Alternate Roots by Christine Scodari

Author:Christine Scodari [Scodari, Christine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, Marriage & Family, Ethnic Studies, General, Gender Studies
ISBN: 9781496817792
Google: rFldDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Published: 2018-06-14T04:13:45+00:00

TELEVISION, GENETIC ANCESTRY, AND IDENTITY

The Big C: Hereafter (Showtime, 2013) contains the final chapters of The Big C (Showtime, 2010–12), a drama series chronicling the life and death of Cathy Jamison (Laura Linney), a mother, wife, and high school history teacher stricken with terminal melanoma (skin cancer). As these final chapters commence, Cathy has learned that her remission is over and that she is in irreversible decline. At school, she no longer has patience for protocol and red tape. When she pays for her students’ genetic ancestry tests, her principal confronts her, declaring, “It’s not history.” She replies, “Turns out two of my white kids are blacker than my black kid. If you think that didn’t provoke interesting conversation, you’d be wrong.”

Despite the potential for using hybridity in genetic ancestry as a mechanism for insight, as Cathy does, or for equating genetic ancestry designations with culturally constructed racial categories, as Cathy also does, DNA in many cases supplies the only means by which the descendants of African slaves can make a connection to African geographic locations and peoples. These subjects’ DNA markers can be matched to those of contemporary Africans. As seen most clearly in Faces of America (2010), where African American school kids are linked to African tribes, such potential for empowerment drives much (but definitely not all) use of genetic ancestry on family history TV. Mountain and Guelke also tout the “subversive potential” of genetic ancestry, based on the case in which DNA vindicated a group of African Americans claiming descent from Thomas Jefferson and one of his slaves, Sally Hemings.

The first episodes of both African American Lives and African American Lives 2 situate the special case of African Americans. Gates introduces the first series from Ellis Island, reminding viewers that some Americans cannot trace their ancestry through there, and hints at new avenues available for such searches. The final episode of each series reveals the results of guests’ DNA tests, which might aid in efforts to scale their brick walls. In African American Lives, we are told that Gates’s admixture indicates that he is 50 percent white. Oprah Winfrey has no white ancestry but does possess a smidgen of Native American background. Astronaut Mae Jemison, who assumed that she had Native American origins because of her appearance, instead has East Asian heritage—a product, Gates suggests, of mingling between blacks and Chinese laborers in the United States.

On African American Lives 2, Gates’s mtDNA suggests European origins along this maternal lineage, which is rare among African Americans. Gates is initially perplexed, much like a viewer who confessed on the show’s Television without Pity forum, “I’d always assumed that my ancestors were products of slave rape, and imagine my surprise when that turned out not to be the case at all.” In Gates’s case, conventional genealogy determined that a white female indentured servant worked alongside and procreated with a male African slave in colonial America.

Following this revelation, African American Lives 2 acknowledges a DNA link to a white family and

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