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At West Chester University near Philadelphia, students can participate in a class called the DNA Discussion Project. It’s designed to get students to talk about their family histories, and they’re invited to take DNA tests to see how genetics fit into that family story.

“Everybody talks about their ancestry, everybody talks about their family tree,” said Anita Foeman, a professor of communications who founded the project and the co-author of Who Am I: Identity in the Age of Consumer DNA Testing.

In 2011, Foeman’s co-investigator, Bessie Lawton, joined the project. They say African American students face a unique set of challenges in doing this work.

During slavery, Black families were constantly being separated, with many enslaved children being raised away from their biological parents. So informal adoptions during and after slavery were very common among African Americans. And the U.S. census — the most widely used record in genealogy research — did not record all African Americans by name until 1870, the first census after the Civil War. (Free Black people were included by name in the 1850 census, but enslaved Black people were not.)

In other words, paper records have their limits.

Foeman said African American students typically hit what she calls “the wall of slavery” and are looking to extend their understanding of their families beyond the United States when they join the DNA Discussion Project.

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Amari Gilmore participated in the project when she was a sophomore at West Chester. Prior to taking the DNA test, she grew up with stories about the people in her family who came before her.

“So on my mother’s side, they have a lot more pictures of relatives,” Gilmore said. “And there is this claim that we are part Native American and that there were several ancestors of mine that had that long, straight black hair … [I was] definitely also told that I was a descendant of slaves.”

For many African Americans, the American South is a place to begin inquiring into family histories and origins.

Gilmore says her great-aunt Christine — who recently passed her 100th birthday — has shared a number of stories about their ancestors, including the fact that they come from a long line of farmers in West Virginia.

“She really dug deep into what our ancestors did,” Gilmore said. “They had accumulated small pockets of wealth here and there, and … a lot of my family, they are educators, but that’s been a passed-down trait, if you will, from even as far back as in slave times.”

Gilmore, who’s an eighth-grade English teacher now, said it was powerful to see how the legacy of education in her family followed her to the present day. And when the opportunity to join the DNA Discussion Project arose, she jumped at the chance because she still wanted to expand on those family histories and get more specific answers about where in Africa her ancestors might have come from. But when Gilmore got her DNA test back, the results surprised her.

“So it told me I was 80% African, 20% European, not at all Native American,” she said. “I was kind of shocked to see such a high percentage of European ancestry, and was kind of shocked, but not really, that there was no Native American in me at all.”

When narratives clash with DNA

Foeman said that in her studies, it’s common for African Americans to overestimate Native American ancestry.

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“The relationship between Black [people] and white [people] is really fraught, and so telling a story of Native Americans … explained why African Americans look so different, when people talk about light skin, dark skin, hair, etc.,” Foeman said. “And so rather than to attach it to European ancestry, it was attached to Native American ancestry, which was a much more palatable history.”

But ultimately, she said, our narratives help us to survive. According to Foeman, the story of Native American ancestry allowed some Black students to mitigate painful memories of slavery, particularly the sexual violence Black enslaved women endured from their white slave owners.

As Gilmore recalled the moment when she saw her European ancestry results for the first time, she said she could feel that same sadness wash over her again.

“I don’t personally know anyone in my family who was actually married or in a relationship with someone else [of European ancestry],” Gilmore said. “But you can put the pieces together of how I ended up with so much European ancestry and thinking through the traumatic events that some of the women in my family must have experienced.”

Lawton said that when she started this work in 2011, she had assumed that the hard science of DNA tests would sway how students identified — even, or especially, if they didn’t agree with family lore or racial and ethnic identities.

But for many Black students, DNA tests were not the end-all be-all.

“Identity is fluid, and people use a lot of different things or data points to negotiate their own identity internally and externally,” Lawton said. “That includes family narratives, their lived experience, what others ascribe to you, and their DNA profile. And a lot of this identification is formed through interaction with others.”

That was certainly true for Gilmore. She said there was a brief moment of pause when she asked herself if the European ancestry affected her identity as a Black person in any way.

“And then I was like, ‘No, I’m still a Black person,’” she said.

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