Condoleezza Rice, former US Secretary of State and national security adviser, ought to be a tough woman to surprise. Yet when Henry Louis Gates Jr, host of a US television series called Finding Your Roots, revealed that nearly half of her genetic ancestry could be traced to Europe, Rice, an African American, told Gates, “I’m stunned.”I am not particularly surprised that Condoleezza is stunned. Years ago, I wrote that persons of mixed ancestry often have three reactions:
- Acceptance ("multiple ancestries, and love'em all")
- Seeking the lowest common denominator ("we're all human; race doesn't exist")
- Denying or minimizing one type of ancestry
I can't claim to have any experience on African Americans, but it seems to me that their frequent surprise in programs such as "Finding Your Roots" is a consequence of two things:
- Their cultural identification with the African part of their ancestry, because it is what separates them -quite visibly- from the rest of society: i.e., African Americans differ from other Americans because of their African ancestry
- The misapplication (understandable, due to a lack of experience) of their own identity to Africa itself. This is rather an empirical bias: the most African-looking African Americans still have substantial European ancestry, and the average one has ~20%. To give a color analogy, a shade of grey looks lighter compared against black, and darker compared against a darker shade of grey.