"Down in the valley, up on the ridge"--- new Economist article on Melungeons by Andrew Miller

[carolinayellowdog]

9. welcome to DU, and I encourage DNA testing which is much less expensive than in the past

Apart from the Melungeon issue, it is certainly a good thing for "white" Americans to learn how much "nonwhite" ancestry is revealed by their DNA, and for African Americans to learn how much of their "white" ancestry dates to the pre-chattel-slavery era of consensual partnerships across what were later called, pseudo-scientifically, "racial" boundaries. The horrors of chattel slavery have created denialism on both sides of the "racial" divide-- which did not exist in the 17thc. The "white rapists/black victims" scenario while quite accurate about the 19thc has created a willful blindness on both sides of the "color line" about how different things were in the colonial era.