How African Am I?

I always knew I was 100% African.  Always.  Every African I ever met knew it -- from the Nigerians I used to babysit for when I was a kid, to the Senegalese, Kenyan, Moroccan and Egyptian co-eds  I hung out with in college, to the South Africans I befriended when I came to the city, to the tailors from Ghana that made my wedding dress.  I have yet to meet any African that doesn't look at me in genuine astonishment as they recognize themselves or their mothers or sisters in me, and embrace me and all my African ways that never cease to amaze them and freak them all the way out. The food that I cook. The way that I dance. The gap in my teeth. My cheekbones. All of it.

Oh, some of them may want to exclude me because I'm American -- but my African face won't be denied.  And apparently, neither will the blood of my ancestors.  The blood, as Andre Crouch sang, will never lose its power. DNA doesn't lie.  And so it goes. 

As it turns out, according to AncestryDNA, I"m not 100% African. I'm 96% African. (Ha.)  And to think -- all those Five Percenters yelling at me in the street, calling me Nubia. They were right!  (Thanks, Brother-Men.)

Here's the breakdown:

Main Regions: "In order to be considered for this category, a region must have enough evidence that you actually have the region as part of your genetic ethnicity."

Cameroon/Congo =  29%
Senegal =  22%
Benin/Togo = 15%
Ivory Coast/Ghana = `14%
Nigeria =  5%

Trace Regions: "There is only a small amount of evidence supporting these regions as part of your genetic ethnicity. Because both the estimated amount and the range of the estimate are small, it is possible that these regions appear by chance and are not actually part of your genetic ethnicity."

Africa/Southeastern Bantu =  6%
Mali =  3%
Africa/South-Central Hunter-Gatherers = 1%
Africa North = 1%

Are you curious about that other 4%?  I'm not -- because it's so scant, they're probably showing up at random. (See Trace Regions.) 

I love all Africans everywhere -- from the Nigerians who squabble over which tribe I belong to ("Look at her! She's Igbo!") to the Haitians that assume at least one of my parents are from the West Indies (they are not); from the Parisians from the Ivory Coast and Senegal and Morocco and Egypt and the Sudan who call me "Soeur!" like that's my name to the stunning Cameroonian sisters who wave me down on 125th Street, friendly and out of breath and blurting French, asking for help, for directions probably, and genuinely flummoxed when I explain that I'm from America.  We hug each other and somehow I help them anyway.  And they leave me in the street, waving back at me, like we are family. Because we are.



I don't know what happened to us, as a people.  Well. We all know what happened, don't we.  Somewhere in the 80s, we became enthralled with a particular segment within a popular genre of music that was intrinsically divisive, glorified violence, denigrated black women with abandon and pandered to society's lowest common denominator to make a buck.  Eventually, that niche caught on with the white folks, became a garish caricature of itself in order to continue selling itself to the highest bidder and made a lot of white label executives a lot of money.

There. I said it.

When I was a kid, it was an ordinary every day thing that we called each other brother and sister -- and meant it.  Interestingly enough, it's a part of Chinese culture (many Asian and African cultures, actually) to address everyone this way. An older woman is aunt or mother, an older man is uncle or brother, someone your age is sister or brother or cousin. In this way, everyone is family and there is a unity inherent in the way you are spoken to that binds you to each other.   When we lost this simple unifying element, we lost each other.  And when we lost each other, we lost everything.

Well. At least now I know why my face has drawn all of the African diaspora to my heart. 

Quote of the Day - on Family

"So much of what is best in us 

is bound up in our love of family, 

that it remains the measure of our stability 

because it measures our sense of loyalty. 

All other pacts of love or fear 

derive from it and are modeled upon it." 

                                                 -- Haniel Long

five thousand words

me in charleston, sc



me, again



douglas on the farm in appalachia (ga)



douglas in repose - charleston, sc



uncle douglas with his nephew thomas - magic johnson theater, greenbriar mall/the atl

something from goodreads...

my goal is to read 100 books this year and blog about them on goodreads, so i can keep up with my bookshelf life. so far, i'm off to a flying start. we spend so much of our lives waiting. i figured out the trick: keep a book in my purse at all times, so that while i'm waiting for the train, waiting in line at the bank, waiting to see my doctor, waiting for that crosstown bus, i'm reading. in the past few months, i've finished quite a few books this way. this is one of them.

