Afro-Netizen

Blacks Pin Hope on DNA to Fill Slavery's Gaps in Family Trees

By Amy Harmon
The New York Times

All her life, Rachel Fair has been teased by other black Americans about her light skin. "High yellow," they call her, a needling reference to the legacy of a slave owner who, she says, "went down to that cabin and had what he wanted."

Charles Larkins, whose great-grandmother was a slave, asked Hayes Larkins, above, the slave owner's white great-grandson, to take a DNA test to see if they are related. They await the results.

So it was especially satisfying for Ms. Fair, 64, when a recent DNA test suggested that her mother's African ancestry traced nearly to the root of the human family tree, which originated there 150,000 years ago.

"More white is showing in the color, but underneath, I'm deepest Africa," said Ms. Fair, a retired parks supervisor in Cincinnati. "I tell my friends they're kind of Johnny-come-latelies on the DNA scale, so back up, back up."

Ms. Fair is one of thousands of African-Americans who have scraped cells from their inner cheeks and paid a growing group of laboratories to learn more about a family history once thought permanently obscured by slavery. They are seeking answers to questions about their family lineages in the antebellum South - whether black, white or Native American - and about distant forebears in Africa.

The DNA tests are fueling the biggest surge in African-American genealogy since Alex Haley's 1976 novel, "Roots," inspired a generation to try to trace their ancestors back to Africa. For those who have spent decades poring over plantation records that did not list slaves by surname and ship manifests that did not list where they came from, the idea that the key lies in their own bodies is a powerful one.

But the joy that often accompanies the answers from the tests is frequently tempered by the unexpected questions they raise. African-Americans say the tests can make the ugliness of slavery more palpable and leave the hunger for heritage unsatisfied. Some are unsure what to make of the new information about far-away kin, or how to account for genes that undermine a racial identity they have long internalized.

The interest in using genetics to construct a family tree comes despite warnings from scientists that the necessary tools to tell African-Americans what many want to know the most - precisely where in Africa their ancestors lived and what tribal group they belonged to - are still unreliable.

The most that blacks who use DNA tests can hope to learn now is that their genetic signature matches that of contemporary Africans from a given tribe or region from a DNA database that is far from complete. To assign an ancestral identity based on that match is highly suspect, scientists say; a group whose DNA has not been sampled may be a more precise match, or the person might match with several groups because of migration or tribal mixing.

Each test can also trace only one line of a person's many thousands of ancestors, making the results far more murky than the promise held out by some testing companies.

Still, the popularity of the DNA tests seems a testament to the unremitting craving for a story of origin. However flawed or scientifically questionable, the results provide the only clue many African-Americans have to the history and traditions that members of other American ethnic groups whose immigration was voluntary tend to take for granted.

"There's just something about knowing something after years of thinking it was impossible to know anything," said Melvin Collier, 32, a black student at Clark Atlanta University who recently learned that his DNA matches that of the Fulani people of Cameroon. "It's still pretty overwhelming."

Some African-Americans, more interested in searching out recent relatives who in many cases can be dependably identified with a DNA match, are asking whites whom they have long suspected are cousins to take a DNA test. And in a genetic bingo game that is delivering increasing returns as people of all ethnicities engage in DNA genealogy, some are typing their results into public databases on the Internet and finding a match that no paper trail would have revealed.

"I've been sitting here for years with nothing left to try and then, boom, this brand new thing," said B. J. Smothers, a retired urban planner in Stone Mountain, Ga., who says the results of a DNA test have brought her closer than she had ever been to discovering the identity of her father's grandfather. "DNA is our last hope."

Read more
(Free subscription to The NY Times is required)

African Roots

After taking a genetic test, a Tampa woman gets a royal reception at ancestors' Sierra Leone village

By HERB FRAZIER
Special to the Times-Union
The Florida Times-Union

SENEHUN NGOLA, Sierra Leone -- An orange sun hung low as a Tampa woman's five-year search for her genetic roots stopped at the end of a long bumpy road in a lush rain forest.

