Absodamnlutely amazing: blacks can trace ancestry through DNA

All her life, Rachel Fair has been teased by other black Americans about her light skin. "High yellow," they call her, a needling reference to the legacy of a slave owner who, she says, "went down to that cabin and had what he wanted." So it was especially satisfying for Ms. Fair, 64, when a recent DNA test suggested that her mother's African ancestry traced nearly to the root of the human family tree, which originated there 150,000 years ago. "More white is showing in the color, but underneath, I'm deepest Africa," said Ms. Fair, a retired parks supervisor in Cincinnati. "I tell my friends they're kind of Johnny-come-latelies on the DNA scale, so back up, back up."

Ms. Fair is one of thousands of African-Americans who have scraped cells from their inner cheeks and paid a growing group of laboratories to learn more about a family history once thought permanently obscured by slavery. They are seeking answers to questions about their family lineages in the antebellum South - whether black, white or Native American - and about distant forebears in Africa.
This dude, Charles Harkins, whose great-grandmother was a slave, has asked ...
... this dude, Hayes Larkins, the slave owner's white great-grandson, to take a DNA test to see if they are related. They're waiting for the results.

"I've been sitting here for years with nothing left to try and then, boom, this brand new thing," said B. J. Smothers, a retired urban planner in Stone Mountain, Ga., who says the results of a DNA test have brought her closer than she had ever been to discovering the identity of her father's grandfather. "DNA is our last hope." Ms. Smothers's father, 88, knew that his father was born a slave in Wilcox County, Ala., but the DNA test showed that he has a European paternal ancestry, a result shared by nearly a third of African-Americans who take the test. The news was not exactly a surprise. But as eager as she is to discover the identity of her great-grandfather, Ms. Smothers is also bracing for a wave of new anger.
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FUCK ME with a slave-owner's flaccid boner, this is amazing. Once they've got databanks of DNA going back to the beginnings of time, we'll all be able to trace our origins back to Adam and Eve -- or some Neanderthal tribe, anyway. Tests cost $129 and up.
Here's a rather amusing bit from this NY Times story: One African-American, upon confirming a match with a white man whose ancestors had owned his, told him he owed reparations and could start by paying for the test.