Of course its a dead end when you don't want to see what's down that road!

Have you seen the new TV show "Who do you think you are"?

Well, I say new TV show. Its actually been on for years in the UK but they have just made an American version.

The only one we've seen so far featured Emmett Smith, an American football player who played for the Dallas Cowboys.

From the very beginning of the show he was keen to find out where in Africa he was from.

They traced his family back through Alabama and found his great great great great grandmother (or something) and great great great great grandfather.

His great great great great Grandmother did indeed come from Africa so off Emmett took himself to try and find out where she came from.

He found a place where slaves were sold and put on ships to the new world and his search ended here. Emmett was very disappointed that he had met a dead end and couldn't trace his family back any further.

But wait, what about his great great great great Grandfather?

He was white and from Alabama. Surely it would be much easier to trace this side of the family and continue the search?

Sadly this didn't seem to be an option as the show ended in disappointment that there were no records in Africa at the time. There was no further mention of his great great great great Grandfather. I suppose he didn't fit into the humble African beginnings Emmett Smith was looking for.

This whole episode reminded me of a show that was on the History channel last year "The Human Genome Project".

In this show, they took a scraping from the mouth of hundreds of people to trace their ancestry back over thousands of years.

There was one black guy, sorry African American, featured who was really excited to find out how his family left Africa and ended up in the US. Only when the research came back, it hadn't. There was nothing in his DNA that linked his family to Africa. His family actually traced back through Europe.

You could see the disappointment on his face. This guy had probably bored everyone he'd ever known with stories of how he was from Africa without even thinking to look into it and find out for certain.

And while I'm on, is referring to every single black person you encounter as 'African American' not a little bit racist? I know it seems to be the done thing but these types of TV programmes show that that may not be the case.

Actor Sidney Poitier is often referred to as an African American and continuously points out that 'no, actually, my family is from the Bahamas'.

Isn't terming an entire group of people the same regardless of where they are actually from what we were trying to get away from in the first place?