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DNA and Racism
Have you seen the recent commercials that promote people having DNA tests? They show a man who is shocked to find out he should be dancing in kilts instead of lederhosen. And there is the woman who clearly has an American accent who says when she travels, people ask where she is from—and she assumes they are asking about her cellular history. Several people report that they now feel “complete,” knowing their personal DNA. It’s fascinating to see how people respond to their results.
One teacher at West Chester University in Pennsylvania has identified a creative and educational way to use DNA tests: to explore questions about racism. Her name is Anita Foeman; she was doing consulting work in the area of race mediation and was using DNA testing as one tool. Her goal, rather than causing confrontation, was to help people recognize their biases and create an environment where people could speak about race in a constructive and positive way. She brought her experiences into the university environment.
Overall, the student response has been enthusiastic.
‘Some people have never had a happy conversation about race,’ Foeman said. But in her class at West Chester University, there was laughter. Eagerness. And easy connections where there might have been chasms. ‘Our differences are fascinating,’ she said.
At a time when tensions over race and politics are so raw, the stakes, Foeman said, seem particularly high. Her students have been talking all fall about riots, building walls, terrorist attacks, immigration, the election. ‘You can feel it buzzing around the halls like electricity,’ Foeman said.
To introduce the process, Dr. Foeman has people complete a short survey about their ancestry. Then they spit into a vial and the vials are sent for testing. Weeks later they get an email with the results of their “ethnic make-up, a color coded map of their past.”
Students have reacted in amusing and thoughtful ways:
‘When I opened my results, the first thing that greeted me was 6 percent African,’ said a student with very pale skin in the back of the classroom, smacking herself in the forehead, mouth open wide, to re-create her reaction the night before: ‘Whaaaaat?’
‘I guess I shouldn’t be that surprised,’ she added. ‘I know a lot of African-American people have some white DNA, so I shouldn’t be surprised there’s some African in me.’
A student with bright-red hair sent her mother an image of her results, telling her, ‘We’re not Irish at all.’ Her first response was: ‘You must have the wrong data.’ And then: ‘Don’t tell your grandfather. It might kill him.’
There were also students who refused to be tested or denied the results:
Foeman has seen people drop out of the project after getting their results, including three people who identified as African-American who were upset to learn how much European ancestry they had. Some people refuse to take the test. A woman of Chinese descent told Foeman: ‘It’s okay for you – you already know you’re mixed up. I don’t want to find out I’m not pure.’
One of the most valuable aspects of this process is that the results create an opportunity to talk about race in a non-threatening, educational and intimate way:
In class, there were a few quiet moments. But mostly people were rushing to talk – to tell about the great-grandfather who was a Portuguese pirate, the grandfather who was a Black Panther, the grandmother who doesn’t like black people, the great-grandmother whose skin is so much lighter than her siblings’ and everyone will be very angry if anyone asks why that is. The grandmother who, on her deathbed at 99, insisted that the family’s roots went back to William the Conqueror, although no one thought the family was of British descent. (That student’s test results indicated they were, in fact, British. ‘Even up to the end, you gave Grandma no respect!’ Foeman teased.)
Emma Krentler, who has pale skin and brown hair, told the class she knew of Italian and German ancestors and expected some kind of a split between the two. Instead, she found a much more intricate tapestry: 2 percent North African, 13 percent West Asian, 2 percent Jewish. And when she saw Middle Eastern, ‘I was like, What? What?’ It was complete and utter surprise.”
‘Who are these people?!’ Foeman laughed with her.
Students are now volunteering for testing campus-wide.
We are in a period of history where many of us want to identify constructive, meaningful and intimate ways to talk about race. We can initiate conversations, but too often participants become upset, defensive, and angry. Discussions might be superficial because they are intellectual, theoretical and uneasy, not exploring the most fundamental aspects of our beliefs about race and culture. I support any method that can bridge the gaps that seem to be increasing over racial differences. If DNA testing is one step that can span those conflicts, creating an environment of curiosity, sincerity, and learning, then I think it could be a great tool for developing and deepening relationships in a society that is ripe for healing.
Published in Education
This kind of thing makes me crazy.
