Page 114 - The Language of Composition 4e Teacher Edition Sample.indd

fascinated by her genetically based health analy- mother could at last make educated guesses
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sis. (Due to an F.D.A. crackdown, 23andMe no about the parentage of her great grandparents.
longer provides that particular service.) But I It was as if 23andMe had taught them to read
was interested in genetic testing for a different the language of their family histories, enabling
Identity
reason. them to finally understand the incomprehensi-
I ordered tests for my father, my mother, and ble book of their ancestral pasts: to read what
myself. We submitted our samples, then waited had been gibberish.
for the company’s scientists to decode the Yet I found my own results both surprising 10
ancestral information in our DNA. and troubling. I was raised in Mississippi, in a
Copyright (c) 2023 Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. Uncorrected proofs have been used for this sample chapter.
My mother and I were sitting at her kitchen family and a community that identified as black,
CHECK FOR UNDERSTANDING table when her test came back. My father was at and I have the stories and the experiences to go
my sister’s house, surrounded by his children, with it. One of my great-great grandfathers was
If you think your students could use some when he received his. Their results confirmed killed by a gang of white Prohibition patrollers.
5
practice with understanding charts, you some of the notions we’d had about our ancestry, My mother helped to integrate the local elemen-
could ask them, with partners, to trans- as passed down through family lore, and sub- tary school in the nineteen-sixties. My father was
late the statistics about Ward’s parents in verted others. My father, who’d always believed run out of segregated Pass Christian’s beaches
a mixture of British, Irish, French, German, its products. Not for redistribution.
paragraph 8 into pie charts. They could himself to have Native American heritage, and and the local park. I was the only black girl at
compare their results and check for who had a strong affinity for Native American my private high school in Pass Christian, the
(approximate) accuracy. They could do history and culture, found that he is fifty-one target of my classmates’ backwards ideas about
the same with Ward’s own results, per cent Native American, as well as nearly race. Despite my parents’ sense of their mixed
from paragraph 11. equal parts sub-Saharan African and European roots, I had thought that my genetic makeup
(British, Irish, Spanish, and Ashkenazi) —
would confirm the identity that I’d grown up
23.5 per cent and 22.5 per cent, respectively — and
with — one that located Africa as my ancestors’
just over one per cent North African. My mother,
primary point of origin, and that allowed me to
claim a legacy of black resistance and strength.
who has told me story after story about her white
So it was discomfiting to find that my ances-
great-grandparents taking their mixed-race chil-
dren to visit their families in Kiln, Mississippi, only
try was forty per cent European — a mixture of
to hide the kids in the trunk of the car at the end
of every visit when the sun set and it was no longer
Iberian, Italian, and Ashkenazi — thirty-two per
cent sub-Saharan African, a quarter Native
safe, found that she is fifty-five per cent European —
Distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. Strictly for use with
American, and less than one per cent North
African. For a few days after I received my
Scandinavian, and Iberian — forty-one per cent British, Irish, French, German, Scandinavian,
sub-Saharan African, and 3.4 per cent Native results, I looked into the mirror and didn’t know
CLOSE READING American. how to understand myself. I tried to understand
You might ask students to look closely at My parents’ results gave them the concrete my heritage through my features, to assign each
the second sentence of paragraph 9: why proof of their ancestry that they’d always been one a place, but I couldn’t. All I could see was
does Ward choose to include the informa- denied. My father, a former member of the my hair: hair that grows up and out instead of
4
tion about her father as a Black Panther Black Panther party, proudly claimed his falling flat, like my father’s; hair that refuses to
with the point about him embracing his Native American heritage by registering with be as smooth and tidy as my mother’s but
Native American ancestry? How does the Choctaw tribe of Slidell, Louisiana. My
the juxtaposition help to characterize her 5 Era from 1920 to 1933, during which the production, sale, and
father? 4 Organization founded in 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale consumption of alcohol throughout the United States was banned by
to advance the Black Power movement in Black communities. — Eds. Constitutional amendment. — Eds.
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220 chapter 4 / Identity

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