June 11, 2022 – Hellenic American Academy students, from left, Gabriela Mattheos, 10, of Lowell, George Kefalas, 10, of Pelham, NH, Elena Bletsis, 10, of Tewksbury, Maria Iliadis, 9 Eva Kazanis, 9, of Chelmsford, and Emmanuela Tjoutjakis, 9, of Tewksbury, perform dances at the Holy Trinity Church Greek Festival at the Hellenic American Academy in Lowell. JULIA MALAKIE/LOWELL SOLEIL
Young children are often not given enough credit for being curious and observant, and many parents fear discussing complex topics such as race and culture with them.
I recently read on a nonprofit website called Futurity that by age 5, children begin to “associate racial characteristics with traits, stereotypes, and social status, and begin to internalize racial characteristics. messages about race that they inferred from the adults and people around them.”
I would also add that ethnicity is another characteristic that children recognize very early.
I remember being in first grade and filling out an assignment for the teacher with my full name on it. When it came to my middle name, I was self-conscious about “Tania.” I actually didn’t like being Greek. I wanted to be Franco-American like the majority of my classmates. I wanted a last name like Côté, Dubé, Lavoie, etc. I knew that my Mediterranean characteristics, my religion and my traditions were different and that made me uncomfortable.
My late grandmother’s name was “Sultana”. It was supposed to be my middle name, but my parents thought Tania sounded better. I asked them what Sultana meant in English, and they said the closest translation was “Susan.”
And Susan was the name I chose to write for my middle name at school. Like most kids, I wanted to fit in.
Today in New Hampshire, the largest ancestry groups include French and French Canadian (23.3%), Irish (20.5%), English (16.1%), Italians (10.7%), Germans (8.3%) and Americans (5.2%), according to World Population Review data. The large French-Canadian and Irish populations are mostly descendants of long-ago factory workers, many of whom still live in Nashua and Manchester.
Nashua as well as the entire state are also majority white. The racial composition of my town of 90,000 inhabitants breaks down as follows:
White: 81.73%
Asian: 7.64%
Two or more races: 5.22%
Black or African-American: 3.53%
Other race: 1.75%
Native American: 0.12%
Native to Hawaii or the Pacific Islands: 0.01%
In the meantime, I’ve learned that ancestry is something that can be more complicated than it seems.
I’ve come to admire and love my Greek roots, but these days I don’t really know how Greek I am. It all started in 2018 when my sister-in-law Nina gave me an AncestryDNA kit. She was certain that my family had Native American heritage because of my strong features, especially my high cheekbones. I laughed, of course. It would be remarkable if I did, but my family’s roots were Greek/Macedonian. I thought I was 100% Greek.
I spit into the little tube and sent it to AncestryDNA. It would only take a quarter of a teaspoon of saliva to determine my cultural makeup.
Surprise. The data revealed that I was 76% Greek, Albanian and Turkish.
Eh?
I recently received new 2022 statistics from AncestryDNA. I am now “only” 67% Greek and Albanian, with 27% ethnic background from the Balkans, 4% from Eastern Europe and Russia, and 2% from the Baltics.
To determine a person’s ethnicity estimate, the company compares your DNA to a global reference panel to see which populations your DNA most closely resembles.
How often can a person’s ethnicity change?
“DNA ethnicity estimates are updated from time to time based on advances in DNA science and the increasing number of samples from our reference panel. With each update, we continue to add new regions, making your results even more accurate,” explains AncestryDNA.
And There you go. As unique as we all are as individuals, we are probably a lot more similar than we think.
