
Sigrid Johnson Was Black. A DNA Test Said She Wasn’t - indigodaddy
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/19/magazine/dna-test-black-family.html
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DoreenMichele
This is an interesting piece from the angle of wondering how we construct our
identities and what happens when those constructed identities turn out to be
based on "facts" that aren't actually true. Such lines of inquiry have
potential to break down barriers by proving the degree to which they are
psychological fabrications.

This is an uncomfortable idea for most people. They want to think things like
race are objective facts. Learning that racial identity can be a construct
based on social messaging that is largely or wholly unrelated to actual DNA
evidence calls into question the very basis for much of the racism in the US
today.

~~~
jrochkind1
You are mistaken if you think those DNA percentages are "facts" exactly
either, though.

I would say that the "fact" that she has lived her whole life as a Black
person is more of a "fact" than the "facts" that one DNA test said "5%
African" and another said "23% African" and another said "0-54% African".
Those percentages are the output of algorithms with unclear validity and
meaning, devised in order to put something on a report to sell tests, they
aren't exactly "facts".

But yes, I agree that race is, of course, socially constructed and not a
biological "fact" at all... and for that matter so are "ethnic" categories
like "Greek" or "Irish"... which is just part of why these DNA tests can't do
what people want them to do.

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DoreenMichele
_You are mistaken if you think those DNA percentages are "facts" exactly
either, though._

If that is the impression I gave, then my wording probably was sloppy. I've
reread it and can't figure out what I "should" have done differently to make
it clearer that I am aware that the tests themselves are of questionable merit
(at this point in time, when it comes to racial identity), given the issues
you pointed out.

I have personally read of cases with devastating personal consequences based
on things that are on more solid ground, such as paternity. There was an
incident where someone got a DNA test and I think gifted their parents DNA
tests and the parents ended up divorced because it revealed that the husband
had fathered a child out of wedlock prior to getting married.

I found that especially shocking and bizarre. When I saw the title of the
piece, I assumed that it had revealed an illicit affair during the marriage.

Anyway, this article is about someone who was adopted. Adopted children often
don't know they were adopted. Even if they do know, it leaves a huge hole in
their knowledge about their heritage.

So I think it is inevitable that at some point we will have more reliable
tests and someone like this individual will learn that their genetic heritage
conflicts with their self image in some important way.

Perhaps we will even see some Neo Nazi members learn that they are not
entirely Caucasian either and then what? Do you rethink your racist ideology?
Do you kill yourself? Do you live in denial and try to hide the truth from
your Neo Nazi brethren?

~~~
jrochkind1
Sorry, I didn't mean to accuse you of anything or suggest you "should" have
said something different. Just trying to engage in the conversation.

But the point I'm trying to make is that I'm _not_ sure that "it is inevitable
that at some point we will have more reliable tests". The problem is not test
reliabilily, it's that there is in fact no actual reliable way to map from DNA
to "not entirely Caucasian", because there's a basic mismatch there.
"Caucasian" is (really!) not a genetic category, there is actually no way to
_reliably_ determine someone is "Caucasian" (or "Black", or anything else like
that) from a DNA test. It just doesn't work like that. (Even though these DNA
ancestry companies make money off people thinking it does).

It's true that at some point some neo-nazi, like anyone else, might have
results that seem to tell them something that surprises them or that they
didn't want to hear. But the problem is in fact with their ideology in the
first place that thinks there is such a thing as "Caucasian" encoded in their
genes, when there isn't.

This is interesting though, in the case where someone who thought they were
Black thinks a DNA test told them they weren't -- my inclination is to say
"Ignore the test, it can not tell you that you aren't Black, because the test
just can't say that, don't let it make you insecure in your identity" In the
case of a neo-nazi who has a similar experience, I'd _want_ it to make them
insecure in their identity, because their identity is based on entirely
scientifically unsound ideas about what race means.

That might be a contradiction in my OWN ideology. But it's not a contradiction
in the science. Either way, the problem is not just that "the test isn't
reliable enough yet", the problem is that "Caucasian" or "Black" can NOT be
"reliably" determined by a DNA test, because these categories are simply not
sound as biologically/genetically determined categories.

~~~
DoreenMichele
This is a bit too deep for me at the moment. I don't know that much about the
science. What little I know about DNA is in service to understanding my
genetic disorder.

Have a happy Sunday.

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scythe
It is an utterly absurd situation that someone like Kamala Harris, who is
half-Tamil and partly English, is considered "black". Our present notions of
race continue to maintain the repugnant fiction that the hereditary material
of some populations is "marked" and those who have even a few such ancestors
are "contaminated". Of course, this is very far from accurate. It may reflect
present social realities, but there is no rule that says present social
realities must not be absurd.

> One said that any percentage not marked “low confidence” was 100 percent
> certain. Another said each percentage was 99 percent certain. When I asked
> that representative to check with a supervisor, she did, then returned to
> tell me that the company’s certainty was 99.7 percent.

Obviously this is a confidence interval covering three standard deviations
assuming a normal distribution. If the last assumption can be considered
accurate, the correct interpretation of the results' precision is "pretty
good", but non-normal distributions occasionally show up and cause the 2007
mortgage collapse.

------
yhoneycomb
How could you publish an article like this without any actual pictures? What
she looks like is 90% of what I’m curious about.

