For black people searching for the meaning in our genome, taking a trip based on new-found DNA results can be life-changing — but here's what you need to know first.
For as long as I can remember, travel has always been a way to hold a mirror up to my surroundings, an attempt to locate myself in the wider world. As a child I was lucky enough to experience family holidays in Europe: Long, languid summers in Ireland with wet walks through glossy fields with my Irish mother, sandcastle building on beach-trips in cold and clear waters with my British father and milky-skinned brother. Then there were the weeks spent in Spain, Austria, France, and the Balearic islands. But it was during the leisure time with my white family that I became more attuned to the visual differences between us all, and I started to really question my own identity in relation to those closest to me.
Although my childhood was characterized by the rituals of regular vacations and lots of love and support, I grew up in a white household with no explanation as to why, or how, I appeared black. The absence of discussion on race, privilege, and discrimination penetrated my world with increasing regularity as I grew up, but my questions largely went unanswered by my parents. I realized that race and its meaning remained totally off-limits in our house.
But when we left our white community at home to vacation abroad, the veil of silence was removed. Race followed me beyond suburbia, and there was no escaping its impact amongst new faces — some of which looked more like my own than my parents' did. Removed from our absurd normal, my racial identity showed up in high definition: when I grew a dark shade of brown in the Portuguese sun; when I was spoken to in Spanish on the island of Tenerife; when I was ushered into airport lines with the Jamaican families in front of me; and when new poolside friends in France asked me how I "knew" all those white people. My early family trips ignited a deep-rooted desire to find out more about my place in the world. Travel illuminated new paths of possibility, showing me spaces in which I could also belong, filled with people who looked like me and who could recognize the things in me that I had not yet claimed for myself.
As I got older, the silence around my identity slowly morphed into a deafening roar I could no longer ignore. When I lost my father to cancer at age 22, I thought I had reached rock bottom emotionally. His death had almost destroyed me, but it also gave me permission to seek out the truth about who I was. After paternity testing, I discovered my mother had been unfaithful to the father who raised me, with a black man she now knows nothing of. Although that news completely obliterated the remaining structures of my world, it also freed me from the half-life I had spent much time living. I yearned to see myself in spaces I had been too afraid to venture into, and uncover cultures I had willfully ignored because they were filled with those who often reminded me that we had much in common. As a child, belonging was everything, so I had stayed away from these groups, becoming complicit in the denial of who I was as a result. But the DNA results freed me from the practice of living a smaller, less authentic life and spurred me on in the search for myself.
I left home to live in black-majority countries where I could get lost in the arms of huge, noisy urban spaces and educate myself on what it really meant to be a part of a vibrant, innovative diaspora. Solo travel for me was more than just a jaunt to pass the time, it was totally transformative and educational, working like a tonic on my soul, tired from the grieving and shrinking myself into spaces where I was not fully seen. I moved to New York City's Crown Heights neighborhood for six months while working remotely as a freelance writer and consumed all the literature by black writers I could get my hands on. Then I moved onto Vietnam, for a press trip where I managed to write about the hair extension industry, tracing the route from the heads of Vietnamese women in a factory I toured, back to the shops in London and NYC where they are bought by black women like me. I then went to Havana, Cuba, where I booked home-stays with locals and marveled at the resourcefulness of black Cubans in a place where racial disparities were evident. I also spent one month in the Dominican Republic, three in Nicaragua, and one in Mexico. In Mexico City I finally took an ancestral DNA test and discovered, to my sheer amazement, that half my genetic ancestry is likely from Nigeria. I wrote about all this — and the reliability of the DNA testing industry itself — in my book, "Raceless," which is out now.
To read more of this article, hit here