Barbara Morrison-Rodriguez was flanked by smiling people in this rice-growing community. The Africans were eager to embrace the black American, who told them that a genetic test revealed that her mother has a Mende ancestor and her father has a Temne ancestor. That connection with two of Sierra Leone's two predominant ethnic groups brought Morrison-Rodriguez an instant passport as a daughter of the soil.

Strong men carried her in a hammock supported on their heads, a ride reserved for chiefs. Women served her heaping piles of red rice, spicy cassava leaves and fish. People danced, played drums and sang for her. Children followed her, squeezing her fingers in their tiny hands.

Reaching for her compact digital camera, Morrison-Rodriguez said: "Yeah, I have got to get these little faces."

Thousands of black Americans have taken genetic tests that link them to a specific group in Africa, but Morrison-Rodriguez is among the very few who've used that compass to follow a trail back to the continent.

The consultant for non-profit groups found her place here during a recent three-day visit and made a pledge to help the 750 residents. Senehun Ngola is one of many impoverished communities in this nation that was ravaged during a near-decade-long period of bloody civil conflict. The West African country's troubled past reaches back to when it was a source of free labor during the Atlantic slave trade to North America. Captives from Sierra Leone, a former British colony on the continent's old Rice Coast, were prized in South Carolina and Georgia for their rice-growing skills.

Within hours of Morrison-Rodriguez's arrival in Senehun Ngola, Martha Koker, a village maternity nurse, embraced the stranger and uncannily gave her a Mende name befitting the American's former career as a clinical psychologist.

"Your name is Nyanehpor," Koker announced, explaining that the name means someone who consoles a person when they are sad.

Read more

Epstein-Barr Virus May Boost Lupus Risk in Blacks

By Robert Preidt
HealthDay News

The common Epstein-Barr virus may increase the risk of lupus in black Americans, researchers report.

Their study also found that genetic variations between individuals may influence immune system responses to the virus in people with lupus.

Read more

A Family Tree in Every Gene

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

By Armand Marie Leroi
The New York Times

London — Shortly after last year's tsunami devastated the lands on the Indian Ocean, The Times of India ran an article with this headline: "Tsunami May Have Rendered Threatened Tribes Extinct." The tribes in question were the Onge, Jarawa, Great Andamanese and Sentinelese - all living on the Andaman Islands - and they numbered some 400 people in all. The article, noting that several of the archipelago's islands were low-lying, in the direct path of the wave, and that casualties were expected to be high, said, "Some beads may have just gone missing from the Emerald Necklace of India."

The metaphor is as colorful as it is well intentioned. But what exactly does it mean? After all, in a catastrophe that cost more than 150,000 lives, why should the survival of a few hundred tribal people have any special claim on our attention? There are several possible answers to this question. The people of the Andamans have a unique way of life. True, their material culture does not extend beyond a few simple tools, and their visual art is confined to a few geometrical motifs, but they are hunter-gatherers and so a rarity in the modern world. Linguists, too, find them interesting since they collectively speak three languages seemingly unrelated to any others. But the Times of India took a slightly different tack. These tribes are special, it said, because they are of "Negrito racial stocks" that are "remnants of the oldest human populations of Asia and Australia."

It's an old-fashioned, even Victorian, sentiment. Who speaks of "racial stocks" anymore? After all, to do so would be to speak of something that many scientists and scholars say does not exist. If modern anthropologists mention the concept of race, it is invariably only to warn against and dismiss it. Likewise many geneticists. "Race is social concept, not a scientific one," according to Dr. Craig Venter - and he should know, since he was first to sequence the human genome. The idea that human races are only social constructs has been the consensus for at least 30 years.

But now, perhaps, that is about to change. Last fall, the prestigious journal Nature Genetics devoted a large supplement to the question of whether human races exist and, if so, what they mean. The journal did this in part because various American health agencies are making race an important part of their policies to best protect the public - often over the protests of scientists. In the supplement, some two dozen geneticists offered their views. Beneath the jargon, cautious phrases and academic courtesies, one thing was clear: the consensus about social constructs was unraveling. Some even argued that, looked at the right way, genetic data show that races clearly do exist.