~~~
muglug
Then you're singularly incurious. And besides, the article begins with a
massive portrait of her (colour changed but otherwise clearly representative).

~~~
my_usernam3
Much of this article is about appearance because our ancestry defines it. I
bet most readers would have found a picture extremely relevant to the article.

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jrochkind1
A DNA test can say no such thing.

One test said "2.978 percent African", and she thought she wasn't Black.
(2.978%? Three decimal places, really?). Another test said 23% and she thought
she was. (23%? So that means like one grandparent? Not really, it's unclear
what the "percentage" means or if it even means the same thing from one
company's test to another. It means something like "23% of your DNA, the parts
we look at, matches some reference sample, that we got from somewhere." What
does THAT mean though? What does "matching a reference sample" _mean_ in terms
of where your ancestors were from? How has that been validated? And many
companies don't even reveal their statistical methods.)

Or maybe it was "0 to 58%".

These "ancestry results", despite being expressed with five significant
digits, are scandalously unscientific and of unclear meaning. It is not even
clear what "percentage of your ancestry from Africa" _means_. You think people
didn't move around and have children with people from all over until the 20th
century? Cause they did.

If your great-great-something grandparent lived in what is present day Greece,
but THEIR parent was born in what is present-day Egypt (or vice versa; either
would be fairly unremarkable)... and you want to know what "percent Greek"
your "ancestry" is, like that even means something? Like your DNA could
somehow even reveal that great-great-something was born in what is now Egypt
but their parent was born in what is now Greece? It can not. All of this is
based on a weird fantasy/mythology of being able to separate people into
historically continuous categories which remain stable over generations, that
just isn't any kind of scientifically or historically justified.

~~~
Nasrudith
Yeah it is an attempt to correlate genes to geography with far more precision
than actually existed and assumptions that populations were hermetically
sealed when they weren't. Regional classifications are often even worse in
GIGO associations from what I heard with trying to distinguish between say
Dutch, Polish, German, and Swiss. It brings to mind sarcastically asking
questions about connections to long gone civilizations that nobody really
identifies as. How many people globally are Scythian? Babylonian?
Carthaginian? Sumerian? Minioan?

It brings to mind the 'smartass genie' technically most accurate way of
classifying blackness by just including a count of melanin producing genes.

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BurningFrog
> They said she was 45.306 percent Hispanic, 32.321 percent Middle Eastern,
> 13.714 percent European and 8.659 percent “other,” which included a mere
> 2.978 percent African.

Decimals aside, since when is "Hispanic" a race? What could that even mean?

 _That too_ aside, 3% African _is_ black according to the still predominant
"one drop" doctrine of blackness in this country.

~~~
Nasrudith
Technically it is an ethnicity but the South American population does have a
larger percent of assimilated natives than continental Spain and a long
history of a caste system which put born natives lower in the hierarchy than
those born in Spain which could arguably make them a more divergent set of
genetic traits being messily correlated. One can argue about the name but
"Hispanic" is a workable proxy for the broad brush of 'everything below the
continental born caste'.

Of course if you want to talk genetics instead of silly human labels you look
at the actual contents of their genome.

~~~
masonic

      Technically it is an ethnicity
    

No, it's defined by geography only. Someone of pure Spanish blood and another
of purely Mayan blood can both be "Hispanic".

"African" is similarly vague. A pure Bantu, an Egyptian, and an Amazight from
Morocco are all African.

~~~
Nasrudith
I realized afterwards that I had meant nationality but that wouldn't be quite
accurate either - unless you count former ones like "was once a part of the
USSR". And even that would probably be pushing it.

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indigodaddy
This post vaulted to the HN front-page shortly after I posted it, but now is
nowhere to be found.

~~~
dang
Users flagged it. That's common. Also common is to see it rise again as the
tug-of-war between upvotes and flags plays out, or occasionally as moderators
turn off flags.

~~~
indigodaddy
What would you imagine the various reasons for users flagging it would be?
Genuinely curious.

~~~
jryan49
It's about race. A lot of people may think it's flame-war bait and HN
guidelines tell us to avoid such topics.

