Letter From America Philip Delves Broughton
Millions of people are taking saliva genetic tests – with shocking results
The Christmas before last, my sister-inlaw gave me a present of a small glass tube. I spat in it, per the instructions, and, six weeks later, received an email from ancestry.com with the results of its genetic testing.
It turns out I’m roughly half northern European and half south-east Asian. A quick look at my parents – English father and Burmese mother – could have got you the same conclusion, without the $99 fee.
But with that, I joined the 15 million other Americans, who have taken one of these saliva genetic tests. It has become a full-blown industry, bombarding us with commercials at family holidays such as Christmas and Thanksgiving, encouraging us to get to know that 0.1 per cent of DNA unique to each of us.
Ancestry even teamed up with Spotify last year to offer playlists based on people’s origins: lots of Ed Sheeran if you’re English; some Youssou N’dour if you’re a bit Senegalese.
Though I found my results banal, my sister-in-law was thrilled to find out she had streaks of Greek and German in her blood. Plate-smashing! Beer drinking!
Even more exciting were our distant cousins dangling on the outer branches of the family tree. Ping, ping, ping went the texts as they turned out to include Johnny Depp, Donald Trump and the rapper Snoop Dogg. Here’s hoping that Snoop will be joining us next Christmas.
It turns out that banality may be exactly what you want out of your genetic test results, as people are discovering the most awful things: that they are likely to succumb to some awful chronic disease; or that Daddy isn’t Daddy at all, but Daddy’s good friend with the cocktail shaker and the twinkle in his eye.
The terms of service for ancestry.com now include this grim warning: ‘You may discover unanticipated facts about yourself or your family when using our services that you may not have the ability to change (eg you may discover an unknown genetic sibling or parent, surprising facts about your ethnicity, or unexpected information in public records).’
When it comes to genes, ignorance may well be bliss. But it doesn’t appear to be stopping anyone. Americans used to talk of their great mix of natives and immigrants as a melting pot or salad bowl. These days, it’s more of a pitched battle of competing interest groups, defined by economic status, sexuality or ethnicity.
The Atlantic magazine ran a piece about these spit-in-the-tube testing services, suggesting they were racially oppressive: ‘African Americans have, on average, 24 per cent European ancestry. To take a genetic-ancestry test is to confront a legacy of rape and slavery.’
In October, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, a Democrat now running for the presidency, in a bizarre act of political theatre, released the results of her own genetic tests to try to prove her Cherokee roots. As a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard Law School, she was for many years listed as a Native American and her employers used her as evidence for the diversity of their faculties.
Her critics, though, said this was all a ruse. She was falsely claiming minority status to advance her career. Donald Trump took to mockingly calling her ‘Pocahontas’.
Unfortunately for her, the analysis showed Warren’s ancestry was overwhelmingly European, though there might have been a Native American in there some eight generations ago. The Pocahontas jibe isn’t going anywhere.
This enthusiasm for attaching oneself to some ethnic minority or other is partly a response to years of institutional pining for ‘diversity’. If you’re going to hand out jobs and university places based on race, it can’t be a surprise when there’s a rush of people trying to horn in on the most coveted identities.
The hypocrisy of this ethnic gamesmanship was laid out in a movie called Soul Man, which came out in 1986. It’s about a wealthy, young white man who wins a place at Harvard Law School. His parents, though, decide he should pay for it himself. As he searches through the list of possible scholarships, he observes, ‘They have support for people whose parents are poor, but not for those whose parents are assholes.’
Outraged by the injustice of it all, he takes the radical step of putting on dark make-up and applying for a scholarship reserved for black students, which he wins. Whatever the truth of Warren’s racial or tribal identity, Trump knows how this story plays with his crowds: Warren is Soul Woman, exploiting the guilt of a liberal institution.
In good news for snobs, though, the great fracturing of America has led to a revival of the Social Register, the 132-year-old list of the country’s 25,000 blue bloods, a sort of American Debrett’s. Not so long ago, the Register was nearly dead, a relic of a time when the country was still run by assorted Biffys and Winthrops. New money had swept away the old. But it’s staging a comeback under new owners, who want to open Social Register clubs across the country.
If it’s fine to seek advantage at Harvard for being one teensiest bit Cherokee, then there can be no shame left in looking for an edge from what’s left of the cheese-cube-and-seersucker set. Just a different sort of tribe.
‘Some people are discovering that Daddy isn’t Daddy, but Daddy’s friend’