Mixed Race Studies

The pitfalls of tracing your ancestry

Nature News
Nature Magazine
2008-11-13

Brendan Maher

Charmaine Royal of the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy explains the limitations of genetic testing.

Ancestry testing is genetics’ most direct and sometimes tempestuous interaction with personal identity. An estimated half-a-million Americans will purchase genetic tests from companies this year and thousands more will participate in university research where such tests will be used. The tests raise ethical and legal questions, on which an 11–15 November meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, hopes to provide some guidance.

Charmaine Royal, an associate professor at the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy in Durham, North Carolina, who co-chairs a task force—looking at genetic ancestry testing—at the meeting, talks to Nature.

What prompted the ASHG to develop these recommendations?

People have been researching their ancestry forever, using stories and historical records, and people have taken advantage of genetic technology with the hope of learning more. But there’s this perspective that genetics provides the truth, and that may need to be challenged. In general, genetic ancestry testing is fallible just like many of the tools we use. Some people think that genetics will provide the be all and end all of information about their ancestry. There are limitations as to what ancestry can provide…

…What are the limitations of such tests?

The general limitation, I’d say, of all of these tests, is that they can’t pinpoint with 100% accuracy who your ancestors may or may not be. Some people are concerned that the biogeographical ancestry test reifies the notion of race. This is the notion that there are four or five parental groups from which we all came and there are discrete boundaries between these groups. But our genetic research has shown that those boundaries don’t exist.

In lineage testing, where someone is wanting to know which tribe or region in Africa they came from, the information that’s given is based on the present day populations. The names of those groups and those locations have changed over time and so people getting that information about present day Africans and extrapolating to who their pre-middle-passage ancestors may have been—that may not necessarily be accurate. So, those limitations need to be clarified.

Another limitation is that the outcomes of ancestry tests are very much dependent on what is already in a database—who a client’s DNA can be matched to. If a database is not comprehensive some potential matches will be missing, and nobody has a complete database. That’s a major limitation, probably one of the biggest…

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Miscegenation produced Eurasian children that were not European or Asian; they were a people without an identity that had the ability to change the European established racial hierarchy. Christina Firpo mentions that in Vietnam, Eurasians were clearly recognizable as being of French descent. But the French viewed this as a threat to their racial purity and superiority. A British travelogue writer noticed that Eurasians were divided amongst themselves based on how closely they resembled Europeans. The Eurasians with the skin tones and facial features that more closely resembled those of Europeans had higher social statuses than those that had features that more closely resembled Southeast Asians. ‘This made it seem like there were several racial categories within the Eurasian community. This confusion over racial hierarchies within the Eurasian community created confusion among the British. The British were confused as to how to categorize Eurasians racially. The British had established a strict racial hierarchy. They were also convinced that they would be able to maintain a racial purity amongst the Europeans. So they were not prepared when British men began to participate in miscegenation and producing another race. As Ann Stoler put it, Eurasians “straddled the divide” between colonizers and colonized. This “divide” blurred some of the racial lines between Europeans and Southeast Asians, which terrified the British.

Katrina Chludzinski, “The Fear of Colonial Miscegenation in the British Colonies of Southeast Asia,” The Forum: Cal Poly’s Journal of History, Volume 1, Issue 1, Article 8: 54-64.

The American Negro and Race Blending

The Sociological Review
Volume a2, Issue 4 (October 1909)
pages 349–360
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-954X.1909.tb01972.x

Frances Hoggan

The problem of the colour population of America is many-sided. Perhaps the most vital question to be considered is that of the amalgamation of the races: how far it has reached or may reach, and what good or bad results it has produced or may be expected to produce.

It may be affirmed unhesitatingly, that no two races of men can live side by side in the same country without more or less race blending. The question therefore narrows itself to one of amount and incidence. In the Southern United States, practically all mixed unions during the period of slavery were irregular unions between white men and Negro women, using the term Negro in its legal sense to include all degrees of intermixture down to one-sixteenth only of coloured blood. Comparatively few mixed marriages took place, although a few of the higher class Mulattoes belonging to Northern families are the offspring of married parents and bear no stigma of bastardy. In the Southern States marriage was hardly ever thought of, and even had it been the enactments against it, passed in different years in the various States, were so uncompromising and drastic as effectually to prevent its occurrence. The race blending of slavery was therefore one-sided, the fathers only being white, and it was outside of legal marriage. When the resulting offspring is studied the inferiority of the mother socially and culturally cannot fail to reveal itself in the child, and in addition to the maternal inferiority, the upbringing and general conditions of slave life were such as to render it next to impossible to emerge from servile habits and modes of thought. When, as was often the case, the master and the father were one and the same man, his paternity was ignored to an extent unparalleled in other countries where slave mothers were common. In contrast with the more humane Mahommedan law and customs, the American slave child was seldom freed, and he could be sold away from the mother, in which case he became a mere waif, with no trace of natural relationships, without recognised kindred, and without even the semblance of a home.  It would be difficult to find elsewhere such loose family ties as prevailed among the slave population of the United States, or a more unnatural conception of the role of the white father. When he was not at the same time the…

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