Afro-Netizen™

September/October 2006 Edition

By Chris Rabb
Contributor
ColorLines Magazine 

My genealogical quest to untangle ancestry and heritage.

IN JUST OVER TWO YEARS OF DNA TESTING, I may have become the most genetically well-documented Black person to date.

I have cajoled and convinced relatives to assist me in this quest by swabbing the inside of their cheeks in furtherance of the family good. After more than a decade of intensive research in the tradition of our family's elder genealogists going back three generations, I've been able to identify 10 distinct African lineages coursing through my body. I've been able to uncover what for so many descendants of enslaved Africans is a tragically elusive piece of our family history. What I initially thought was a potential means by which government agencies and eugenicists could harvest and misuse people's genetic code, I eventually saw as a powerful tool to delve deeper into the cultural diversity of my African ancestry.

But I quickly realized that the more intently I sought to learn about my Black ancestors, the more I would have to research the white people who owned them. A notable subset of the slave owners were also my ancestors. Many white people-mainstream journalists in particular-ask me how I used this technology to identify the prominent white ancestors in my pedigree. The answer is, I didn't. It was neither my goal, nor my interest.

While I was growing up, my complexion and features constantly reminded me of this fact, a reality I only came to peace with it when I learned the distinction between ancestry and heritage. Before this epiphany, the idea of white male ancestors who owned and raped my Black female ancestors filled me with so much rage and frustration that I nearly lost the will to learn more.

Genes, however, don't tell the whole story. Often, they only illuminate the corners of this planet from which our ancestors hail. The larger narrative is what our forbearers chose to do in those corners and how that, generations later, produced us and the socio-political circumstances into which we were born. Once I drew the line between what I was (my ancestry, which I cannot control) and who I was (the heritage I choose to embrace), whatever I uncovered in my genealogical journey had little impact on my racial identity. And racial identity, not to be confused with race-the biological term-is an incendiary and malleable artifice of our own making. What we loosely and provocatively call race, so often conflated with color, culture and consciousness, changes with the passing of each historical moment and each footstep toward or away from those earthly corners from which our ancestors migrated.

When my circuitous research finally revealed the identity of the first slave-owner who was also an ancestor of mine, I cringed and wishing it wasn't so. When that painful experience repeated itself for the second, third, fourth and fifth time, I had to consciously choose to process these genealogical realities in a way that did not psychically relegate me to being a man who descends from multiple rapists. That's when my epiphany came: How can I be ashamed for acts I did not commit? How can I take responsibility for the choices an ancestor-any ancestor-made decades, generations or centuries before I was even born? For that matter, how could I take pride in something I had nothing to do with?

I descend from 2 Black parents, 4 Black grandparents, 8 Black great grandparents and 16 Black great-great grandparents. Of my 32 great-greatgreat grandparents, at least 5 ancestors were white, slave-owning men who had relations with enslaved Black female forbearers. But for me, Ewondo, Tikar, Bamileke of Cameroon, Mende, Kru and Temne of Sierra Leone and Liberia, Ga of Ghana, Yoruba of Nigeria, Berber of Morocco and Pakistani, are a select sampling of my ancestral ethnicities that have influenced the heritage I own.

When I visited the site of the antebellum Rabb plantation from where my surname comes, I longed to know about my great-greatgreat grandparents who were kidnapped from points unknown and despaired that it might be impossible to find the names, language, beliefs and even just that small piece of the world they called home. I always knew my ancestors had a place in history. Now, thanks to science, I know where those places are, not just in history, but on a world map and amidst the tangled, blood-drenched, but resilient roots of my ever-expanding family tree.

Chris Rabb's forthcoming book
about his family and genealogy
is called Rivers to the Soul.

By Troy Duster
Longview Institute

People who know their biological parents and grandparents typically take the information for granted. Some have a difficult time empathizing with the passionate genealogical quests of adoptees and, increasingly, products of anonymous sperm banks and other new technologies where one or both genetic contributors are unknown. In recent years, new legislation has enabled people to search for information about genetic progenitors—even in cases where there had been a signed agreement of nondisclosure. The laserlike focus of that search can be as relentless as Ahab's hunt for the white whale.

Mystery of lineage is the stuff of great literature. Mark Twain made use of it for biting social commentary in his Pudd'nhead Wilson, a story about the mix-up of babies born to a slave and a free person. Sophocles, Shakespeare, Molière, and Dickens built grand tragedy and enduring comedy on the theme. In England in 2002, a white Englishwoman gave birth to mixed-race twins after a mix-up at an in vitro fertilization clinic. Imagine what Shakespeare would have done with that!

