Who am I? What DNA Testing Can't Tell You
Victoria, welcome to you! Your 23andMe results are in. A world of DNA discovery is waiting.
The invitation was juxtaposed against a yellow background; little bursts of orange and blue speckled the page in celebratory fashion. It looked like a Hallmark birthday card, welcoming into this great big world of racial identity chaos answers I’d been seeking for 14 years. I swallowed hard and my thumb hovered over the screen, trembling. What if the report isn’t what I expected? What if after all this pinning and questioning I was left empty-handed? What if after over a decade of navigating this ocean of racial tidal waves I was washed up ashore an island without so much as a compass? I wasn’t sure I could handle the culmination of a long quest for answers leading to a dead end.
Deep breath. I told myself. This does not define you. It’s just a test. You decide who you are going to be.
While that might sound empowering, it is truly just a platitude. You see, I don’t get to decide who I’m going to be. At least not with much freedom or without obstacles. For much of my life my racial identity has been painfully, and often times forcibly, chosen for me. I’ve walked the color line, inhabiting a liminal state of both/and in a world obsessed with either/or, a world bent on polarization. I’m a brown child of two white parents. I’m a legitimate family member in family without biological ties. I’m white and I’m black. And whether it is in the classroom, at the lunch table, in a dentist’s office or on a college application I am overtly and covertly reminded that my body is a contradiction, my life is an anomaly.
Trevor Noah, host of the Daily Show, says it well:
“America, I’ve found, doesn’t like nuance. Either black people are criminals, or cops are racist — pick one. It’s us versus them. You’re with us, or you’re against us. This national mentality is fueled by the hysteria of a 24-hour news cycle, by the ideological silos of social media and by the structure of the country’s politics.“
My parents made sure I knew I was living a life of nuance, one of racial and familial complexity. In our home, I never had to choose. But outside our house, I was pressured to make a choice. And if I made the wrong choice? I was socially exiled or chastised. And with every remark, side-eye, sneer and slur the internal tug of war bore incessant confusion and anxiety:
“Torie, you’re not black. You’re white. Stop saying that. You’re wrong. You are white with a tan.”
“You’re a white ni–er, you think you’re better than us cause you live with white people and go to the white school.”
“I don’t understand this ‘mixed’ business. If you’re part white and part black, you’re just black. You’re confusing to me. Actually you’re just confused.”
“Your white parents probably taught you to hate black people. You’re not really black.”
In black settings I’m too white and in white settings I’m too black. Always careening in my head are questions of authenticity. Am I a counterfeit? Will they openly or subconsciously question my claim to blackness? Will they resent my whiteness, my white family? Will they fear my blackness? Am I allowed to go to the Black Student Union? Can I sign this petition for Black Centre College Alumni? If I speak from the black perspective am I stepping out of line? If I don’t speak from the black perspective am I letting bigotry and ignorance pass? If I identify with blackness will that distance me from my white family? If I marry a white man, will he understand the depth of my racial identity? Should I use the lighter or darker skinned emoji? Are you Hispanic? Are you Trinidadian? You must be Ethiopian. Who’s your kin?
That last question Who’s your kin? links back to the essence of 23and Me, and all other DNA testing sites. A large incentive (which is often reflected in their marketing) is the chance to dig up your past so you know who you are in the present. In essence, you are those who were.
I’ve been trying for a very long time to figure out who I am. While that statement oozes with hyperbole, there is nothing hyperbolic about the precision with which I am able to recall the ways in which my life is informed by that overarching question:Who am I?
You might say, “That’s easy.” You’re Torie. Art and Pat’s daughter. Centre College graduate. Christ Follower. Old Soul. Cinnamon roll enthusiast. