I <3 this show

I was trying to fall asleep last night but MisMis was being a fucking spaz attack crackhead and breaking dishes and trying to play with my necklaces on the jewelry box and then I tried to put the laundry basket over him like a cage but he just kept walking around and dragging it all over the floor and I couldn't get to sleep. oh, but that's not the point.

SO, I started watching this show on pbs called "African American Lives 2" which I had seen commercials for and looked v. good. basically, this dude henry gates, jr (he's an author, essayist, professor, etc of african american studies) is into geneology and in this show he tells 9 famous bps and bvs their ancestry (and his own), like tina turner, chris rock, morgan freeman, maya angelou, don cheadle (who I love love love), and some others I didn't know.

it is really really interesting, and the part that was on when I turned on was telling them how much european or white they had in them. it is actually a really surprising amount. most of them were between 15% and 20% white. like this one dude, tom joyner (a radio talk show host) is a bp but has grey-blue eyes, and henry gates shows him this picture of a white slave owner who is his great great great grandfather and he has the exact same eyes. no shit. and tom is like "this is crazy I've looked around everywhere in my family and nobody has these eyes" but this old dude has them. it's amazing.

and also henry gates breaks the myth that most bps have native american in them (which he says is something almost every bp family thinks that they have) and says that it is actually white.

and then he has all these peeps figure out exactly or close to what tribe in africa the famous bps belong to b/c for the first time they can trace it through dna (your father's father's father's father's father or your mother's mother's etc).

and then he tells this white chick that she has black in her and I think she has a really insightful reaction to that info:

at one point he even (almost) narrows it down to which slave ship his ancestors came from africa on. (he narrows it down to a potential 7 out of the 35 000 that came from africa to america)

and he also talks about how a lot of bps hear the story about slave capturing "oh your great great granpa was out on a picnic with his girlfriend when a white man jumped out of the bushes and threw a net over them" and says that it actually was africans warring with africans and capturing them b/c it was a huge huge trade in the 1600s and 1700s. sad.

whoa I just wrote a lot but I was into it.