Genetics: How a DNA Test Can Change Someone's Life

Around the world, tens of millions of people have already tested their own DNA, including about five percent of Britons and more than 26 million Americans.

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Kara Rubinstein Dejerin gave her own father a home DNA test for Christmas in 2017 because she wanted to find out exactly where in Africa her ancestors came from.

She had already traced her family's family tree back to three brothers who were slaves in Texas, but her dream was to take her own sons to Africa and do what she called a "discovery tour."

It was an exciting gift, but not overly original.

Test kits from companies such as AncestryDNA, 23andMe and MyHeritage have long become ideal Christmas gifts for those who already have everything.

Around the world, tens of millions of people have already tested their own DNA, including about five percent of Britons and more than 26 million Americans.

This was attractive to many of them because of the tantalizing promise that our genes would reveal who we really are and where we come from.

That's how Kara Rubinstein Dejerin bought a test for herself and her father.

Growing up in Seattle with a white mother and a black father, Rubinstein Dejerin experienced racism from an early age.

The kids at school called her 'Oreo', 'semi-thin' and 'zebra'.

When she was filling out school enrollment forms, her mother circled the option that her daughter was black.

"In America, there is also a 'drop of blood' rule according to which, if you have even one drop of blood from an African ancestor, you are considered a colored person,"

"She thought it would help me get my hands on some programs," says Rubinstein Dejerin.

Based on her appearance, the school administrator questioned the information on the form, but race and ethnicity are influenced by much more than skin color, she adds.

"You can't just look at someone and automatically know their ethnicity."

The results of Rubinstein Dejerin's DNA test arrived shortly before her 44th birthday, in the form of a pie chart.

Finnish, German and English origin occupied half of the circle, while the other half was occupied by Ashkenazi Jews.

The man who raised Rubenstein Dejerin was not her father and she ultimately had no African ancestry.

Rubinstein Dejerin now belonged to an ethnic group she knew nothing about.

"Until then, I had never even heard of the term Ashkenazi. I don't think my mother ever even met a Jew in her life.

"Obviously he did on one occasion," he adds with a smile.

See how scientists reconstructed the faces of ancient Egyptians based on mummy DNA

Five years after this revelation, she is wearing a Star of David pendant during our Zoom chat.

She embraced Reform Judaism and recently returned after spending several months in Israel.

She adopted her biological father's last name as her own, hence the Rubenstein in her name, even though he died more than 10 years before she underwent the DNA test, and his family wants nothing to do with her.

Rubenstein Dejerin had no one to help her understand her new, Jewish identity.

When she succeeded in doing so, she instantly felt a connection.

"The first time I went to the temple, I sat in the back and started listening to Hebrew. At that moment, something clicked in me," he recounts.

While I was doing the podcast D Gift (The Gift), my BBC Radio 4 series on BBC Sounds, I discovered that people who take a DNA test out of curiosity can expect life-changing things to happen.

What do you do when you discover you belong to a different ethnic background than you thought growing up?

Does our heritage come from our genes or upbringing? How much can we trust these tests that tell us who we are?

Kara Rubinstein Deyerin

In the age of identity politics, racial identity can bring you certain specificities, such as access to certain spaces, and it can also exclude you from some others.

Being part of a minority group can mean you're more likely to face discrimination, brutality, and even genocide, but, as Rubenstein Dejerin's mother knew,

you may have easier access to certain programs, scholarships, and even wealth: Natives belonging to the Ho Chunk Nation in Wisconsin are entitled to a share of $200.000 in tribal

wealth after high school graduation, as long as genetic test results show they have the requisite amount of Ho Chung DNA.

But racial identity is not determined by genes alone.

Mark Thomas, a professor of evolutionary genetics at London College University in Great Britain, has been criticizing the genetic test of ancestry for years.

"Genetic ancestry testing has had quite a checkered history with people making exaggerated or ridiculous claims about ancestry in the past," says Thomas.

