(music playing) The "Black Is, Black Ain't" event was actually an event hosted by the Upsilon Mu Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Incorporated. We were coming up with programs and trying to decide what really means a lot to us? What void are we trying to fill on this campus? What can we get people to really open up about? And this whole idea of being black is something that I've
always been passionate about because my family is from Trinidad and Tobago and
it's very interesting because in America we live in New Jersey, and New Jersey has a lot of Caribbean people, so everyone knew what Trinidad was. And then, when I
came down to school in North Carolina and I told people I was from from Trinidad and Tobago, a lot of people were like, "what is that?" They didn't even know where Trinidad was. So I had to explain to them that it's in the Caribbean, near South
America, and everyone's immediate reaction would be like, "So what are you?" So I got involved when one on my advisees, Melissa Hayban, invited me to attend a program that her sorority - the Deltas - were putting on. And one of the women there
said, "you know, what I'd really like to know is my ancestry." She said, you know,
"because of the slavery we hit this wall and we can't know anything further back."
And I thought, well, as a genomicist, that's what we do, right? We answer those
kinds of questions. So afterwards I emailed Melissa and we met and I ran the
idea by her that, what if the James G. Martin Genomics Program could pay for
some of the students to be tested? And I had to find, you know, I didn't know the
cost, et cetera, but um, we found a company. Then we said, well, how are we going to
call in the students? And I said, I don't want this to be tied just to the Deltas.
It seems to me that this should be bigger, and I said, what about the Black
Student Coalition? So that's when Jada got pulled in. So even when we did this project I had students ask me, "why were only Black students contacted from Davidson College?" And so being able to explain there's an idea of being Black that's not as defined, compared to other ethnicities and other races, that "Black" can really encompass
students who have Caribbean descent, who have Latino descent, who have African
descent, who just really don't even know where the family comes from. And that
kind of leaves this mystery of what it means to be Black for students that they
grapple with every day. So we really targeted those students first, just to
give that kind of understanding on what "Black" means for them, and we were very
upfront with them, that at the end of the day this just shows where your DNA comes from, kind of gives to you an understanding of just where people have mixed in throughout
your ancestry, but in no way can we say specifically that you are from this country from this region from this set of people. Because being Black has this
mystery of like, "what does that even mean?" But what about a person who does know
where their people come from? My grandfather, he's from Russia, and he's a Russian Jew. So he actually came over to the U.S. -- I don't know how old he was -- I was always told that he lied about his age and just
kind of found his way over here and started making a new life. And my
grandmother, from what I remember, is Palestinian. I have 43 percent African
DNA, and with me personally -- not that that really defines my blackness -- I don't
think it's like, if you're less-than-half Black you're not "Black enough" or
anything like that. And I kind of fuse a bit of my own personal experiences and kind of like historical Black experience in America, because for
me, I've always kind of grown up with like almost that one-drive mentality,
just kind of like, it doesn't matter how much of your family is Black; you
are Black. I live with my mom. She's always told me that I've been Black, even
though she's a lot darker than I am. I've always just had that mentality, even
more so to the point where I've never really connected too much with any, I
guess, "whiteness" or "white side" of myself. My family's Ethiopian and my -- and also
Eritrean -- so it was really interesting to see how, despite the fact that I know
where my roots come from, the majority actually came from Middle East. And so
that was really interesting to me as well as for my family. Also my
experience within it, I was connected with a woman who said that I was the first
person that she's biologically matched with. In the 1970s she was adopted from
Addis, which is the capital of Ethiopia, and since then she's lived in Sweden, and
she's about 48, I believe. And she said despite being -- like, her kids were the only ones that are biologically related to her -- and I was the first person she
met, despite the fact that she's been to Ethiopia multiple times, and has yet to
connect with anybody who may be related to her. So I thought, to me and my family this is something that's very exciting. That was something that was really the
highlight of my experience with this with this program Who you think you are can only change if you allow yourself to change who it is. This just says that we are all united. And that's why I think people should take this test, because it allows us to see that we are more than who we identify ourselves to be. That there's aspects of me -- and I'm not afraid to share my results -- that it said I was about
83 percent West African, about 15 percent Eastern European, so there's aspects of
me that then allows me to connect with people from so many different
cultures that I would never have known if I only focused on my one identity, that
would be Black. And it allows us to take that identity and just conceptualize it in a different way. And I think that's something that
all individuals should do -- is learn that we are more than that one race or
ethnicity that is assigned to us. And the ethical benefit that can come from that
is, maybe we won't be so discriminating against each other all the time; that we
think that there's something so different between me and you that I can then kind of discriminate against you. And if we learn that, at the end the day we come from the same roots, I think it could really change the way we interact and work with each other.
