Who I Am

 I got results from the 23andMe kit. I have most of my ancestry from the British Isles. No Irish, though. Some German. No surprises in any of that. There were a couple of smaller surprises, though. A little West Asian. 0.2% South Sudan.

Yeah, by that old idea of a single drop of blood, I'm Black. Without the DNA results, you'd never know. It's hard to get lighter skin than mine. I do have hazel eyes, so not blue. I'm a nerd, bookish, good at math and science. I don't know what other factors matter. I have no rhythm and am not musical.

I read Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. She has a character move to America from Nigeria, and once here, she discovers she is Black. She was never Black in Africa. She was Igbo, and knew about all the other tribes, and other people who were immigrants from Asia and other places, including Europe, but in America, she was Black.

When Americans, and other Europeans, created Blackness for slaves, they created whiteness for themselves. I can't say I identify as white, except when I click on menu choices that ask my race. Then they ask my ethnic background, a separate question for me to declare I am no Hispanic or Latino. I speak Spanish, in a formal, school-book kind of way, because I learned most of my Spanish in Paraguay, where most people speak Guarani or some other Native language at home, and use Spanish at work or with strangers. I was a stranger there, and never learned Guaraní.

I don't have a lot of faith in these DNA markers. After all, they are all made from the same four bases, and it is just the order that matters. I don't know how the catalogue of markers has been developed. I don't know how long the markers are, or how much variation there is across the population at specific sites in the human genome. I know interpretation is adjusted over time. Liz became more Swedish between her original test results and the current report.

My brother, John, and I share 53% of our DNA, including the X chromosome, almost entirely according to the map comparing our results. The percentage is about the expected level for brothers, but John has no Asian or African in his results. I wonder if that would change if he logged in again. Or if his has been updated at all since he sent in his sample. I think it would be fun to compare with all my siblings, but I don't see it happening. But at least so far, no one has told me I have to use the other bathroom.