Who are you?

Who are you?

Who, who, who, who?

Who are you?

Who, who, who, who?

Who are you?

Who, who, who, who?

Who are you?

Who, who, who, who? — The Who (you were expecting, maybe, the Addams Family?)

My wife and I have been fans for years of Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates Jr., an American documentary TV series that premiered on PBS back in 2012. In each episode, celebrities who appear on the show hosted by the well-known literary critic/professor/historian/filmmaker are presented with a “book of life” compiled by professional genealogists that allows them to view their ancestral histories, learn about familial connections and discover secrets about their lineage.

A consistent theme that emerges from every episode, bar none, is that rich and famous people, like most North Americans, know next to nothing about the lives of their forebears.

The fabulously well-to-do often don’t even know who their great-grandparents were.

Which underscores a peculiar and faintly ominous asymmetry in the “New World’s” relationship to ancestry, viz., the fact that we are forever being encouraged — commercially, culturally, almost liturgically — to “discover who we are,” while being quietly insulated from the possibility that what we might discover is not only incoherent but actively unwelcome.

The prevailing fantasy is that identity, once excavated, will resolve into something affirming, a tasteful arrangement of resilience, quirk and perhaps a dash of aristocratic cheekbones. What is less advertised is that excavation, as a practice, is indifferent to taste. It uncovers whatever is there, including the things that were buried precisely because they were never meant to be found.

Programs like Finding Your Roots operate in this tension, staging revelation as both spectacle and therapy, with just enough archival gravitas to reassure us that the past, however complicated, will ultimately be narratable. And narratable, in this context, is a synonym for survivable.

The “book of life” family tree arrives not as a chaotic dossier but as a curated object, its horrors footnoted, its ambiguities framed, its emotional crescendos timed to coincide with commercial breaks. One leaves most episodes with the impression that history, though occasionally rude, is fundamentally well-behaved.

Outside the studio, however, the situation is less obliging. The causes of our genealogical opacity — migration, assimilation, the administrative violence of governments that record selectively and forget strategically — do not merely obscure the past; they distort it, compress it, and in some cases replace it with something more palatable.

Families, like institutions, develop public-facing narratives and private archives, and the distance between the two can be measured not in years but in silences. To grow up within such an exiguously resourced structure is to inherit not just a lineage but a set of editorial decisions, most of which were made without your consent and all of which present themselves as fact.

Enter the contemporary enthusiasm for DNA testing, which arrives under the banner of self-knowledge but behaves, in practice, like an audit conducted by a party with no stake in your psychological comfort. What genealogy companies like ancestry.ca have begun to reveal — incrementally, algorithmically, and with the unsettling cheerfulness of a push notification — is that a meaningful percentage of the shreds of family histories we do possess are, at best, creative nonfiction.

The term “non-paternity event,” shimmering with the antiseptic elegance of bureaucratic understatement, covers a multitude of human arrangements: affairs that were successfully absorbed into the official narrative, children reassigned to more convenient fathers, and, in darker registers, acts of coercion whose consequences were not recorded as crimes but as births.

The effect of such discoveries is not merely to add branches to the family tree but to expose the tree itself as a kind of collaborative fiction, maintained over generations through a mixture of omission, optimism and what might be called strategic incuriosity.

The genial grandfather becomes, under genetic scrutiny, a question mark; the resemblance you once took as evidence of belonging becomes, retroactively, a coincidence.

And because these revelations occur within the intimate economy of family — where identity is not an abstract concept but a network of obligations, affections and tacit agreements — their impact is less like acquiring new information and more like discovering that the floor plan of your house (where Johnny’s in the basement, mixing up the chromosomes) has been subtly, persistently inaccurate. You know what they say.

Well, maybe it is just the time of year Or maybe it’s the time of man I don’t know who I am But you know life is for learning.

We have, as a culture, invested enormous faith in the idea that more data will yield more clarity, that the accumulation of information will asymptotically approach truth.

And yet here is a domain in which additional data produces not resolution but proliferation — more relatives, more contradictions, more narratives that cannot be reconciled without doing violence to someone’s sense of self. The promised “book of life” begins to resemble less a coherent volume than a palimpsest, overwritten so many times that the original text is no longer recoverable, inferable only through gaps and anomalies.

Rootlessness, in this light, is not merely the absence of knowledge but the presence of too many incompatible kinds of it. One can know, with statistical confidence, that one’s genetic markers align with a particular region, while remaining entirely ignorant of the names, faces and choices that produced that alignment.

We can also discover, with algorithmic certainty, that a beloved relative (even the father who raised you) is not biologically related, without acquiring any guidance on what, if anything, this should mean for the relationship as lived. Knowledge, divorced from narrative, does not console; it destabilizes.

At the individual level, this destabilization manifests as a peculiar oscillation between inflation and diminishment.

On the one hand, the self is expanded — suddenly populated with previously unknown ancestors, connections and contingencies. On the other, it is rendered contingent in a way that borders on the absurd.