Full article

Race-Based Medicine, Genomics And You

Matthew Herper
Forbes.com

NEW ORLEANS - When the human genome was unveiled in 2001, researchers made a point of saying that there is no genetic basis for what we call race--whether someone is Asian, African-American, or Caucasian. Mostly, that's true. There is much more variation within any single racial subgroup than there is between them.

So how do we explain the new heart failure pill tested by NitroMed?

The pill, a fixed combination of two generic ingredients, is the first drug tested only in African-Americans. Results unveiled this morning here at the American Heart Association meeting and published online in the New England Journal of Medicine are stunning. On top of the best treatments available, BiDil still increased survival of African-American heart failure patients by 43% compared with a sugar pill, while cutting hospitalizations by 33%. That's particularly impressive because heart failure, a chronic weakening of the heart's ability to pump blood, has a 50% mortality rate over five years.

Previously, BiDil had never been a true success in clinical trials containing both whites and blacks, but seemed to work well in African-Americans. Thanks in part to hard work by the Association of Black Cardiologists, it was tested in that group--and will now probably save many lives.

Full story

African-American Leaders to Meet to Examine Issues in Race and Genetics

The Gazette
The newspaper of The Johns Hopkins University

The Congressional Black Caucus and the Johns Hopkins University Genetics and Public Policy Center will host a meeting of African-American leaders on Monday, Oct. 4, to examine issues in race and genetics. The conference will take place from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. at the Marriott at Metro Center in Washington, D.C.

Understanding the genetic basis of diseases that disproportionately affect the black community could lead to improved prevention, treatment and cures. Until now, the event's organizers say, there has been too little research to fully understand the role of biological and genetic differences in racial health disparities.

The meeting — titled "IMAGN! Increasing Minority Awareness of Genetics — Now!" — will address the current status of genetic medicine, future directions for genetics research and the potential uses, or misuses, of genetics outside the medical context.

U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, chairman of the The Congressional Black Caucus and a speaker at the conference, says, "The assignment of 'race' can be traced through American history as having a direct impact on the current health outcomes and health disparities confronting the black community. The prevalence of diseases such as hypertension and diabetes and the overall state of African-American health constitute a national crisis. It's time to discuss these issues very candidly."

The conference will bring together political, community, business, religious and opinion leaders to examine the challenging questions raised by advances in genetics and their impact on the black community.

U.S. Rep. Donna M. Christensen of the U.S. Virgin Islands, who chairs the Congressional Black Caucus Health Braintrust, says, "This conference will be an important step in providing the necessary tools to assist the CBC and other leaders in the African-American community to discover just how advances in genetics can best be harnessed to help alleviate current health disparities." Christensen also will speak at the event.

Others who are scheduled to speak are Tony Brown, host of Tony Brown's Journal on PBS & PBS YOU; Aravinda Chakravarti, professor of medicine, Johns Hopkins; Francis Collins, director, National Human Genome Research Institute; Andre Davis, judge, U.S. District Court of Maryland; Georgia Dunston, professor of microbiology, Howard University; Troy Duster, professor of sociology, New York University; Rev. Brenda Girton-Mitchell, associate general secretary, National Council of the Churches of Christ; Patricia King, professor of law, medicine, ethics and public policy, Georgetown University; Charles Ogletree Jr., professor of law, Harvard University; Dorothy Roberts, professor of law, Northwestern University; Maya Rockeymoore, vice president, The Congressional Black Caucus Foundation; and Carol Swain, professor of political science and law, Vanderbilt University.

The program is made possible by funding from the Pew Charitable Trusts, the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Energy.

The Genetics and Public Policy Center is a part of the Phoebe R. Berman Bioethics Institute at Johns Hopkins and is funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts. Its mission is to create the environment and tools needed by decision-makers in both the private and public sectors to carefully consider and respond to the challenges and opportunities that arise from scientific advances in genetics.

To attend the conference, register by Sept. 30th.

Were Jesus and the ancient Semites Black?

"This book attempts to provide a short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years."

--author, Jared Diamond.

In Jared Diamond's book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and UCLA professor of geography and physiology states:

“We instinctively associate Semitic peoples with the Near East. However, . . . Semitic languages really form only one of six or more branches of a much larger language family, Afro-asiatic, all of whose other branches (and other 222 surviving languages) are confined to Africa.

