Can DNA tests tell us who we are? Only if we're racists. - The Washington Post - 0 views
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What I regret is the ease with which I accepted the racist implications underlying the test: a desire to understand who I am through DNA.
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In using DNA ancestry tests, we reduce the culture and lived experience that have long defined ethnicity to a biological, racial signifier that is neither especially relevant nor particularly accurate.
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By joining in, I inadvertently bought into the dangerous notion that who we are lies fundamentally in our blood.
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instead of allowing it to cement racialized ways of thinking, we can use these tests to highlight how meaningless genetic ancestry is compared with the many other factors that shape our experience of ourselves and our communities.
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For most of human history, the concept of peoplehood — of belonging to a group larger than one’s extended family — has been largely determined by shared cultural practices (such as religion, customs and language) or political institutions.
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This more capacious notion of belonging is how heritage is lived day to day for most people. I didn’t need a DNA test to identify as a Jew of European ancestry.
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race science got a new lease on life when, in the 1950s, scientists discovered the molecular structure of DNA. By the 1980s DNA testing could reliably prove paternity
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The answer goes back to the 18th and 19th centuries, when European colonialism and the slave trade birthed the modern concept of race.
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As societies were built and genocides committed on the basis of racial hierarchy, it became imperative for racists to prove the biological existence of race. And so race “science” emerged, seeking to dislodge cultural heritage as the prime difference between groups of people.
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“Aryan” became synonymous with “German,” excluding the many Jewish and Slavic speakers of the language.
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et, no matter how strong it was, this sense of cultural heritage didn’t feel like enough for me. In a society that determines so much based on blood — money, connections, assumptions about character — culture by itself felt like an unreliable narrator of my identity.
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Ironically, as academics were reaching the consensus that race is a social construct with no basis in biology — about 94 percent of human genetic variation occurs within so-called racial groups, with racial difference accounting for only 6 percent — the popularity of DNA testing was helping undermine that very idea.
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Two-thirds of white Americans believe that their racial identity is determined by their DNA, compared with about half of black, Latino and Asian Americans
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Only 35 percent of those surveyed believe that shared history or culture determines their racial identity.
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DNA tests merely compare patterns in your genome with those of groups of people who have been identified as belonging to different ethnicities based on traditional genealogical research (vital records, family trees, etc.)
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“If your 23andMe test says you’re 29 percent British, it’s because 29 percent of the pieces of your DNA were most likely to have come from a group that 23andMe’s reference library has labeled ‘British.’ ”
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This means ethnicity estimates from companies like 23andMe and AncestryDNA tell a much narrower story than consumers — led along by marketing campaigns — read into them
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such estimates are only as good as the companies’ pattern-matching algorithms and DNA reference libraries, which can be incomplete and haphazardly assembled
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In a society that continues to structure lives along the hierarchy of race, it is difficult to leave behind the reassuring neatness of blood ancestry — of, in an age of turbulence and uncertainty, knowing exactly and objectively who we are — for the reality of mixing, moving and contradiction that makes up our history on this planet.
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As Chuck Hoskin Jr., then the Cherokee Nation’s secretary of state, wrote in response to Warren’s DNA testing controversy, “We are [tribal] citizens through historical documentation, adopted laws and a shared language and culture that make us unique.” DNA tests, he said, are “useless to determine tribal citizenship.”