If your foundational story can be revised by a saliva sample and a software update, what, exactly, is the ontological status of the “you” who existed prior to the revision? Are you the product of your history, or of your current best guess about it? And how many revisions can a self absorb before it begins to resemble a draft that has forgotten what it was trying to say? You know what they say.

You sat up all the night and watched me Just to see, who in the world I might be.

Collectively, the implications are no less disquieting. A society that lacks a stable, shared account of its past is one that becomes increasingly susceptible to narratives that offer stability at the cost of accuracy. The less we know, in specific, verifiable terms, about where we come from, the more appealing become the broad, reductive stories that promise coherence: we are this kind of people, with this kind of history, destined for this kind of future. So we better kill those people over there — the others — before they kill us.

You know what they say.

The Lord’s our shepherd, says the psalm.

But just in case, we better get a bomb.

These stories function as cognitive shortcuts, allowing us to bypass the labour of engaging with a past that is, in reality, contradictory, unjust and resistant to moral simplification.

It would be comforting to conclude that the solution lies in simply knowing more — in funding archives, digitizing records, encouraging intergenerational conversation. And to some extent, it does.

But this prescription understates the degree to which the past, even when accessible, resists incorporation into the present without cost. To know more is to inherit more — not just stories but responsibilities, not just identities but implications.

It is to recognize that one’s existence is entangled with histories that are not entirely admirable, and that this entanglement cannot be undone by disavowal any more than it can be purified by selective remembrance.

You know what they say.

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

Many of the Jewish celebs whose ancestral backgrounds were laid bare by the Finding Your Roots sleuths have proven astonishingly ignorant of the horrific sufferings of extended family members in the atrocities of the 19th and 20th centuries.

And pretty much every white guest on the program with an ancestor who settled south of the Mason-Dixon line before the American Civil War turns out to have had a slave-owning forebear.

Most of the Black guests have their suspicions confirmed that they descend from slaves ... and, more than that, from slaveowners. On average, African Americans have approximately 20-25 per cent European ancestry, with roughly 10 per cent of Americans who identify as Black having more than 50 per cent white ancestry.

In its mendacious mania to rewrite American history, the Trump administration has enjoyed considerable success in postponing a long-overdue reckoning with both the country’s original sin — slavery — and the development of a belated appreciation of the deep kinship ties between Blacks and whites — bonds that were sometimes consensual but more often forged through sexual violence on plantations.

Slavery was less common (though not unknown) in the colonies that morphed into Canada, but most settlers remain woefully, even wilfully uninformed about our shameful track record of land and resource theft, not to mention the tragic effects of two centuries of botched assimilation campaigns through residential schools and racist child welfare systems.

Channelling James Baldwin, Maya Angelou was surely correct when she wrote: “You can’t really know where you are going until you know where you have been.”

Channelling Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat, George Harrison was surely correct when he sang: “And if you don’t know where you’re goin’, any road will lead you there.”

Maybe it’s because we’ve bought into the idea, promulgated by James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, that history is a nightmare from which we should try to awake that mainstream North American society has adopted Harrison’s mantra rather than Angelou’s.

Though we can never escape it, the past is largely forgotten and the slate wiped clean, or at least heavily smudged, with the arrival of each new generation.

You know what they say.

Hide it in a hiding place where no one ever goes,

Put it in your pantry with your cupcakes.

It’s a little secret, just the Robinsons’ affair.

Most of all, you’ve got to hide it from the kids.

Which brings us, unavoidably, to the possibility that rootlessness, for all its drawbacks, has functioned as a kind of cultural analgesic — a way of dulling the sharper edges of history by blurring them into vagueness.

The recent turn toward genealogical precision, enabled by technology and incentivized by curiosity, threatens to wear off this analgesic, to reintroduce sensations that are, if not entirely new, at least newly unavoidable.

But the question is not whether we can know our past more fully; it is whether we can tolerate what that knowledge does to our carefully maintained sense of ourselves.

There is, finally, a bleakly comic image that suggests itself: millions of individuals, armed with test results and login credentials, peering into databases that return not the reassuring portrait of a stable lineage but a hall of mirrors, each reflection slightly misaligned with the last.

We click, we scroll, we expand family trees that branch into strangers, and all the while the interface assures us that we are “discovering our story,” as though the story were not, at this very moment, dissolving into a set of competing drafts.

And yet, even here, there is a kind of austere honesty. The silence that once surrounded the past is being replaced not by a single, authoritative voice but by a cacophony of partial accounts, each demanding consideration, none sufficient on its own.

The “book of life” — anyone’s book — is neither a single volume nor particularly well edited.

It is a stack of drafts, marginalia, contradictions and occasional outright fabrications, assembled over time by individuals whose primary qualification for authorship was their participation in the ongoing accident of your existence.

To read it seriously is to accept that one’s lineage includes not only the admirable and the sympathetic but also the banal, the misguided and the morally compromised — which is to say, the full range of billion year old carbon.

You know what they say.

We are stardust. We are golden.