Even the Semitic family subfamily itself is mainly African, 12 of its 19 surviving languages being confined to Ethiopia. This suggests that Afroasiatic languages arose in Africa, and that only one branch of them spread to the Near East. Hence, it may have been Africa that gave birth to the languages spoken by the authors of the Old and New Testaments and the Koran, the moral pillars of Western civilization.”

What do you think?

Anorexia in Blacks gets new scrutiny

Disorder may not be rare as thought

By Shannah Tharp-Taylor
Tribune staff reporter
The Chicago Tribune

In many ways, Stephanie Doswell is your regular college student in a T-shirt and flare-legged jeans. But she is also anorexic, bulimic and African-American, a combination so rare that it sometimes goes unrecognized.

"If someone sees a sickly, thin White person, they automatically think that they have anorexia," said Doswell, 19. "If someone sees a sickly, thin Black person, they don't think that they have anorexia."

She adds sarcastically: "Because Blacks don't get anorexia."

While their numbers are probably small, Black anorexics face a host of unique problems, including inadequate diagnoses from doctors not expecting to find eating disorders in African-Americans.

Anorexia has been thought of as a disease affecting rich, White females since the 1940s because it primarily affects girls from well-to-do Caucasian families.

Recent studies seem to confirm that Black anorexics are extremely hard to find. Last month Ruth Striegel-Moore of Wesleyan University in Connecticut reported in the American Journal of Psychiatry that although anorexia is believed to affect 1 percent to 2 percent of the general population, none of the 1,061 young Black women in their study was anorexic.

But many experts doubt that Black anorexics are as rare as studies have suggested, though experts are left guessing at how prevalent the disease is in minorities.

Traditionally, African-American girls have been thought to have some protection from eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa because of a greater acceptance of larger body size in the African-American community, said Gayle Brooks, an African-American psychologist specializing in eating disorders at the Renfrew Center in Florida.

But this alleged protection from eating disorders appears to weaken as Blacks take on the values of the mainstream culture, Brooks says.

"I think that there are a lot of African-American women who are really struggling with their sense of personal identity and self esteem that comes with being a part of this culture that does not accept who we really are," Brooks said.

For years anorexia (characterized by refusal to eat enough) and bulimia (characterized by binge eating and purging) was only studied in white females, leaving gaps in medical knowledge about eating disorders and how they affect minorities.

For example experts are not sure whether black girls from high-income families are more likely than their poorer counterparts to develop eating disorders, as is believed to be the case for White girls.

Striegel-Moore acknowledges that her study may have underestimated the number of Blacks with anorexia nervosa because she had too few girls from affluent Black families.

Similarly, psychologists typically search for anorexia in adolescents, the age group commonly found to have the disorder in white girls. However, experts question whether anorexia may develop later in African-Americans.

Thomas Joiner, a professor of psychology at Florida State University, tested whether racial stereotypes influence the recognition of eating disorders. He asked 150 people to read a fictional diary of a 16-year-old girl named Mary and rated whether they thought the girl had an eating disorder.

For some the diary was labeled "Mary, 16-year-old Caucasian." For others it was labeled "Mary, 16-year-old African-American."

More people said the subject had an eating disorder when she was labeled white than when she was labeled Black.

"Race mattered," Joiner said. "There's the idea in people's minds that African-American girls tend not to get eating disorders. And that influenced their judgments."

Joiner and his colleagues also found that many health care professionals were unable to recognize black anorexics.

One 17-year-old African-American girl from Washington, D.C., said her doctors did not diagnose her properly, even though she has been purging since age 10 and at 5 foot 7 has weighed as little as 95 pounds.

"The doctors just thought I had a stomach thing. ... They gave me antibiotics and rehydrated me and sent me home," said the girl, who replied to an e-mail request from the Tribune asking African-American anorexics to share their stories.

Many researchers and clinicians studying anorexia nervosa say that becoming anorexic is more a consideration of one's social group.

Girls from poor families face an additional risk because they are not likely to be able to afford treatment, which can cost as much as $30,000 for a month of in-patient care.

To read the rest of this article in a separate window, please click here