Modern genetic ancestry exposes a basic historical reality most people have, for generations, tried to sweep under the rug.

Populations we now treat as distinct “races” or “ethnicities” have been mixing for centuries, too often in ways that our recorded histories minimized, sanitized, or downright ignored.

Part of what that DNA reveals is super positive.

Like the Lemba people in Zimbabwe, some of whom have DNA that traces their roots to the priestly tribe in Israel, the Kohanim, not far off from people with the last name Cohen in America who have similar DNA.

DNA has also allowed families to find their histories.

For Black Americans, what countries they were stolen from. For everyone, what mix of ethnicities they are. And for some, what diseases or other genetic characteristics they might be more prone to.

My DNA came back 80% Russian/Ashkenazi Jewish, 9% Middle Eastern, 2% Moroccan and Algerian, and the rest from Central Asia. Admittedly, I didn’t read the medical part.

At its core, DNA is also an undeniable record of who had children with whom. Geneticists can examine autosomal DNA alongside mitochondrial DNA, which follows maternal lines, and Y-chromosome DNA, which follows paternal lines.

These patterns reveal how populations mixed and had babies together.

For Black Americans, studies consistently find substantial European ancestry alongside predominantly African ancestry. One large genomic study found a median European ancestry of about 18.5% in its African American sample.

But Researchers found a profound disproportionate African ancestry on the X chromosome, a pattern consistent with more European male ancestry and more African female ancestry.

Said another way, DNA evidence preserves the actual racial and sexual power structure of American history.

This was true throughout the Americas.

Researchers examining descendants of the Atlantic slave trade found a recurring heavy bias toward European male and African female genetic contributions. In many Latin American populations, researchers similarly find disproportionately European paternal ancestry combined with Native American and/or African maternal ancestry.

We have spent centuries pretending racial boundaries were rigid. But our DNA says otherwise.

The much darker point is that DNA tells us something about the unequal circumstances under which that sex occurred. Rape and dominance.

In the United States, that immediately leads us to the untold stories that don’t get told of what occurred during slavery.

A Black American can have overwhelmingly African maternal ancestry but a significant European paternal contribution.

That genetic asymmetry is consistent with the historical record of abusive sexual encounters including rape, coercion, and exploitative relationships between European-descended men and enslaved African-descended women.

The genetic evidence obviously can’t tell you whether each particular sexual encounter was consensual, but at the population level it records a striking sex imbalance and proves up a heavy dose of rape of Black women.

Otherwise, we would have seen a more equal mix of European female ancestry.

Not only is DNA proving up a sad untold story of mass rape, but it also exposes the frequent concealment of racial identities.

Research has detected African ancestry among many so-called white Americans. So, someone whose family has identified as “white” for generations may nevertheless descend from African ancestors.

America spent hundreds of years creating laws to stop interracial relationships.

Anti-miscegenation laws (banning interracial relationships and sex), the one-drop rule, and strict racial classifications were society’s attempt to impose artificial boundaries that human sexual behavior violated over and over. DNA now lets us see through those ridiculous boundaries.

The gross irony is that the people most committed historically to racial purity were leading societies whose genomes were becoming increasingly mixed. Through their owned forced sex.

But our DNA is an uncensored history book. And not one that leaves much room for debate.

It records migrations, invasions, slavery, colonization, love affairs, marriages, rape, and relationships that society often refuses to acknowledge.

Much of what we call ancestry is ultimately the accumulated history of people crossing the racial boundaries their societies constructed.

Ok. Great. DNA tells us about history. Why is this all important, though?

Here’s the thing. We can argue over textbooks. We can sanitize history. We can even try to erase extremely uncomfortable stories and pretend that racial groups lived in neatly separated worlds. We can teach our kids about chopping down cherry trees and pretend our forefathers were all saints.

But our DNA doesn’t care about the stories we tell ourselves. It carries evidence of people crossing those boundaries for generations, sometimes through love, sometimes through survival, and sometimes through mass violence and oppression.

Nobody ever suggested that understanding that history will magically solve racism or inequality today.

But it can destroy one of the myths that keeps them alive. Namely, that we have always been separate peoples with separate stories. We haven’t. Our histories are tangled together because our ancestors were tangled together.

Solving some of today’s divisions begins by finally understanding just how genetically connected we are.