Shared by Tahir Mahmood

This article is printed in one of recent issues of American Scholar

My family’s complex racial history, filled as it is with myths and truths, led me to DNA ancestry testing. I had begun writing a book on the life and times of my maternal grandparents, whose marriage around 1915 was an act of defiance in a part of the South governed by Jim Crow laws. In that book, The House at the End of the Road, my purpose had been to tell the little-known story of mixed-race families in the American South, like my mother’s, that prevailed in spite of Jim Crow and laws against interracial marriage. As the book took shape, a scientific study caught my eye.

In late 2005, scientists reported the discovery of a gene mutation that had led to the first appearance of white skin in humans. Other than this minor mutation—just one letter of DNA code out of 3.1 billion letters in the human genome—most people are 99.9 percent identical genetically. And yet, what divisions have arisen as a result of such a seemingly inconsequential genetic anomaly. Moreover, this mutation had separated members of my family along tightly demarcated racial lines for three generations. As this discovery became known, I was invited to join a class on race relations at Pennsylvania State University in which all the students participated in DNA ancestry testing as a way of discussing contemporary attitudes about race and cultural identity.

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