Things improved after he raised the issue of the validity of such requests, he adds.

"Big companies don't do that anymore, but I like it when those companies use the term 'ethnic', because your biological origin is not your ethnicity - ethnicity is a socially defined category.

"It seems to me that they use the word as a euphemism for race, which is also a social construct, but ideas about race have traditionally been based on ancestry. Everything is kind of bland, they are not biologically significant categories".

DNA and identity issues

Using a home DNA test to predict ethnicity can be problematic.

Tests give results based on geographic regions, which are a human invention, not a biological category, and reference groups that judge ethnicity by self-proclaimed nationality and identity.

DNA tests could show the location where people with similar DNA typically live, but the population data available to companies is limited.

Their reports are based on estimates that vary from company to company and may change over time, depending on the data available to each individual company.

The companies behind the at-home DNA test websites admit that their estimates of ethnicity are imperfect.

MyHeritage points out that these are only estimates with limitations: the boundaries are unclear, and the estimates about ethnicity can only go back to some extent.

23endMi cites a few 'points' that make their estimates imperfect: people tend to have many ancestors, and biomedical research tends to focus on the DNA of people of European descent, meaning they have much less data available on the rest of the population.

They also point out that their test results will offer details about 'genetic ancestry' - that you share recent ancestors with a group of people who identify as belonging to an ethnic group - rather than an estimate of ethnicity or race.

They will point out, for example, the important differences between a test result showing a match with Native American DNA and a claim of such identity.

"23endMi does not combine the concepts of ethnicity and genetic origin.

"We've always understood the importance of clearly separating these different models," a company spokesperson said of their ad.

AncestryDNA points out that their results are the product of comparing DNA with a reference panel of self-proclaimed ethnicity and that it is not about different biological categories, and that the results are not perfect in assessing where your ancestors come from.

But all three companies highlight the ethnic and national components of their results in their marketing presentations, and this is where we most often find consumer interest.

Jacobsen became interested in her origins when she heard a passing comment 50 years ago.

She grew up in Queens, New York, as a child of Danish immigrants who came to the US in 1947.

"My parents were swingers," she says.

When she was 16, her mother's boyfriend casually mentioned that her biological father was black.

Until then, Jacobsen had no reason to suspect that she was anything other than XNUMX% Danish.

"I was amazed. I had no idea what he was talking about

"I totally looked white," she says.

When she spoke to the Danish father that evening, he told her that she looked too much like his mother to be true.

But the seed of doubt was planted and remained in her mind until she entered her late 60s.

Today, finding the answer to such a question is as simple as putting some saliva in a glass ampoule and sending the sample for DNA analysis.

When the results came in, her chart showed that she was 25 percent West African.

"Opening that email and discovering the results were a validation of the questions I've been asking myself for the past 50 years."

She began to learn all she could about her own origins.

She had a DNA match with a close relative at 23endMi, so she messaged her through the website.

Together, they were able to discover that her biological father was the dancer Paul Mears Jr., so Jacobsen began scouring the Internet for information about him, eventually writing a memoir about the search for her own genetic identity.

At the same time, she fully embraced her newfound African ancestry.

And just like the man in the Ancestry commercial, Jacobsen changed the way she dressed: She experimentally began covering her head with a Nigerian turban (gele) and studied YouTube tutorials that taught women how to tie a turban.

She also went to a local store and bought her 28-year-old son a dashiki, a colorful shirt from West Africa.

But Alec did not feel comfortable in this shirt.

"It was a beautiful garment, but it seemed like a joke to me,

“Definitely not something I could wear. As if it was a costume," he says.

Alec then explained to his mother that her experiments with African culture represented a kind of appropriation.

Regardless of what her DNA test showed, he said, if a person looks like she's white, she's unlikely to experience the life led by people who are black.

“One of the things about race is that it's not about you, it's more about how society treats you.

"Once I understood what appropriation really meant, I started asking myself, 'Am I appropriating or accepting something?'" says Jacobson.

