Henry Louis Gates, academic clone of the Reverend Al Sharpton, black ambulance-chaser on the scene wherever blackness needs publicity, has made fame and fortune by digging into the genetic pasts of famous black people and revealing them on national television.
The latest was when he confronted Angela Davis, Sixties radical, black supremacist, and Communist with the fact that one of her ancestors came over on the Mayflower.
'It can't be', said Davis. 'It simply can't be'. Heresy, apostasy, fake news, a scurrilous attempt to distract, demean, and disparage her blackness and her untiring labors for the black man.
But of course it was true. First of all thirty million people are descendants of the Mayflower colonists, not surprising as genetic inheritance becomes geometric. The 102 passengers on the ship quickly became 200 and then 2000 and before long in the tens of thousands.
Death from infection, disease, and Indian scalping did nothing to stop the demographic tsunami. That number even beggars that of Genghis Khan who conquered the whole world and whose descendants are estimated to be only sixteen million. Human beings are not exactly fruit flies, a generation of which is ten days, but our reproductive potential is still impressive.
Second, Angela Davis is not as black as the ace of spades and even a casual look in the mirror would tell her that she had more than a drop of white blood. Miscegenation was common in the days of slavery, most plantation owners had their way with chattel and it wasn't long before the pure Mandinka stock of the first African slaves had been mixed with white blood.
Third, the preference in the black community for lighter-skinned mates is well-known - the more white blood the better.
Yet Angela, playing for the camera, looked nonplussed and shocked. Gates, delighted in his gotcha moment, smiled. 'There, there, my dear', he said. 'We're all in the same boat'.
The Gates show is serial soap opera, with each black participant on tenterhooks to find out how black he really is, only to find out that he has been mongrelized long ago. It was not enough to want to be white, to bed white, to envy white. Once the onion had been peeled back and white was found at the core, whiteness was complete.
Ordinary black people have not followed suit. For two hundred years in America they were segregated and whether pure black, quadroon, octoroon, or just a bit off-white, they were mishandled, misused, and mistreated by the white man. The last thing they needed to know was their white ancestry - who had done what with their mommas in the woodshed - and even before that which African tribe they had come from.
Those tribes were complicit in the slave trade. It was Mandinka slavers who sold their stable to the Portuguese, the Spanish, and the English. Where was the value in confirming that?
White people, however, are spitting into cups at record rates and sending it off to be genetically tested. The curiosity of 'who am I?' has become epidemic.
The reasons for researching ancestry are many. Take Bob Muzelle, a civil rights activist who made his reputation on the Freedom Rides to Selma and Montgomery and who marched across the Pettus bridge with Martin and Ralph. Bob had so identified with black people his whole life - rode with them, ate with them, partied with them, and went to their weddings and funerals, that he considered himself one of them.
Perhaps given this instinctive, almost preternatural preference for black folk, he thought he might have black blood in his veins. He might be a descendant of Sally Hemmings, Thomas Jefferson's black mistress, or any one of the offspring of Southern grandees and their slaves. His family was originally from Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, and the opportunities for mixed race affairs were many.
If he found out that he did indeed have at least some black blood, his reputation in the black community and in the white progressive one in which he was a notable member, would be further burnished.
Of course Bob, so one-sided and deliberate was he in his search for black membership, that he never considered the alternative - that he was descended from slave owners, a far more likely possibility. He waited patiently for the DNA results, confident that what he had long assumed would be confirmed.
Things don't always turn out the way we hope, and when Bob's genetic results came in, they confirmed the worst of all scenarios. On both sides of the family he was descended not just from slaveowners, but the largest, most vilified, cruel, and most dastardly of any in the South.
DNA testing can only show general associations, but with only a very little research into public and family records, ancestry can be made far more precise. There was no doubt that he was white and in a direct genetic line to two prominent Southern plantation-owning families.
Not only was he white, but pure, unalloyed white. The properties owned by the families were the largest in the county, and thanks to their thousands of slaves, they moved comfortably to the Mississippi Delta to grow cotton once the tobacco lands of the Virginias had been depleted. There they ruled the roost just like they had in Virginia.
To tell or not to tell was Bob's dilemma. Revealing his tainted, slave-owning ancestry would be tantamount to expulsion from the black community; but concealing it would be dishonest and a secret hard to keep.
On the other hand, being a close relative of one of the most notorious slavers in the South and freely admitting it and stating his renewed commitment to the black cause might be just the thing to give him a particular and unique cachet.
'Let it be, Bob', said his wife, Cara, a far more down-to-earth, practical woman who to be honest had only put up with her husband's racial fol-de-rol for decades and at best hoped that his grandee past might put an end to his black wannabe-ism. She, also descended from well-to-do Southern families, had always assumed both family slave holding and sexual liaisons and took it all as a matter of course. History was what it is, unchangeable, irremediable, and inalienable. Besides, who cares?
Bob however went into a funk, a dark depression, a miserable period in which he questioned his very worth. What had all the stinking bus rides, the nasty hotel rooms, and the gross Southern food meant?
Betty Putnam had hoped to find a direct ancestral link to the Duke of Northumberland, English royalty not too far removed from the throne of England. She had watched every episode of Upstairs, Downstairs, and Downton Abbey, rooted for the aristocrats, her likely ancestors, masters of the realm, at the top of the social pyramid, and la creme de la creme of Anglo-American society.
The Putnams already were known for their storied history - early American colonists in the Massachusetts Bay colony, associates of John Davenport who in search of a more disciplined Puritanism founded New Haven, and who were later successful shipbuilders and traders; but a touch of royalty would be the jewel in the crown.
However things in Merry Old England were just as tricky as they were in America, and there were far more servants, peasants, and grooms than the intermarried royals, so it shouldn't have been a surprise when she found no direct link to the Duke of Northumberland or any royalty.
She was unmistakably and irrevocably from peasant stock. The Putnams might have been ambitious international entrepreneurs, clerics, and adventurers, but they weren't royalty by any means. Betty had to be content with recorded history and to forget the inconvenient truth of her genetic past.
The rest of the millions of Americans who want a glimpse into the distant past are happy enough confirming their Irishness or Italian ancestry. Some wanted to be sure they had no Jewish blood, although given the forced insularity of the Jews, ghettoes, shtetls, and the like - that was pretty much of a certainty.
'I've got a drop of Scottish blood', said one patron at McSorley's bar, who bought a round of single malt for everyone; and that was about as far as most DNA searches went. A complete waste of time and money, a pastime, an incidental use of new technology, but meaning little or nothing.
Yet Gates has made millions, far more than he made as a Princeton professor teaching Black Studies to black students, or later at diversity minded Harvard which hired him to do the same thing; and the DNA tracking companies are now on the stock exchange. An American success story among many, or looked at another way, a sucker born every minute.
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