On the one hand, DNA analysis can be valuable for telling us when and whether we should screen for certain illnesses.
But to tell us what “racial” components we have? Stuff and nonsense. Only an idiot thinks that they are the sum of their genetic makeup. We are ultimately valued by what we do, not by what we are born.
Then, too, “Russian” or “Italian” designations are ultimately arbitrary. DNA, like so many things, are not points on a line, but areas within spectrums. One so-called marker may be more prevalent in people from Athens than from Australia, but that hardly makes the bearer of such a marker X% Greek and Y% Aussie. Especially because there is no defined starting point: migrations have been ongoing since the dawn of mankind, so a marker in the 19th century may be entirely absent hundreds of years earlier.
In the Domesday Book (1086) there were Swedish names in every Shire in England, probably as a result of Vikings who went native. Not to mention dozens of other clearly definable peoples. Who is to say, now, what DNA is “English?” To ask the question is to show how silly it all becomes.
Silly, but seductive. Kids need to be taught better: people are what they do, not what they are born.
Culturally we should all identify as Americans before whatever our race is. But medically, race is important.
West Africans, relative to other races, have very high rates of malaria resistance and it stands to reason that other races have a different mix of resistances and or susceptibilities to different kinds of diseases. I think collecting more accurate data will help Doctors better treat patients. That being said, once we recognize that some small racial differences are real, bad actors might completely overstate the importance of racial genetics.
Beat me to the punch. Well done.
But a lot of people are interested, not because it tells what “race” they are, but where their family came from. It helps to tell their family story. It’s not just “race” and medicine.
In other words, don’t be so racist as to think it’s all about race.
Hey, that was fun! I played the racist card. I could get used to this!
That puts me in mind of this:
As someone else has said, it’s only the racists and race-hustlers /redundant/ who think this is important.
I completely agree with this. Also, genetic testing for medical conditions is something else entirely. I had a genetic test for hemochromatosis (both parents carry the gene) but I very much doubt that’s the kind of specific info 23andme or Ancestry.com is giving people.
We are the product of a genetic blender. The math has been alluded to in prior comment. Over the millennia that humans have been here the number of contributors to each of us is in the trillions.
I thought long and hard before submitting a mouth swab for a bone marrow donation program called “Be The Match.” They use the results to match those who are willing with those who are in need. I did send it in, and would share my bone marrow to save someone’s life, but I would not do the kind of DNA test they are doing in these college courses.
Who knows, at some point in the future what would be done with such information, or material, and how secure it is, or how carefully it is done.
I know my family far back enough to know that my parents are mine, and I am theirs, and family photos confirm our relationships back to great-great grands, resemblances are uncanny.
The DNA stuff is just digger deeper under the skin color, bone structure, eye color, etc, all of which which is unimportant in the scope of life.
I have a dream…about content of character being the measure of a person. Do they have a test for that?
I agree, iWe. But people won’t even have that conversation because they are so attached to ideas about race. I still think there might be benefit in showing that holding on to ideas of race is absurd, because there is so much overlap and intermingling. If people see the absurdity, my hope is they’ll let go of the whole idea of race and look for other ways of honoring people–like what they contribute to the world.
23andme generates a report that can be plugged into Promethease for a nominal sum. Additionally, I think 23andme only stopped doing health reports because the FDA made them stop. 23andme intends to resume, I think, and may have already.
23andme + Promethease generated pretty detailed hemochromatosis reports for us.
While I do hope it turns out that way I have strong misgivings about how this will be used, not necessarily by the current University doing it but by the race baiters in future. They have shown an ability to co-opt and pervert some good causes to divide people and enrich themselves. So I can only hope that the people pursuing this DNA testing for good ends will prevail. I wish them well but do believe that intermarriage will eventually be the only solution, probably in 3-4 generations.
Within my family, my parents’ generation and most of the people in my generation are supposedly of 100% Irish ancestry, but it’s obvious that we really aren’t; some of us look like Celts, but many of us look like Vikings or North Africans, or some combination of all three. Many different groups went through Ireland; I have always known that I am not really totally Irish, if anyone is. I have been curious to do the ancestry DNA testing, but haven’t gotten around to it.