If one person's passions can be so riled by such a puzzle, imagine the emotions involved when the uncertainty applies to a whole group - say, of 12 million people. The middle passage did just that to Americans of recent African descent. Names were obliterated from record books, and slaves were typically anointed with a new single first name. Sometimes no names were recorded, just the slaves' numbers, ages, and genders. Some African-Americans have deliberately and actively participated in the erasure, showing no desire to pursue a genealogical trail. For others, fragments of oral history generate a fierce longing to do the detective work.

That is the case among the prominent subjects featured in "African American Lives," a two-night, four-part PBS series scheduled for February 1 and 8. The host and executive co-producer is Henry Louis Gates Jr., chairman of the department of African and African-American studies at Harvard. Gates has assembled eight notably successful African-Americans, among them the media entrepreneur Oprah Winfrey, the legendary music producer Quincy Jones, and the film star Whoopi Goldberg. Each participant, along with Gates, is the subject of some serious professional family-tree tracing. There are surprises for each of them, and the series has undeniable human-interest appeal.

But there are other reasons why it is likely to be a staple for courses on history, family and kinship, and African-American studies for years to come. Who knew that before the Emancipation Proclamation, more than 250,000 free blacks lived below the Mason-Dixon line? We learn that the kinds of fears that preoccupied them in their daily lives were partially mitigated when they bonded in one place, permitting them to vouch for each other's long-term community standing if a white person came and tried to claim them as slaves.

The first three segments are very much driven by traditional genealogical research, the hard work of ferreting through archival materials, birth and death certificates, deeds, trusts, estates and wills, church records, and, inevitably, the sale of slaves. One of the patterns discernible at the outset is the speed of some tales of rags to riches and meteoric ascendancy from modest circumstance to extraordinary accomplishment. The Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon Benjamin Carson, who performed pioneering work in separating twins joined at the head, is the son of a domestic. Winfrey's story is fairly well known - as a child, she was sexually abused and shuttled between homes until finally becoming more settled as a late teenager.

Gates deserves special praise for the way in which he weaves biographies into the larger social and historical context. Reconstruction comes to life in the form of Winfrey's grandfather, Constantine Winfrey, who was illiterate as slavery ended. He taught himself how to read and write, then sponsored a new school, all the while raising a family and tilling the soil. The comedian Chris Tucker's great-grandfather was a beneficent church minister who purchased a large plot of land upon which the sanctuary was built. To keep his congregation together, he sold small plots to members. The Harvard sociologist Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot's ancestors left New England to start a trade school in the South to help the newly freed slaves find employment.

None of the participants knew the rich details of these histories, and the "only in America" element is compelling.

At another level, however, the series performs a disturbing sleight of hand. Conventional wisdom has it that we can choose our friends, but that our families are a given. But with long-term genealogical work, there is a sense in which this can be inverted. We each have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, etc. As Gates points out in the fourth segment, current technology permits us to link via DNA analysis to only two specific lines.

On the Y chromosome, one's father's father's DNA, going back as far as we can locate the genetic material, can be determined with a high degree of certainty. (That is how Thomas Jefferson - or one of his brothers - was definitively linked to Sally Hemmings's offspring.) On the female side, mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) can link one's mother's mother's mother going back as far as we can garner the DNA. So, while we have 64 great-great-great-great-grandparents, the technology allows us to locate only two of those 64, if we're going back six generations, as our real legacy and genetic link to the past. But what of the other 62? Those links are equal contributors to our genetic makeup, and we ignore them only because we do not have access to them.

What an arbitrary "choice" of a branch on the family tree!

At one point, upon learning that 50 percent of his ancestry has been traced by DNA analysis to Europe, and that both his maternal and paternal lines are also "European," Gates jokingly asks if he still qualifies to be chairman of African-American studies at Harvard.

But for many, that is no laughing matter. The Black Seminoles are struggling with this very question - whether to use DNA analysis to "authenticate" their relationship to the Seminoles. The reason is straightforward and serious: money. The federal government, pursuant to a land-settlement claim, made an award to Seminole Indians in 1976 and is poised to distribute upward of $60-million.

