Are DNA Ancestry Tests Harmful?

BOUNCY MUSIC PLAYS AS THE SUSPENSE BUILDS: Assma, a Canadian YouTuber, is about to view her mail-in DNA ancestry test results for the first time.

“My heart is racing right now. I really don’t know what to expect,” she confides to her viewers. “Oh my God! I’m so nervous!”

The results reported that she had North African ancestry, but no Middle Eastern.

With clear astonishment, she announces, “I’m not Arab!”

“She interpreted this to mean that she was not Arab, and she was quite happy about that,” said Amina Zarrugh, an associate professor of sociology at TCU who found the video while she was studying the experiences of Arab Americans. “This, for me, was very perplexing to see that interpretation, but also that kind of embrace of, ‘Oh, thank goodness I’m not that.’ ”

Genetic testing is immensely popular in the 21st century. In the U.S. alone, tens of millions of people have mailed saliva samples to companies that do DNA analysis to learn about their ancestry. The test has been a significant tool for people who have been denied access to their ancestral histories, Zarrugh said, such as the descendants of enslaved Americans.

But as the YouTube video hints, commercial DNA ancestry tests might have a downside.

“People rejoicing around certain ancestries and playing down other ones plays into those existing social ideas about what is a desirable race or ethnicity. That’s concerning.”
Amina Zarrugh

Students bring up the technology in classroom discussions of race as an entirely social construct, said Zarrugh’s colleague Luis Romero, an assistant professor of comparative race and ethnic studies.

“A lot of our students inevitably tell us, ‘Well, what about ancestry DNA tests?’ ” Romero said. “ ‘If these things are social, how can we have this tool’ — at least in their eyes — ‘that tells us our race?’ ”

The video and conversations with students inspired Zarrugh and Romero to examine how people talk about DNA ancestry tests. In a groundbreaking study, they analyzed 418 videos about ancestry test results that individuals posted to YouTube from 2014 to 2020.

What they found gave them pause. Many people interpret ancestry test results in ways that not only overlook historical and scientific facts but also risk reinforcing race-related stereotypes — including the debunked notion of race as a biological phenomenon.

These consumers seem to reason that if a biological test such as DNA analysis can shed light on ancestry, and if race is based partly on ancestry, then race itself must be biological, the researchers argue. Their research results were published in Social Problems in 2023.

“We are suggesting that these technologies pose the risk of returning to a kind of racial science,” Zarrugh said.

Luis Romero and Amina Zarrugh’s analysis of hundreds of YouTube videos of individuals revealing the results of DNA ancestry tests found that people often misinterpret those results. That misunderstanding, they said, might reinforce harmful stereotypes. Photo by Joyce Marshall

“This is a valuable study that shows how people taking genetic ancestry tests and posting about them on YouTube often take away the message that a person’s race or ethnicity can be determined purely by their DNA, which is something that both sociologists and biologists know not to be true,” commented Wendy Roth, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and expert in the field who was not involved with the study.

“I’m so glad that we have even more proof [from this study] that there is potential harm in doing something that seems so fun as taking an ancestry test,” said Rina Bliss, an associate professor of sociology at Rutgers University, who also was not part of the study team.

The false idea that race is a biological reality has inspired untold suffering and oppression for centuries. If DNA tests are turning people toward that belief, could they be doing more harm than good?

A SEARCH FOR IDENTITY

The researchers identified three major trends in the videos.

First, many people felt that the DNA ancestry tests told them something about their real selves, their true identities.

In 56 percent of the videos, consumers expressed the idea that the tests were valid representations of their ancestry — “which they discuss interchangeably with biological notions of race,” the researchers write.

Some parroted company marketing, Romero said. For example, one YouTuber said she was “so excited to see what makes me, me,” echoing a company slogan that promises consumers can “discover what makes you uniquely you.”

Even on pure scientific terms, these tests have shortcomings. The results are only as good as the raw regional genetic data the companies possess. And the assumptions the tests rest on may be questionable.

“The companies utilize an approach called population genetics, in which they attempt to discern the genetics of what they identify as a native person in a particular region,” Zarrugh said. “As sociologists, we would raise the question, ‘What makes a person native to a particular region? Why distinguish this region from another region?’ ”

“One of my biggest peeves with ancestry test makers is they make it seem like the reference population that they’re referring to are people that have lived at that place where they were sampled for all of history, and that’s not possible,” Bliss said. “You go back 100 years, and these countries didn’t even exist necessarily in the specific way that we conceive of them today. And people were migrating.”

