Living Life To the Fullest
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This morning on Facebook, I saw an interesting post by Jacqui Cooper about DNA. I replied in a comment that there were some YouTube videos or commercials for Ancestry.com DNA testing or something in which participants who professed to hate members of a certain ethnic group discovered they were descended from that very group.
So I'm White, Right? Or Not That got me to thinking about people making assumptions and stereotyping members of various races. I look white. For that matter, I generally identify as white. I had my ethnic profile done about a year ago.
The summary results are above. I am mostly - surprise! - white. Scots-Irish, English, German, French, Italian and Spanish, a wee bit of Eastern Europe/Finland/Russia. But I am also Native American on my mother's side, Chickasaw, Choctaw and Cherokee - and I am a proud citizen of the Chickasaw Nation. My grandmother (pictured here with my cousin Lonzo) was born in Indian Territory in 1894, well before Oklahoma became a state.
My great-grandfather was white - from the French/German part, and my grandfather was also white - from the Scots-Irish part. But both chose to exploit their Indian wives, treating them badly and stealing land and money from them. The only Chickasaw phrase that passed down to my generation means "white man no good." Nevertheless, unlike some of her siblings, my grandmother looked white, and was urged to take advantage of looking white to assimilate into white society. As the family historian, I can see that these things fit into the family narrative I already know. I have photos, original newspaper articles, even original birth certificates dating back more than 150 years. The Dawes Commission kept meticulous records - I even have transcripts of interpreted interviews with my Chickasaw great-grandmother because she could not write or speak English. I have a pretty good handle on who lived when and how.
Surprise!
But even with everything I already knew, two of those DNA results said something I hadn't known before. One was that I am part Italian! I had no idea. I used to say that I was just about everything but Italian, and found it funny when people told me I was "more Italian" than most Italian-Americans they knew. I chalked that up to being married to an Italian and living in New Jersey. The other one was that I am 24% Spanish! This was a stunning finding. Unfortunately everyone who could shed new light on my dad's side is dead, and so I have to guess that the Spanish part is Spanish Jews migrating somehow to Eastern Europe, Poland or Russia - since I know my Jewish grandparents came to America from Vilnius - which at the time they arrived in 1884, was part of the Russian Empire. Blackface, Bombings & Blazing Saddles I certainly knew that I was Jewish. My dad was the youngest of six children. His eldest sister was born in Russia, but he was born in New York City in 1900.. When he was in his twenties he was a self-taught comedic dancer in a Vaudeville circuit, doing pratfalls and blackface and working with a troupe of ladies along the lines of the Rockettes or the June Taylor Dancers.. In his travels around the country he experienced a lot of prejudice. He said that in Miami, there were signs on the beach that read "No Jews or Dogs Allowed." When he opened his dancing school in the south after leaving Vaudeville, he changed his name to Jack Eppley. He said he didn't think the "Isaac Epstein School of Dance" would get too many students in 1930.
It wasn't quite like that for me, even though the synagogue we attended in Atlanta is the same one that was previously bombed in 1958 by members of the white supremacist group "Knights of the White Camelia" when I was four years old. You may have seen it in "Driving Miss Daisy." When I was growing up, I wasn't Jewish enough for the Jewish community because my mother was not Jewish. But I evidently was not gentile enough, either, and was called variously called eitiher a "goy" or a "Christ killer" on the playground, depending on who was talking. When I got to high school and became friends with a number of black students, I became a "Schvartze lover." Yes, that means what you think it does. Watch Blazing Saddles sometime for clarification.
We Need to Talk So back to Jacqui's question - how differently would people feel about stereotyping and hate if they knew their own ethnic profile? How about if they knew the other person's ethnic profile? I look like an ordinary Caucasian female Baby Boomer. But my family and I have experienced a lot of heartache due to racism and anti-semitism. It would be wonderful if people could think of people as fellow members of the human race and stop making assumptions about them when they don't really know who they are. I hope this blog is a place where we can unpack these topics and reach a place of understanding. Do you know who you really are?
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