ancestry
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The Ancestry Trap: This Geneticist Wants to Shift the Focus From DNA Testing to Black Futures
Dr. Janina Jeff can tell you just about anything you want to know about genetics testing: How does it work? What can it tell you? How do you spell mitochondria again? But Jeff herself has never taken a DNA test. “It still sits on my shelf,” she told The Root in a recent interview. A…
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46 Chromosomes and a Mule: Falsely Romanticizing Our Complex Genetic Identities for Profit
Last Tuesday night, a friend sent me a video of a commercial framed as a short film titled “Inseparable.” It was set in America during chattel slavery and featured Abigail, an enslaved black woman, and her love interest, a white man who was seeking to entice her to run away with him to presumably engage…
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Michigan State University Receives Almost $1,500,000 to Create Online Slavery Database
Michigan State University will receive nearly $1.5 million to create a new online database that will allow folks to navigate the records of millions of enslaved people and their descendants, a boon for historians and African Americans who are interested in knowing more about their ancestry. Michigan State recently announced a $1.47 million grant from…
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The Museum of You: The International African American Museum Wants to Personalize African-American History With Its Genealogy Center
Museums can impart a vast amount of information to visitors, sharing with them history, culture, science, art. But what if a museum could personalize your own story, your own background and your own history? That is exactly what the International African American Museum is hoping to do with the launch Tuesday of its Center for…
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My Ancestry Results Revealed a Difficult Truth Behind 'Good Hair' in My Family
In the bathroom of a Brooklyn, N.Y., bar over the weekend, a black woman stopped me and said, “Oh my, I love your hair! What are you mixed with?” It’s not the first time I’ve been asked that, but I took a pause before answering and eventually said to her, “Not mixed, just black.” Growing…