In the US, I am particularly struck by new organizations using DNA analysis to locate the “ethnic” origins of African Americans, an effort that has involved people like Oprah Winfrey and Henry Louis Gates, as well as Linda Heywood and John Thornton at BU…. it’s become quite commercial, in addition to being political.

Kenyans would laugh at the idea that the Luo homelands in Western Kenya are “an Arab part.” The coast still has its Arab enclaves–a few years ago on a flight from Mombasa to Nairobi I ended up sitting next to a young woman with a Mediterranean complection and hands covered in beautiful hennaed patterns. She was interested in my daughters (they’re a striking pair, believe me) and asked if she could give them a piece of candy (she could). Then she explained in halting english that she was going to Muscat to meet the man she was supposed to marry. I had a thousand questions and at the same time I worried that she could get in trouble for talking to me (of course it was patronizing to imagine she didn’t know what she was doing).

But she is to contemporary Kenya more or less what a Hasid from Brooklyn is to America, though her people are more central to Kenya’s history than the Hasidim are to ours. That’s my little window on how wrong Limbaugh is. But as you say, it seriously understates the problem to say that such a wild figment of hateful imagination is wrong and leave it at that.