are we who we think we are?

I shot an assignment the other day at Soldan High School. The assignment: Trace your ancestral roots via a DNA swab of the mouth. The results: Surprising.

One African American student found that his ancestral line strayed from Africa, into Europe, where his family stayed for more than 20,000 years. He said, "Yeah, so I'm basically White." He likes to skateboard and play video games. His friends think he's different. They define different as "White." He also hates being cold. He discovered his ancestors left Europe for the same reason. Another student, who immigrated to the U.S. from Iraq, found his line went down to Australia. He also comes from the Prophet Muhammad. Most lines crossed through a continent or two, but one girl's crossed every continent except Antarctica. Her ancestors went from Ethiopia into Europe, from there through the Middle East and into Asia (with a detour to Australia), across the Bering Strait into Canada all the way down south to the tip of South America, into Chile.

I wonder if knowing where our ancestors traveled helps us to define who we are. Or, without knowing, our ancestors have already created that definition.