Nicole Persley, who grew up in Nokesville, Va., was stunned to learn that she is part African. Her youth could not have been whiter. In the 1970s and ’80s in her rural home town, she went to school with farmers’ kids who listened to country music and sometimes made racist jokes. She was, as she recalls, “basically raised a Southern white girl.”
But as a student at the University of Michigan: “My roommate was black. My friends were black. I was dating a black man.” And they saw something different in her facial features and hair.
“I was constantly being asked, ‘What are you? What’s your ethnic background?’ ”
While African Americans generally assume that they may carry non-African DNA dating back to sexual relations between masters and slaves, many white Americans like Persley grow up believing that their ancestry is fully European, a belief manifested in things from kitschy “100 percent Irish” T-shirts to more-sinister racial “purity” affiliations.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/...-unexpected-african-roots-20180206-story.html