I grew up in a town populated mostly by the descendants of Polish and French Canadian immigrants; my best friend growing up was half Ukrainian. None of us denied our history; we celebrated our own history and each other’s history. My Ukrainian friend took Irish dancing laessons with me, and I painted Eater eggs with her. . We really did celebrate diversity, and it was taken for granted that we would marry people whose ancestry was different from our own.
The kids in our family are becoming more and more Heinz 57 all the time; we don’t have to deny where we came from in order to be American.
Very fun post!
I’ve always wanted one of these tests, but I have a completely silly and irrational fear that whomever I send my DNA sample to will now have the proof they need to frame me for a crime.
So I’m having my sister do it. Results pending.
Italian and Irish I know, but since Sicily is closer to Africa than Brooklyn is to Manhattan, I’m guessing I’m part African. Also one grandfather was Johnson, which I’ve always suspected is an Americanized version of Johansson. I hope I’m Swedish. Maybe I’ll wake up 6’2″ and fair-haired after I find out.
One question: I’ve dutifully bought into the first man was from Africa version of events. Shouldn’t every one of these tests come back with some African?
One observation: Regarding race, I’ve done some layman’s research (as in read some stuff on the Internet) and it seems that the scientific consensus is leaning toward one “race” as in human, rejecting the Negroid, Caucasoid, Mongoloid groups we all failed to recite on our junior high school science test. These tests my help with that.
Those aren’t the only choices.
There are some language difficulties about all of this, but if you are at the right time and place and ask a person, “Who are you?” you might get the reply, “I am Moong,” which is a clan name. (If I remember my Ojibwe, that means the Loon clan.) It’s not the same as his saying “I am a member of the Moong clan.” It’s not his membership; it’s who he is. The person would also have one or more names, but the person’s identity is Moong.
In other words, he’s not just what he does, but he is what his (extended) family is.
Most modern Americans don’t quite have that family sense of who they are. However, when someone says, “I married my wife, but I didn’t marry her family,” I’ll say that when I married my wife, I did marry her family. Maybe not in quite as strong a sense as in some cultures, but my wife is not just what she does, but is also part of a family. (Not necessarily a biological family, though.)
This gets to be important when we need to fight off totalitarians and Democrats who want to destroy all such relationships that compete and interfere with the government-to-autonomous-individual relationship.
This is funny: most of the little girls who did Irish dancing were of Irish ancestry, but my best friend, who was half Polish half Ukrainian and not one ounce Irish routinely won all the gold medals; she was really, really, really good. I was ok at it; I usually won silver or bronze, but I totally hated it. It just wasn’t the kind of dancing I was into, and besides that, they made us do it outside in the summertime in 90 degree heat, in heavy costumes: I thought this was a huge drag, and after a few years, I abasolutely begged my parents to let me stop doing it. I think they kind of thought it was a drag too, because they were fine with letting me quit.
40 years later, My best friend still does Irish dancing; she has always loved it.
I’ve been wondering about that too.
I presume they do come back with African in the results. Rabbit, too. We are probably told we share 90 percent of our DNA (or some such number) with rabbits. But we all share the same 90 percent, so that’s not so interesting. And we all share a certain large percentage of our DNA with Africans and everyone else. But that’s not as interesting as the remaining small percentage that distinguishes our places of more recent origin or other such factors.
A book that addresses this science quite well is Troublesome Inheritance by Nicholas D. Wade. anonymous reviewed the book and I recommend his writing on it. On average, there is very low amount of genetic difference between different races.
That being said I do think that there are some important differences in medicine as previously discussed as well as other not-insignificant differences. Scandinavians tend to be taller in order to better resist the cold and some Africans near the equator tend to be longer and leaner to resist the heat. Tibetans are genetically very well suited to living in their extremely high climate and one tribe in Kenya probably have a genetic advantage when it comes to distance running.
Possibly, Ashkenazi Jews and Asians that come from a Confucian society have a higher I.Q. because knowledge was deeply valued by their religion and culture and being smart was considered desirable in a marriage partner. These traits don’t make a Kenyan a better person than an Ashkenazi Jew and vice-a-versa but they are significant differences.
