by Alex Wagner
I raised this issue with Dr. Long.
“Well,” he said, “would you ask for the recipe from the chef if you enjoyed your meal?”
I thought that seemed an inapt metaphor—after all, I took penne arrabiata seriously, but not as seriously as I took, say, my heritage. Dr. Long persisted.
Testing your DNA was like a fun-house excursion, he said: “What if I went to a crystal ball reader and she told me my sister was not my sister….What would I think? Maybe a reading of your DNA is no more accurate than a crystal ball.”
That was a revelation.
“There may not be that much more to the science than crystal ball reading,” Long repeated. “When it comes to a direct-to-consumer test, I would tell people not to give much more credence to it than recreation.”
*1 Okay, I mostly remembered from biology class but still looked it up on the Internet.
*2 There’s a whole second book I could write on this practice, which would probably be the correct venue to expand on the controversy regarding the gathering of this ostensibly “pure” DNA. In certain instances in the past, those being sampled did not actually give consent to have their DNA used in this way.
*3 Woe be to any suckers who used version 1.0.
*4 Obviously, I cringed when I read this, because my goal at the start of this project was mostly—no, actually—the same. If I’d known then what I know now!
*5 The two groups were criticized when Ancestry provided DNA samples from its Sorenson collection to the Idaho Falls Police Department, which was looking to make a DNA match for a 1996 murder. Despite the fact that certain Sorenson data was classified as “protected,” Ancestry complied with the government’s subpoena and gave law enforcement access to the DNA collection without donor consent. The subsequent lead drawn from a partial DNA match was later found to be a dead end.
The tribe is not strictly speaking a genetic population. It is at once a social, legal, and biological formation, with those respective parameters shifting in relation to one another.
—Kim TallBear1
So the DNA tests were compromised, and by “compromised” I mean “possibly inaccurate to the point of uselessness.” And yet, millions of people were taking them. And millions of people, inevitably, had a more nuanced and complex picture of their roots, even if that picture was a wavy-gravy, Magic Eye version of the truth. I tried to sort out what this meant as far as my original question: Who am I and where do I belong? Was there a solution to the existential loneliness that had followed me around like a shadow all these years, one that might answer the primal call for identity and community?
The search to discover my heritage had ended up fracturing my understanding of my people. I was not the natural inheritor to some forgotten society, but, rather, I had been grandfathered in to a million splinter groups: the hustling Luxembourgers, the nationalists of Burma. Each group had a subgroup, and each subgroup was so particular that it blew up the whole idea of ancestral community: I was not the expression of some intangible Southeastern Asian/Western European id; I was the offspring of a very specific group of (very complicated) people.
In fact, I was coming to the sinking realization that my hope that discovering my identity would provide refuge and belonging was itself a trap—it was a con just like the DNA ancestry tests were a ruse, designed to lure in the questioning with zealous promises. Because if you looked closely enough at where you’ve come from—as part of the quest to determine “identity”—you’d inevitably find failures and exceptions, the truth of which would destroy the myth that you could find some peaceable, faraway kingdom of elders that would confirm your belonging to something greater than just little, old, weak-kneed…you. You’d find mixed blood, not the pure hemoglobin of princes. You’d find that you were a little bit of a lot of things, a person drawn from many different people of many different persuasions. There was resolution in that, but it was still damn lonely.
Maybe there was some solace to be had in simply understanding this. I thought about James Sorenson’s lofty dreams of peace: “By understanding how closely related they are, people will treat one another differently.” If the knowledge that we are all humanly amalgamations from around the world could, in fact, help tamp down the vitriol and hate that was increasingly defining us, if it could undermine the Us versus Them dichotomy in our present national debate or slow the spew of demagoguery, then it might actually be worth it. The faulty results and the questionable science, the arbitrary classifications and significant blind spots. The legitimization of colonial boundaries, the massive oversimplification of ethnic identity. Could this kind of science bring us closer to a more perfect union, act as a weight on the moral arc of the universe to bend it ever so slightly further in the direction of justice, and put us on a more direct path to becoming whole?
When I looked at a map of the world—found on each company’s website—highlighting the countries where my DNA could be found, I was awash in pride.
I had no claim to Australia, Greenland, the Middle East, most of East and West Africa, or Russia—but other than those places, the entire world was highlighted, blasted into full color by my DNA. This was visual confirmation about ole futureface—numbers that reflected a certain global reach: I was quite literally a citizen of the world! Here, in my occasionally broken-down body and increasingly creaky bones, was a veritable mini United Nations of genetic material. Never mind the truthiness of the science behind it; I had third-party assessment showing my universality, my mutability—and that seemed a reason for hope. So much has been made about our borders, how effectively we might close them off and secure the entry points to “protect” our national identity. But here was a body that bled across the world—from sea to shining sea. My map was a refutation of xenophobia, a double-down bet on the world as a sprawling place of commingling and communication, rather than a series of tightly drawn political boundaries and passport checkpoints.
