The name Melungeon may come from the Greek word melas, meaning dark or black, or early French settlers use of the word mélange to describe them, but the name soon became a racial slur. Melungeons were no strangers to prejudice or segregation, and their ill treatment is a plausible reason as to how they settled in and around isolated Hancock County, Tennessee, 200 or more years ago. The county was, for the most part, outside the grip of Jim Crow laws.
Kathy Lyday, a professor at Elon University in North Carolina, has researched Melungeons appearances in periodicals and literature for the past century. She spoke with Dale Neal from the Citizen-Times in Asheville about seeing Melungeons in newspapers as a child. "Melungeons are clearly not like the mountaineers I knew," Lyday told Neal. "They look different. They have darker skin, darker hair and blue eyes. In older photos, their physical appearance looks almost Mediterranean or Middle Eastern."
Researchers have re-defined Melungeon as tri-racial, theorizing that they are descendants of Europeans, Africans and Native Americans. In 2012, however, the Journal of Genetic Genealogy released a DNA study that reported families historically called Melungeons "are the off-spring of sub-Saharan African men and white women of northern or central European origin." Today, Melungeons stretch across East Tennessee, Southwest Virginia and into areas of Eastern Kentucky.
At a time when mixed ethnic backgrounds are becoming a more comfortable topic of conversation, emerges a peculiar people who can declare they do not have the racial identity of one-half or one-third of an ethnicity. Melungeons can identify, rather, as wholly sub-Saharan African and European. The "invention" of the Melungeon race and the unraveling mystery of their origins bring new clarity to a muddy and infamous past of race relations in America, Miller writes.
"There may be a deeper honesty, and a kind of idealism, in this voluntary embrace of a mixed-ethnic background—a make-up common to millions of Americans, but which many remain reluctant to acknowledge," Miller writes. "And there is something optimistic and timely about the vision of race that the Melungeons imply. These days, on university campuses and beyond, the old, humanistic faith that everyone is the same at heart has been ousted by an essentialist idea of black- and whiteness, which sees the experiences of each as distinct, even mutually incomprehensible. The grievances that underpin this attitude are often legitimate, but the result is that race in America can sometimes seem like a prison. The notion of racial categories as fluid and optional, even invented, is a refreshing counterpoint to this ossifying sense of unbridgeable difference."
To describe the 2012 Y-DNA study as having "solved the mystery" ignores two preceding DNA studies. The first, and only one conducted by a scientist and academician, found mitochondrial (female ancestral lines) haplogroups that were 83% European, 7% Asian, 5% Native American, and 5% Subsaharan African. A 2010 autosomal matching DNA study (everything BUT the Y and mitochondrial lines) found the same pattern-- European, African, Native American, and Asian matches. Only the 2012 study, focused on Y DNA, found 60% European haplogroups and 40% Subsaharan African in the male line-- NOT entirely African as misreported in the AP story at the time. Given that Native American women often were recorded as bearing children by European colonists, whereas the reverse was unheard-of, it is hardly surprising that a mitochrondial study and a Y study would find very different profiles. The Economist story makes all this complexity fairly clear, whereas your summary is misleading along the same lines as the sensationalist AP story of 2012.
ReplyDelete