What are you? Where are you from?

The question I get on a nearly daily basis... What are you?  Most often referring my amorphous racial appearance.  When I was little I was told to say "Indian".   Then I changed the response to "East Indian" after someone asked me "Dot or feather?"  Later I learned that since my parents were both from Guyana (South America not Africa for you geography impaired Americans) that I should answer "West Indian". 

As I grew older I began putting down "Asian" on applications as the PC term of "Multiracial" had not been coined.  Occasionally I saw "Other" on the form... What the hell is an "Other"?  But as I began learning about my family history, things got even more interesting.  Here we go...

My mother is full East Indian, but not from India.  She was born in Georgetown, Guyana from parents that were indentured laborers on sugar plantations.  There families as far as the lore goes was that they were from Calcutta and Madras, India (Now Kolcutta and Chennai as they shrug off the vestiges of Colonialism).

My father is a mix of African and Chinese, but there has always been a rumor that some Caucasian blood mixed in there, but no one seems to know from where... Two common rumors formed, one was that it was Russian blood and the other that it was something from Great Britain ie English, Irish.  There is also a third rumor that we had South American native blood as my father's family was living in Bartica, Guyana a place deep in the jungle of Guyana.

When Penelope my daughter was born she had deep blue eyes.  As the early months went by her eye color changed to three colors... blue, green, and brown.  This attracted a lot of attention from people passing by about the beauty of her eyes.  As more months passed her eyes settled into the green shade that they are now. 

My background is in molecular biology and specifically genetics... So naturally I realized that for me to have a green eyed child, I must have blue eyed genes and therefore must have Caucasian genes...

On Christmas break I sent in a DNA sample of myself to www.23andme.com for analysis and the results were very interesting...
So I am 50% South Asian (Indian) from my Mother, and the next highest category was 17.3% Caucasian!  The rest was 15.9% Sub Saharan  African, and 11.8% East Asian (Chinese).
And the kicker... The Caucasian genes match closest to Ireland and Lithuania!  Both rumors were true!  And alas, no South American Native genes...
 

So after the South Asian from my mother, the next highest category was Caucasian.  This means all those times I was called a "Coconut" (brown on the outside, white on the inside) or "Oreo" (black on the outside, white on the inside), they were right!  Stay tuned for more interesting insights...