But, in this hopeful embrace of Pangaeatic heritage, was I the rule or the exception? Would most people see it this way? Certainly, a good deal of the country was open to pluralism and mixing. But not all of it. Specifically: Would America’s white majority rejoice at the brownness, the unassigned nature of this American heritage? A sizable group of white Americans, after all, had made their opinions known in recent years—and they had spoken resoundingly in favor of protectionism and tribalism, rejecting the gray areas of multiculturalism for the sharp relief of black and white, and demanding walls and policies to separate us, not unite us. They would be no fans of what my map portended. This America felt fear when it came to cultures mixing—a fear that was centuries old—and the shrinking of the world had not done anything to allay it.
With this history in mind, the fractioning of personhood, readily available thanks to my various test results, seemed a ghostly reminder of antebellum one-drop rules and racial phrenology, when blackness or Jewishness was something to be measured and marginalized (and destroyed, not celebrated).
Professor Duana Fullwiley at Stanford, who specializes in medical anthropology, was one of the most prominent voices urging caution in the burgeoning practice of DNA-based ancestry testing. I asked her whether—in a well-intentioned, progressively minded quest to eradicate cultural differences by revealing complex ancestry (a project considered by both Mr. Sorenson and myself!)—we might be, in fact, inadvertently reinforcing the idea that we were all genetically different from one another.
Professor Fullwiley was diplomatic.
“Well,” she said, “it could work out that way…but I think oftentimes people glom on to two or three specific [parts of their heritage], and these come to represent someone’s whole identity. And the methods of these technologies feed that behavior, rather than showing people how fluid identity might be. Instead of inciting people to be more curious about the world, now there are only one or two things they might be focused on.”
She added: “I don’t see [DNA–based ancestry testing] as deconstructing race, as some people do.
“In general,” she continued, “we’re still thinking of very basic racial options in very basic racial terms. The actual concept of race is fortified by these technologies. I feel that the tool of ancestry testing, as it’s constructed—organized and collected data by continent—reiterates our way of seeing race in simplistic terms.”
Many (if not most) scientists and geneticists concur that the classification of “race”—as such—has no basis in scientific reality. In 2000, leaders of the Human Genome Project announced that the human genome contained no real racial differences and that we are all just one race—“the human race.”2 These scientists concluded that human beings share “99.9 percent of their genes, such that researchers cannot point to clear, qualitative genetic breaks between one population and another.”3
And yet, the practice of this DNA detective work emphasized the opposite. They were all about finding difference in our genes: Fundamentally, these were businesses whose entire model was selling the idea that we were each genetically determined to be different. I was, for example, 50 percent European and 37 percent East Asian. As these breakdowns told us, we all had distinct ancestral lines, separate and unique from each other, as determined by a DNA-based test. And where there’s difference—no matter how neutral or meaningless—there is an arbitrage opportunity to turn that difference into someone’s favor or fortune.
“The tools we have today that parse ancestry in terms of percentages play into the idea that there are pure racial types,” Fullwiley told me. People who took the DNA tests had their genetic material classified according to reference populations on various continents—but oftentimes, Fullwiley said, the people in those same reference groups didn’t even understand themselves to be classified as such. In other words, the so-called true Siberians and Melanesians weren’t necessarily characterizing themselves as Siberians or Melanesians—they were assigned into those categories by someone else.
I recalled an article I’d read earlier by a group of leading sociologists wary about genetics and their impact on how we Americans imagine ourselves.
“Websites of many companies state that race is not genetically determined,” the sociologists said, “but the tests nevertheless promote the popular understanding that race is rooted in one’s DNA—rather than being an artifact of sampling strategies, contrasting geographical extremes, and the imposition of qualitative boundaries on human variation.”4
By drawing the questionable line between someone’s makeup and “genetic science,” consumers might be led to the iffy conclusion that race was based in science—even though that science was a product of subjective determinations and constants that had more to do with sociopolitical realities (including the whims of various and sundry British lords) than they necessarily had to do with any natural genetic separations.
“Because race has such profound social, political, and economic consequences,” these sociologists concluded, “we should be wary of allowing the concept to be redefined in a way that obscures its historical roots and disconnects it from its cultural and socioeconomic context.”5
But when I asked evolutionary genetics scholar Dr. Bamshad about how DNA-based ancestry testing was informing—or perpetrating—misguided ideas about “race,” the professor agreed that race was “not a very good tool for classifying populations,” but did not consider race entirely irrelevant.
“Race is one of many ways to define populations,” he said. “Any definition of a population is relatively gray, because you have to make an arbitrary definition of where to draw the line. There are hundreds of definitions of race. But race captures some biological information: It’s one of many identities that a person has. [We see] genetic ancestry and popular notions of race—as well as other parts of identities—as overlapping with one another. They overlap to different extents in different people.”