What a Difference a Daddy Makes: The Lasting Imprint a Dad Leaves on His Daughter's Life by Kevin Leman

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
i read this as a gift to myself for father's day, to give me some insight on my relationship with my father (which is actually pretty cool these days).



this is a smart book, an easy read, one that i would recommend to absolutely anyone, but it's especially a must for black men who are fathers. way too many women i know see fathers as just a paycheck. in many instances, they don't understand the importance of a father because they've never had one who had a strong presence in their lives. sometimes, even when he was physically present, he wasn't necessarily "there".



so why have a father that's especially involved with your daughter?



because according to this book, it is fathers who give girls their self-esteem/self-worth. girls get a sense from their fathers -- not their mothers -- that they're worth being loved. if the father isn't present in the girl's life to give her this, she will find a surrogate who will. this can mean lousy choices in love for the rest of her life. and of course, this cycle will perpetuate itself when it's time for her to have children.



kids are going to belong someplace. the question isn't whether they'll belong but where. a gang. a basketball team. a boyfriend/girlfriend. but they will belong.



some of it was a little too disney-esque for me -- like him crying his eyes out when one of his daughters left home for college/got married (yeah, he's a cryer) -- but on second thought, maybe the ideal situation needed to be presented so we'd see the male/father and female/mother roles in the home in their proper perspective.



yeah. a definite must-read.


View all my reviews.

homeward bound

since i'm going to meet the rest of my friend's family this weekend at his cousin's wedding in pennsylvania -- and since monday is my birthday -- i thought i'd push play on this classic: simon and garfunkel at monterrey in '67.

celebrate me home

for today's monday video selection, i thought this kenny loggins song would either really move you or totally cheese you out. let me know which feeling overwhelmed you first.

birthday season

earlier this week, i made a birthday package for my nephew ezra and sent it to ATL right after his special day. thanks to my friend allowing me to cherry pick my way through a longbox of material that he didn't want anymore, i managed to send 19 batman comic books. and when that didn't seem like enough, i put nine 1 dollar bills in an envelope (he's 8 so i gave him one to grow on), with a little note. i was going to include a free scoop of ice cream from baskin robbins but i thought, whoa -- that wouldn't be fair to the other munchkins, his brothers and sister. so i backed off. i'll probably send something like "free ice cream scoops for everyone!" before the end of the summer. it's an auntie thing to do.

i know it seems insignificant, but that was a nice little morning, making his bundle. and it made me feel like such an aunt, when he called -- unprompted by his mother, believe it or not -- to thank me. he also thanked my friend, who is still in awe of how polite those children are on a casual ordinary day-to-day basis.

my goal is to not forget any kiddie birthday this year. so far, so good.

happy birthday, daddy

my father turned 90 on saturday, march 24th. there was a formal black tie party in his honor in ATL. complete with a four course meal, old family friends, footage from family reunions past, and of course pictures. ramon and i serenaded him. nothing elaborate. just a few standards that he would have heard as a young man in the 2os and 30s. i think a lot of my not-so-distant family members were genuinely surprised that i could actually sing. at the time, i was more amused by that than annoyed but it was definitely a mixture of both.

my father grew up in the deep south -- south Georgia to be exact. interestingly enough, he made the first wave of the great migration north in the 20s and eventually the first migration south in the 70s. i don't know very many people who can make that claim.

i don't even want to think about the trouble he's seen. but believe it or not, sometimes he actually tells us about it.

just so you know that he's not hobbling around in a diaper with a drool cup around his neck and talking to himself: here he is the next morning after breakfast on his excercise bike.



the day before i got to ATL, we had this long wierd argument about debt and how he thinks it's better to pay things off over time than all at once, in one lump sum. i mean, really. he practically drew a flow chart for me over the phone. not that i needed one. i had to keep reminding myself that he was about to turn 90. he sounded like his usual self. remembers absolutely everything. still thinking everything through, still scheming. and even though he's calmed down a lot since i got work, he's still arguing with me about my future, my finances.

that's his job, i suppose. God knows he's good at it.