The Sunday Read: ‘Sigrid Johnson Was Black. A DNA Test Said She Wasn’t’

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 28 February 2021

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It all started when Sigrid E. Johnson was 62. She got a call from an old friend, asking her to participate in a study about DNA ancestry tests and ethnic identity. She agreed. Ms. Johnson thought she knew what the outcome would be. When she was 16, her mother told her that she had been adopted as an infant. Her biological mother was an Italian woman from South Philadelphia, and her father was a Black man. The results, however, told a different story. Today on The Sunday Read, what the growth in DNA testing, with its surprises and imperfections, means for people’s sense of identity.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Back in 2018, my editor asked me to look into DNA ancestry kits, which were becoming really
0:07.0	popular.
0:08.2	So much so that on Black Friday the year before, 23andmeas DNA tests had actually been
0:14.1	one of Amazon's top five bestsellers.
0:18.5	The marketing for these tests was really clever and convincing.
0:22.5	When people got results that they expected, they'd say stuff like, I'm 68% Italian, so
0:28.0	no wonder I like pasta.
0:31.2	But what about people who were stunned by their results?
0:34.5	I met one woman whose ancestry percentages totally challenged who she thought she was.
0:41.5	My name is Ruth Patewer and I'm a contributor to the New York Times magazine.
0:46.1	I wrote a story about the rise of at-home DNA tests and how these kits claimed to tell
0:51.6	us who we really are.
0:54.2	At the center of my story is Sigrid Johnson, who was raised by Black parents and went to
0:59.2	a historically Black university.
1:01.9	When Sigrid was 16, she found out that she was adopted.
1:05.6	Her mom told her that Sigrid's biological mother was Italian and her bioph Father was
1:10.4	Black.
1:12.2	When I met her, she was 65.
1:14.3	A few years earlier she had taken a DNA test to find out her ancestry.
1:18.6	The result said she was only 2.987% African.
1:24.5	2.987% is a really specific number and a really low percentage for a woman who had always
1:31.4	thought she was Black.
	...

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