So Al Sharpton Is Discovering the Roots Beneath the Hairdo!

The New York Daily News and the Rev. Al Sharpton are making a big deal -- as in a multiple-part series -- about the Rev's learning a few days ago that some of his ancestors were once owned by some of the kinfolk of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond.

Well, wow!

Anyone who knows the history of this country knows that that is no big thing.

Most Blacks in the US, myself included, can trace some part of their family tree to some White folks -- and vice versa if Whites are so inclined. I do now have older White people considering me a "cousin" or somehow in an-as- yet-to-be-defined way, kinfolk. I've even been graciously hosted by White people on a visit to the remains of an Allison plantation in North Carolina where some of my folks toiled and some of their descendants still live. In South Carolina, there is a city called Aiken, named for White folks from Ireland whose family in South Carolina and in Georgia owned some of my ancestors. I've got a bill of sale for Ike Aikens -- spelling was always a matter of who was doing the writing -- the grandfather of my 103-year-old grandmother, Ethel Mae Aiken Moore, still ruling the roost in Conyers, Ga. I know so much about the White Shipp lineage that I sometimes hear from the White folks about getting started with their genealogical searches. (A bit of trivia: the "S" in Harry S. Truman, the president, was apparently SHIPP.)

After the death of Thurmond, a notorious racist as he built his political career but repentant towards the end, it was officially acknowledged that he had fathered a Black daughter some 70 years before and had, in his own typical-of-the-old-South way, supported her through college and beyond.

As I have said many times before, we are all mutts. A little dab of this, a little dab of that -- and that makes us all the more American.

Perhaps the presidential odyssey of Barack Obama, a true African American because of his White American mother and his Black Kenyan father, has us more attuned to issues of racial identity. Think of this: The only certified descendants of the relationship between Thomas Jefferson, the president, and his Black slave/concubine/mistress Sally Hemings is a WHITE family in Staten Island, N.Y. The putative BLACK descendants haven't been able to convince those who need to be convinced.

To understand how all of this is ridiculous when defining ourselves in the 21st century, take a look at a booklet done by the late J. A. Rogers called "The Five Negro Presidents." It was published in 1965 and is available online and in Afrocentric bookstores. Based on the way Blackness in the US was defined as any knowable or rumored genetic connection to a Black person, however meager, Rogers came up with five; to his list, others have added at least one more. So neither Jesse Jackson nor Colin Powell nor Barack Obama would, truly, be a first.

And, of course, we are ALL Africans, if you believe the scientists who have traced all living humanity to that continent. The Rev told the News this about the discovery of his supposed connection to Thurmond: "It tells you who you are. Where you come from. Where your bloodline is."

I beg to differ: This information may tell you something about your bloodline, but it can never tell you who you are.