As Bamshad proved, just how precisely race matters (or even exists) differs wildly, depending on who you’re talking to. According to a study conducted by Bamshad and others, geneticists and anthropologists have divided opinions on this.6 When asked their opinion of the statement “Races don’t exist,” 61 percent of geneticists disagreed, while 59 percent of anthropologists agreed.
When responding to the statement “Race is biologically meaningless,” only 42 percent of geneticists agreed with it, while 71 percent of anthropologists did.
Bamshad concluded, “Do common notions of race used in the United States capture some information about your biological and genetic identity? Absolutely. In the overwhelming majority of people, that is absolutely true. The better question is: Is that information meaningful? If so, in what context, and in what way?”
For me, it boiled down to one question: Was this stuff moving us closer together or farther apart?
I asked Professor Long, the man who put as much stock in DNA-based ancestry testing as he did in crystal ball reading.
“Unfortunately,” he said, “I think it’s moving us toward more division. And this is something that bothers me about the field. As an evolutionary biologist, I have to think of unity and diversity simultaneously.”
When you looked at ancestry tests, Long said, “You’re looking at the top ten feet of the tree, rather than the whole tree. All my genes are African—but they were given to me by Europeans. That’s how I like to think about it: Genetic ancestry has been transferred, but there’s no point at which it starts.”
I liked this concept: the idea that, in the beginning, we were all the same; we just took different routes to get to our modern selves. Some people took the Andes, others trekked across sub-Saharan Africa, and still others walked an overland route across the frozen Bering Strait.
But conceiving of heritage and ancestry in such a fashion required a certain deftness. It did not come with a big, multicolored map that announced you were a citizen of the world, and it basically, ultimately, put all of us Homo sapiens in the Unassigned category. It was not a particularly easy discipline to practice because we had been taught to desire singularity and specificity, to champion the special things that set us apart, to ask, “What’s your blood?” rather than assuming that our blood was, in fact, really all the same. Long’s way of thinking and understanding our place in the world would not do that. In fact it would do the opposite.
Ancestry tracing was a greedy sport: People who did it wanted as much information and as many statistics as possible. Relinquishing one’s claim to a specific heritage was especially difficult in the deeply personal and political divide over identity. Moreover, it didn’t take into account the radically different realities experienced by people who looked different from one another, even if they were genetically the same. (You’d have a hard time convincing a young black man that he was scientifically identical to a young white man, given the presumably opposing set of realities facing each.)
For his part, the ancestry-testing critic Professor Duster was resolute: Ancestry maps—like the one I had gazed on with pride—had irrevocably negative outcomes.
Duster recalled the work of Professor Jennifer Lee at the University of California, Irvine. “What she’s shown is how, even though we’re all mixed in this way and that, when you have an Asian and white mixture, you still get a binary world. You don’t have people saying, ‘We’re mixed!’ People identify with one or the other. Asian-white students may get categorized as hapa, but when it comes down to their actual activities, look at the patterns in terms of dating and marriage—and it is dramatic.”
I thought about this as it concerned myself, a hapa of Asian-white parentage (never mind the percentage). And it was mostly true: Growing up, I had identified with white culture (Saved by the Bell; Garfield) more than Asian culture (Thingyan celebrations, durian fruits). I married a (really very great) white guy. I credited this to the fact that I was raised in a very white
quadrant of northwest Washington, D.C., and was—in my classes and on my sports teams and in my professional adult life—mostly surrounded by white people.
I was still proud of and excited by my Burmese heritage. In fact, I understood it to be a mark of honor, the thing that made me futureface, the thing that set me apart from…all those white people. And, by the way, if I could have gained entry into a Burmese peer group that wasn’t largely composed of bullying twelve-year-old boys throwing water at me in the chilly weeks of early April, I like to think I would have. Maybe I would even have married one.
As I defensively reasoned through all of this with myself, I felt a creeping sense of apprehension, because, well, I hadn’t really ever looked for that group of friends, nor had I dated that phantom Burmese suitor. I hadn’t poked at that other half of me—the Asian side—until something approaching guilt had set in. Maybe that was genuinely the result of circumstance, maybe it was due to a lack of curiosity, maybe it was laziness.
Or maybe it was because it was, in truth, a lot easier to be white than Asian where I was growing up, surrounded by the people I was surrounded with, working with the people I came to work with. They were all white! And part of being ambitious about succeeding in their world meant fitting in. And fitting in meant embracing the dominant culture, which was…white culture—not someone else’s.
Being able to throw the signs and read the cues of Caucasia made it easier to scale and conquer the world of Ivy League universities and American media, to approach the top echelons of what we think of as success in this country. I wanted this, badly, even if it was ultimately an unsatisfying fit. But you couldn’t be safely ensconced in that world while you were still part of another—that’s not how membership worked. Whiteness, even in the twenty-first century, remained a fairly singular thing, one that did not meaningfully embrace hyphenated co-branding: It was all or nothing. So I put aside my Burmese-ness and my skin color and its potential pool of suitors. That was just the truth.