Diasporas in the New Media Age: Identity, Politics, and Community

5 Oprah, 419, and DNA

85 The term African diaspora is relatively new, having become popular after World War II and first defined formally in a 1965essay by George Shepperson . As noted by Edwards (2001) the specific phrase African diaspora contrasts with prior terms such as Pan-Africanism in ways that convey its orientation toward a more decentralized, heterogeneous, and antiessentialist meaning, an orientation that is made even more explicit in Gilroy’s framework of “the Black Atlantic.” Here we investigate the formation of diasporic identity through digital media among two different groups of African Americans : those with a heritage in the United States and those who are recent immigrants (i.e., first generation) from Africa. Strange though it may sound at first, we found recent controversies involving television show host Oprah Winfrey to be a common intersection by which diasporic identity in both groups could be elucidated. oprah winfrey’s dna ancestry tracing On the Public Broadcasting System program African American Lives, which first aired in February 2006, host Henry Louis Gates Jr. traced the ancestry of eight prominent African Americans, including Oprah Winfrey. Winfrey had previously announced her ancestry to be Zulu, but that was—according 5 Oprah, 419, and DNA Warning! Identity Under Construction tolu odumosu and ron eglash 86 d i a s p o r a s i n t h e n e w m e d i a a g e to the mitochondrial dna test offered by Gates—incorrect; her closest match was the Kpelle ethnic group in Liberia.1 Winfrey was clearly taken aback by this news; she “had to take a breather.” Her personal, emotional, and financial investment (forty million dollars for a girl’s school in South Africa) in Zulu identity had been intense, despite prior warnings from historians that there was no record of the slave trade delivering people from the Zulu ethnic group. While Winfrey’s conflicting ancestral identity was the subject of a great deal of popular press, it was by no means unique. All migrants create stories, composed of facts, guesswork, and outright imagination, about their relation to heritage—indeed, even people still occupying their own ancestral lands do so (Anderson 1983). But this act of identity self-construction is particularly intense in the case of involuntary migrants such as the descendants of enslaved Africans in America. Ogbu (1978), investigating the rejection of academic success by some African American students, argues that African Americans (as well as those other involuntary inhabitants of the United States, Latinos and Native Americans) created an “oppositional identity” to the mainstream culture, making the rejection of what Jim Crow laws and more informal racist systems had held them from part of an active form of self-creation. Ogbu (1991) later clarified this concept using the term cultural inversion to refer to the rejection of symbols (dress, language, behaviors, and so forth) associated with a dominant culture. Fisher (2005) amends this model to stress oppositional identity as more about an attraction to alternatives than a rejection of the mainstream: in her view the students were not so much rejecting academics as they were placing a higher priority on becoming a rapper or an athlete. Of course, the African Americans of Ogbu’s and Fisher’s studies—high school students in the age of hip-hop, where “keepin’ it real” often references a glorified criminality—have a different construction of identity than the generation represented by Winfrey, who came of age during the 1960s, when dashiki shirts, Afros, and other symbols of a displaced African homeland often constituted black authenticity. As Dent (1992), Gilroy (1993), George (2001), and others have stressed, these strategic modes of individual and collective identity—Garveyism, Negritude, Black Power, Buppies, b-Boys, Bohos, Rastafarians , 5 percenters, Gangstas, AfroFuturists, and so on—embody a wide variety of intersections among political strategy, heritage, and social position . From assimilation to separatism, from the promotion of tolerance to resistance and revolution, from civil rights to repatriation in the motherland, these various ideologies (and in some cases accompanied theologies) align i d e n t i t y u n d e r c o n s t r u c t i o n 87 themselves with specific cultural expressions. The use of particular elements of African continental culture is thus at least as much a strategic decision as it is a recognition of historical realities. In Molefi Asante’s Afrocentric framework , for example (cf...