THE PURITY TEST

The second finding was that about 42 percent of people referred to blood in regard to test results, using phrases such as “I got Indian in my blood.”

“They felt that there was some sort of tangible aspect of a particular racial or ethnic group that was residing in their body,” Zarrugh said.

One problem: Commercial DNA tests, including those offered by Ancestry and 23andMe, use saliva, not blood. (“We unfortunately saw a lot of YouTubers spit into these tubes. More spit than what I ever want to see again,” Romero said with a chuckle.)

Whether people realize it or not, that lingo harkens back to the colonial era, when blood-related language was used to exclude access to human rights, property and civil participation, Zarrugh said.

The U.S. census, for example, once documented fractions of African ancestry. Today, at least one DNA company offers quantitative estimates of ethnicity, such as informing someone they have 15 percent ancestry from West Africa.

That “then invites people to think about, ‘Well, what blood is enough to belong to a certain group?’ ” Zarrugh said.

Then, too, was a phenomenon the researchers observed called genealogical aspiration, a term coined by sociologist Alondra Nelson.

“People rejoicing around certain ancestries and playing down other ones,” Zarrugh said, “plays into those existing social ideas about what is a desirable race or ethnicity. That’s concerning.”

A third finding lay in what people didn’t mention: history that would have put the results in context. One person referred to the colorblind notion of a melting pot. Others made jokes, such as a quip about a Native American ancestor mating with a white ancestor; another person said her ancestors got frisky.

Were these customers aware of the violent histories of conquest that led to so many mixed ancestries? Sanitized notions of family history overlook how violence — slavery, genocide, rape, colonization, forced assimilation or migration — may have played a role in a person’s ancestry, the researchers argue.

RACIALIZATION RETURNS

Together, the three trends Zarrugh and Romero discovered contribute to what they term genetic racialization, a public conversation about race among scientists, corporations and ordinary people that uses science to claim race is biological.

It isn’t. Race is a social invention — something educators have tried for a century to get people to grasp.

Racial categories don’t contextualize for human diversity in any accurate way. For example, African populations show the most genetic diversity of all humankind — as a research group based at the Georgia Institute of Technology and in South Africa put it in a 2023 paper in Genome Biology and Evolution, “the genetic variation found outside of Africa is largely a subset of African genetic diversity.” That makes Black a nonsensical category where biology, at least, is concerned.

A 1918 issue of National Geographic Magazine attempted to map the human race by continent. Photo by Joyce Marshall

In 2023, the National Academies of Science recommended that geneticists not use racial categories in their research.

Ethnicity, by contrast, refers to membership in a group and a sense of identity that is based on a common history, language and culture. It is not a biological category but an acquired, flexible identity.

Problems arise when people confuse race, ethnicity and ancestry, a conflation the DNA testing companies do not exactly discourage.

“As these researchers show, even if you’re getting a test that’s telling you about specific ethnic lineages, people are still bringing it back to their racial identity,” Bliss said, adding, “In no way does an ancestry test confirm or disconfirm a person’s racial identity.”

“There’s a great risk in utilizing terms like ‘ethnicity estimate,’ ” Zarrugh said. “An unequivocally social concept [ethnicity]
… is then being mapped onto — from the consumer perspective, seamlessly — some sort of genetic material.”

In the social media age, this process is participatory. With old, discredited racial science, Zarrugh said, academics and scientists defined racial categories. That was bad enough. But now, profit-driven corporations and ordinary people appear to be shaping and amplifying such potentially harmful narratives.

NEXT STEPS

Zarrugh and Romero plan next to analyze how consumers talk about particular groups of people — and whether this verbiage reflects corporate marketing.

“A lot of stereotypes surface that are extremely embedded in long-standing racist tropes, especially around Judaism, African Americans, Native Americans,” Zarrugh said. “How are people being sold this technology, and how are they being encouraged to think about it?”

What if, despite all of the caveats, someone still longs to know where their ancestors might have lived? The researchers suggested viewing the results as a beginning, a way to start investigating what the results might mean from a social point of view. One might start by, say, exploring possessions passed down from ancestors or talking with relatives about family history.

In other parts of the world, Zarrugh said, oral tradition is a deeply trusted form of passing on knowledge, including knowledge about an ancestor.

Instead of viewing the test as the end of a journey, she said, “see it as an invitation to learn more about your family, about your own location in the world.”