In 2000 the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma amended its constitution so that members needed to show "one-eighth Seminole blood." The Black Seminoles could use either Y-chromosome analysis or mitochondrial DNA to link themselves through very thin chains back on two edges of the genealogical axis (mother's mother's mother, etc.; or father's father's father, etc.), but that would miss all other grandparents (14 of 16, 30 of 32, 62 of 64).

One attempt to fill in the blanks is the use of a technology called admixture mapping through ancestry-informative markers, or AIM's. Unlike Y DNA or mtDNA tests, this technology examines groups' relative sharedness of genetic markers found on the autosomes - the nonsex chromosomes inherited from both parents.

In the last segment of the series, each of the nine subjects, including Gates, is given information using molecular genetics and computer-assisted analysis of all three kinds of DNA markers. Each of the subjects accepts the ostensibly scientific news of his or her percentage ancestry, deduced by AIM's - that is, African or European or Native American - as if it were of the same certainty as a clerk's entry of a birth date on a certificate. Oprah is crestfallen when she is told that she is not Zulu.

Gates has no match to Africa at all using the conventional tests, so he deploys Mark D. Shriver, a Pennsylvania State University geneticist at the forefront of admixture mapping, to conduct a special test for him. Gates's autosomes are compared to the small set of African samples Shriver has in his database, from no more than six West African regions. When compared against those few, Gates is closest to the Mende people of Sierra Leone.

Shriver himself seems wary of these results. He surely knows the clusters of DNA are at best crude approximations completely contingent on available samples. Africa has over 700 million inhabitants, and among them it has the greatest amount of human genetic variation found on any of the seven continents.

Read more

By Jazmyn Burton
PhillyBurbs.com

I used to have the luxury of deciding which African country to identify with, but all of that is going to change next week when I get the results of a mitocondrial DNA test that will link me with the true origins of my ancestry.

I used to have the luxury of deciding which African country to identify with, but all of that is going to change next week when I get the results of a mitocondrial DNA test that will link me with the true origins of my ancestry.

I have to admit there is some reluctance to know exactly where my ancestral line originated.

What if the test reveals that I am not of African decent?

What if I open results of my African Ancestry Inc. genetic test and find that my first mother was a European woman and that the color of my chestnut brown skin is the result of changes in my family pattern over the centuries.

Since interracial marriages were illegal a century ago, the revelation of mixed ancestry would leave me with myriad of questions, the answers to which are lost in the secrets of the past.

Not being genetically "African" was a reality that professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., head of the Africana Studies department at Harvard University, was forced to face recently when the results of a genetic test revealed an interesting twist.

"I'm going to have to give up my job. ... I'm descended from that African province known as Ireland or France or northern Europe. I'm heartbroken," Gates quipped after receiving news that origins of his genes are 50 percent European.

Learning that my DNA traces back to a European country would be a difficult pill for me to swallow for several reasons.

I grew up with a family that countered the effects of white hegemony and institutionalized racism by placing an emphasis on taking pride in African and African-American history. And, if the effects of family conditioning weren't enough, my lessons in racism started early. By the time I was 13, the world around me had me convinced that I was a black girl before anything else.

Chris Rabb, a Philadelphia-based writer and genealogist, can recall the nervousness and anticipation of waiting for the results of his first test. Because of the nature of the slavery system and the fact that African women and their bodies were property and rape was commonplace on southern plantations, Rabb expected that he would eventually find a European link in his ancestral line.

But he found a way to deal with the truth of his past.

"I had to draw a line between my ancestry and my heritage," he said. "Ancestry represents one's bloodline, but heritage represents one's culture," he said. "Both impact identity, but, while the former may indicate what you are, ethnically, the latter reveals who you are."

I hope that if the test reveals something I don't expect, I'll be able to view the truth with the same level of clarity.

Weekend America

Identity is a mix of genetics and culture, and most of us think we know who we are -- but do we really?

With the advent of the latest technology, some people are testing their DNA to get at that most personal of truths -- their ancestry.

The journey can be as frustrating and rewarding as the result. Weekend America host Bill Radke talks to Christopher Rabb of Philadelphia and Sonya Loya of Ruidoso, New Mexico about how DNA testing and genealogical research shapes our identity.

Click here to listen to the podcast of the Weekend America interview of the Afro-Netizen founder regarding his long, fascinating genealogical odyssey and recent use of DNA testing to trace his African roots to specific ethnic groups in North and West Africa.

To book a speaking engagement or for press inquiries, please click here.

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."

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(Free subscription to The NY Times is required)

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

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

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

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

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.

"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?

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.

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