Beyond 'Roots'
NEARLY THREE decades after Alex Haley's book ''Roots" aired as a television miniseries and sparked a national conversation about race, we are seeing a new cultural moment as the result of Henry Louis ''Skip" Gates's PBS series ''African American Lives." But this time, the conversation has a new twist in the form of the double helix.
Three of the four episodes follow African-American celebrities -- Oprah Winfrey, Quincy Jones, and Chris Tucker, among others -- as they discover details about their extended kin through the use of conventional means of genealogical recovery, including oral history and painstaking archival research.
But in the fourth episode, which aired Wednesday, new genetic techniques only dreamed of 30 years ago are used to trace the subjects' ancestry. One technique traces matrilineal and patrilineal inheritance by analyzing mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosome DNA, respectively. A second test provides subjects with their percentage of ancestry from four racial groups.
Although a similar documentary ran on the BBC in 2004 (''Motherland: A Genetic Journey") and PBS has aired documentaries on how genetics can illuminate the relatedness and evolution of human populations (such as ''The Journey of Man"), this is the first national consideration of how genetics might assist African-Americans in uncovering knowledge of ancestral lineages that were lost to slavery.
There is much that is laudable about this series. It is an innovative take on television biography that proceeds from the assumption that the answer to the question ''Who am I?" can be achieved by filling in gaps in a network of kin. Through the processes of familial reconstruction, we also learn a great deal about the subjects -- their respective backgrounds, formative experiences, mentors, familial culture, and their ascendance from modest origins.
As the documentary's narrator and host, Skip Gates plays a central role. In each of the episodes, he nimbly supplies the celebrities with information about their family tree. He also serves as a science educator of sorts, translating the genetic genealogical information to the subjects. In the final episode, perhaps lifting a page from ''reality television" with a shocking ''reveal," he informs Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot that, despite her cultural affinities and what she knows of her familial history, genetic analysis based on an unrepresentative DNA database concludes that she does not have Native American ancestry. He is also on hand with other celebrities to empathize and explain when they receive inconclusive results, as is the case when a genetic marker is found in Africa but on other continents as well.
Most people who are lining up to take the genetic genealogy tests will not receive such ''star" treatment. Consumers of genetic genealogy testing receive their results at home in the mail. So what happens when, standing in their kitchens at the end of a workday, they open the envelope to find shocking results that may fundamentally alter their self-conceptions?
Some recent studies based on Y chromosome analysis have revealed that up to a third of black men have white paternal ancestry. Most people, and especially African-Americans, understand (thanks in part to Alex Haley) that these findings reflect the historical collision of power, race, commerce, and sexuality that characterized slavery. But it's another thing to be confronted with this reality by a certificate of ancestry or a diagram of your racial composite received in the mail.
It is in these moments that black consumers could use a friend like Gates. Left to absorb the results on their own, to reconcile the genetic genealogical information with other ways of knowing about their families, many are faced with the choice of opting in or out of the genetic identity that has been sold to them.
What appears as a choice may in fact be a Faustian bargain. For as the final episode of ''African American Lives" suggests, the genetic ancestral information based on imperfect science becomes a trump card, diminishing the detailed genealogical inquiry of the preceding three episodes.
To be sure, we are all active agents in the formations of our identities, be it through performance, familial stories, and, yes, even genetics. Yet, given the social power of genetics, the science may have an edge.
Alondra Nelson, a teacher of sociology and African-American studies at Yale University, is author of the forthcoming ''Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Politics of Race and Health." 
