BALTIMORE — Maia Wise spent the last day of Black History Month adding an important piece to the puzzle of her identity.
Thanks to a genetic testing event sponsored and hosted each year by the University of Maryland, Baltimore, Wise found out Tuesday that her maternal lineage ultimately goes back to the Masa, Mafa and Kotoko people of Cameroon. She immediately texted and sent the news via Snapchat to her relatives.
“It feels good. Almost like a sense of wholeness and completion,” Wise said after she learned of her genetic results from AfricanAncestry.com. “I’m happy with that.”
For Wise, a graduate student in social work at UMB, acquiring the knowledge that she descended from specific groups of people in Cameroon helps fulfill her longstanding desire for details about her identity that began when she first left home in Newport News, Va. — a mostly Black and White city that she describes as “racist” — and began college as an undergraduate at George Mason University.
Whereas Wise saw the world largely in terms of black and white back in her hometown, once at GMU Wise began to interact with African students who made her realize that Blackness was only part of her identity as an African American.
“Growing up and not really knowing where I’m from, when I got to college, it was a much more diverse environment, with me meeting people from Liberia, Ghana,” Wise said.
Wise got more insight into how she and other African Americans are viewed abroad when she visited Malawi as a member of the Peace Corps.