The problem I find with these ancestry tests is that outside of Western Europe the mapping data is very low resolution. So while the test can tell you Irish, Scottish, and French % if you are Romanian you just get Eastern European or Balkan…which is lame.
The other aspect I dislike with these test is that like the man in the commercial people think these test mean something. If you have been dancing in lederhosen your whole life and you like it why should you care that your grand father was really Scottish?
I found it rather amusing when my sister had her DNA tested. Among the gems: Contrary to our maternal grandmother’s insistence on Cherokee (as an explanation for her very dark hair), there was not a drop of Indian of any type. There were, however, some Jewish makers. This is especially funny as Grandma was a bit of an anti-semite.
Otherwise the tests showed what we expected – lots of English, Irish / Celtic, Swedish, and the usual mix you get with German (lots of people travelled through Germany over the centuries):
33% Western European (France, Germany, maybe southern Britain)
27% Great Britain (England proper, northern France, maybe into Germany, maybe into Ireland)
17% Scandinavian
7% Eastern European (east of Germany)
5% Finland/Northern Russia
4% Italy/Greece
3% Iberian Pennisula
2% Ireland
2% European Jewish
I don’t think the majority of people doing this are hoping to find out that they are part of some ethnic group that makes them “better” than other people. I think people are just curious. If a relative where to tell me some stories about an ancestor who had an interesting life, I’d find it somewhat interesting. It wouldn’t make me feel pride or shame in myself, it would just be kind of interesting.
I’m not going to crack open my wallet to sign up for one of these, but if my brother or mother or father did, I’d be interested in reading the report.
One of my cousins has adopted several children, one of whom is half Mexican. Perhaps because she may have been overwhelmed with the kids, she never really discussed their ancestry with them. Then one day, her half Mexican child started telling Mexican jokes he had heard in school. He was only 6 or 7 at the time; she just laughed, and she said, “You do realize that you are half Mexican, right?” Apparently, his racism was not deep seated, because he smiled and said, “Really? Am I?” :)
Yeah, I’m curious about my genetic makeup but I’m not going to be out looking for long lost relatives. No telling what kind of characters you might run into! I’m pretty sure there were some prohibition booze runners on my father’s side.
From the OP, one interesting thing to note was that the white people seemed to be the least racist. That is one danger of the way we talk about race, today, that racism is praised in all other cultures, while whites are called racist simply for the color of their skin… If that trend doesn’t reverse, soon (starting with our education system), I see a lot of harm resulting.
Lots of people have prohibition booze runners on their father’s side :) A few months ago, my parents and I were at the funeral of one of my father’s cousins. The people speaking kept going on and on about what a successful entrepreneur her father had been; just a few years after arriving from Ireland with nothing, he owned a farm and was always buying more land and animals. This struck me as odd, and on the way to the cemetary, I asked my Dad about it. Then my Dad started going on and on about what a hard worker his cousin’s father had been; this struck me as odd too, because from what I can tell, most people at that time were very hard workers. But, I accepted my Dad’s explanation. Then, as we were leaving the cemetary, a childhood friend of my Dad and his cousin spotted my Dad, and they started talking about the old days. The woman smiled at my Dad and said, “Do you remember when they ran moonshine?” Then my Dad smiled at me, and said “Well, I guess the cat is out of the bag” :)
That’s a bummer. The interesting stuff is further east, IMO.
I know that every other Ricochetti with knowledge of Asia says this but it bears repeating. Asians usually have horrible racism against other Asians and black people. I lived in China for seven years and the way the Han Chinese treated/talked about the Xin Jiang Muslim people was awful.
An NRO reporter worked as a reporter in India for a few years and he was struck at the racism of lighter skinned Indians towards darker skinned Indians. Some Indians in an attempt to lighten their skin, even died from chemical treatments that they thought would make their skin lighter. For some reason, Americans cannot accept that outside of America, racism is usually way worse.
I too am disturbed by the black Americans and the Chinese lady in the study who were obsessed with something as stupid as racial purity.
So science is catching up with G-d? Good to know.
Bill Murray figured this out 35 years ago.