For her, it was the beginning of a portage for her own soul, which lasted for years.

"My views on race have changed. There were still many things I had to learn."

Christine Jacobsen

Jacobsen read more and more about black history and culture, especially about civil rights during the 1960s.

Then in 2020, George Floyd was killed.

"I started to realize that I had internalized the racism that was all around me," she says.

She navigated a path that was neither rejection nor acceptance of her newly acquired identity, which turned out to be a very complicated path for her.

"It was a real minefield."

Both Rubinstein Dejerin and Jacobsen wanted to continue investigating the identity revealed in their test results.

But what happens when a home DNA test tells you some things about your heritage that you didn't want to hear?

Stromfront, a forum for neo-Nazis and white supremacists, has dozens of posts by self-proclaimed racists who have used these tests in their quest for racial purity, only to get results that revealed they weren't as white as they thought.

"I am 61 percent European.

"I am very proud of my white race and European roots. I know many of you are whiter than me. I do not care. We have the same goal. I will do whatever it takes to protect our white race," reads one of the posts.

One of the responses was particularly brutal.

"I prepared a drink for you. It contains 62 percent pure water. The rest is cyanide. I appreciate that you don't mind drinking it. (Perhaps it wouldn't be bad if you mixed it a little, because everyone can see that it's not pure water). Cyanide is not water, and YOU are not White".

Aaron Panofsky, director of the Institute for Society and Genetics at the University of California, and Joan Donovan, a sociologist at Harvard's Kennedy School, analyzed 639 posts on Stormfront to determine the ways a white extremist group deals with unexpected DNA test results.

They discovered different strategies, depending on the debate participants themselves and how their news was received in the forum.

In some cases the user was rejected by the community, while in others the test itself was rejected.

"'You don't need science to recognize whiteness. If you are a white nationalist, then you can see race, know it, feel it, and no test in the world can tell you that,' was the answer of one of the forum members.

"Sometimes the rejection is more conspiratorial: 'Why would you reveal your DNA to companies that use the results to track and control white nationalists? We know who we are,'" says Panofski.

He and Donovan noted that the DNA results caused forum members to reexamine their own notions of racial purity.

"There was a discussion on the topic: 'We will have to revise our views on who among us is white if we want to sustain this movement.' They also noticed discussions about the very existence of a genetic definition of race and, if there is one, where is the border beyond which the white race begins."

Race is negotiable, even with racists.

"Even white nationalists do not have a stable and permanent understanding of what the white race represents, but they are constantly questioning, debating and conflicting about its significance," adds Panofski.

AncentriDNA is no longer trading lederhosen for kilts in its commercials, but the enlightenment about your heritage that could change the way you see yourself is still a significant reason why home DNA tests sell well.

Alamy

For Rubinstein Dejerin, there is no exchange of identities.

"I still draw on what I love about being part African-American while also being able to embrace my Jewish identity," she says.

He currently leads an organization that helps people whose lives have been shaken by the unexpected results of home DNA tests.

In Jacobson's case, her results gave her the opportunity to confront prejudices and stereotypes she didn't even know she had.

"They established my personal sense of belonging, but at the same time they opened up many other questions.

"I don't tell people that I'm black and I don't enter in questionnaires and forms that deal with my identity, but deep in my heart I feel that black part - half of my heritage," she says.

DNA tests are good for finding relatives, but the genetic determinants of whether you are black or white are not there, and ethnic categories are constantly being re-examined, even by the corporations that sell the tests.

They can give completely different results.

DNA results can change the way you see the world, but they can't tell you which world you belong to.

It depends on how that world sees you and how you see yourself.

"In today's society, our identities are ambiguous.

"We have the option to choose a wide variety of things ourselves. We're complicated, but that's okay. It doesn't matter what the result of your DNA test says and it's always a slippery slope," says Ribinstein Dejerin.

He nods his head.

"My Jewish background speaks best of how slippery that terrain is."

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