A RICH AND TURBULENT (GENE) POOL

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, February 21, 1992                   TAG: 9202210478
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-7   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: By JUAN WILLIAMS
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium
A RICH AND TURBULENT (GENE) POOL
THE WEEK before he died, Alex Haley sent me a letter. He had seen an article of mine and had some encouraging words to say about the importance of writing about race in America.
But what Haley really wanted to talk about was what he called his last book. He had started research on his white ancestors.
He said there were few black Americans who didn't have whites in their family background. And there were many whites, he said, who not only had black ancestors, but who, if they took the time to dig in the local archives, would find they had living black relatives.
Haley's idea was that this next book would break down what he called the artificial lines of race, lines that too many consider walls. To Haley the walls were illusions that had somehow grown into fearsome reality in the American mind.
He wanted to puncture the myth by writing about whites in his own family and the families of other people who consider themselves black - and about blacks in the families of people considered white.
And it didn't stop there. Haley spoke about American Indian blood in blacks and in whites; Hispanic mixtures and Asian mixtures. He talked about East Indians, Chinese, Hispanics from Central America mixing with American Indians and whites from Texas.
From his research had come a vision of a common humanity, and especially of an American population that drew strength from the mixing of its gene pools.
He told me to look at people. "How can you divide them as black and white?" he asked. There are, he said, all kinds of people with all kinds of facial features, skin colors, hair colors, hair texture.
Haley found high amusement in the artificial barriers that Americans erect. The great heroes of America would be in his book, he said. He said researchers had documents showing famous people, ranging from Thomas Jefferson to Thurgood Marshall, had progeny with mixed racial background.
He never told me the name of his planned book, but he saw it as the final message to emerge from his lifetime of listening to stories and collecting secrets. America is poorer for having missed that message.

Juan Williams writes frequently for The Washington Post.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB