by Ancestry which provides an estimate of the historical origins of my DNA.  Following are my results:

History of Native American Heritage in African Americans (Source:  Henry Louis Gates Jr., posted 11 Feb 2013 12:32 am, Exactly How Black is Black America , direct quotes from the article):

• The findings show that the common claim that many African Americans make about their high percentage of Native American ancestry is a myth.  Joanna Mountain broke down to Henry Louis Gates Jr. our low amounts of Native American ancestry in this way: “Eighty percent of African Americans have less than 1 percent Native American ancestry. Over 2.5 percent have between 2 percent and 3 percent. And of all African Americans who have at least 1 percent Native American ancestry, the average is 2 percent Native American.”  So much for all of those putative Cherokee roots on just about every black person’s family tree, fabricated to explain why your great-grandmother had “high cheekbones and straight black hair”!  Why there is such little evidence of genetic mingling between African Americans and Native Americans deserves a column of its own.
• And what about the percentages of “black” or sub-Saharan ancestry in the white American community? That will be the subject of another column.  But suffice it to say here that, according to Mountain, “The bottom line is that 3 percent to 4 percent of people likely to consider themselves as all ‘white’ have some African ancestry — between 0.5 percent and 5 percent.”  Thinking about the enormous implications of these percentages of admixture for African Americans calls to mind that famous line from Dr. King’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail” about what he called “the interrelatedness of all communities” in this country.  When he wrote that “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny,” I wonder if he could possibly have realized how fundamentally this was true of black and white Americans on a biological level. Black and white citizens are bound together in this country at the most fundamental level possible — the level of the genome. And it turns out that Dr. King’s stirring conclusion — that “whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly” — has been literally true genetically of these two groups of the American people for a very long time.

Between The Dashes