Think of the Whitest person you know: someone with blond hair, blue eyes and almost translucent skin, not a drop of Black ancestry in them. Now think of the darkest person you know: someone richly endowed with traditional African features, not even a drop of White ancestry in their past. Well, guess what? Scientists now trace the origins of both of these people-and of all human beings who have ever walked the face of the earth-to Black Africa, to the region around what is now Ethiopia. As Spencer Wells, the director of National Geographic's massive Genographic Project, puts it: "Our species evolved in Africa, and a subset of Africans left that continent around 50,000 years ago to populate the rest of the world. Our earliest ancestors probably looked very much like modern Africans."

This would have been news to "Bull" Connor and Orval Faubus and countless other racists from our past. It is also news to most of our White brothers and sisters today. But it is an undeniable fact. We are all, in a very real sense, "Africans." The only question is how recently did our ancestors leave the Motherland? For the 35 million of us who are African- Americans-and for Black people in the Caribbean and Latin America-the answer is: very recently.



"I was able to trace the family trees of several prominent African Americans deep into slavery, following the paper trail. And then when the paper trail ended, we tested their DNA in an attempt to discover the origins of their mother's line or their father's line on the African continent."

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University Director,
W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research



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