So sorry there’s no black in me

When I heard ancestral DNA tests were becoming more and more affordable, I was excited.

That excitement grew even more when, last October, my son bought me one for my birthday.

There was the initial buzz of submitting the test (spitting into a vial and posting it off to find out about my ancestors), and then receiving the e-mail linking me to my results online, but there the excitement quickly faded because, alas, they were so predictable as to be boring: I am not remotely black. I am not the ancestor of some rare Anglo-Saxon Protestant “red Indian” tribe.

I am not even a little bit Italian, despite feeling it in my soul when I visit Venice.

I am 41% British, 23% Irish, 22% western European (that’s Germany and France mostly, because migrations and fluid borders make it difficult to be more specific), 11% Scandinavian (explaining my addiction to cured fish), 2% Spanish and 1% of me is possibly from Finland or northwest Russia.

Dammit, I thought, am I not even a little bit black? I wanted to be at least partly “of colour,” if only to annoy my not-very-PC brother-in-law.

Dammit, said my sister – we’re assuming we share the same parents and therefore roughly the same DNA profile – because she too wanted to wave colourful ancestry before her not-very-PC husband.

And there I thought it ended. Heritage DNA tests, just a bit of fun …

However, my friend – who’s white with an Italian father and a Mediterranean-American mother – recently spat into her own tube, a Christmas present that all of her family gave to one another.

Her parents’ results both came back as a whole heap of Italian (90% for her dad, 50% for her mum), a touch of Moroccan-Berber, a dash of Greek, a splash of Syrian, and her mum was 24% Spanish, with a tiny bit of Jewish ancestry too.

Both said zero percent black African.

However, my friend’s cheerful email is just in: she’s 50% Jewish, 25% Spanish and – the clincher – 25% Nigerian.

She calls it a “faulty reading” and “quite obviously impossible.”

I call it a very serious conversation she needs to have with her mother.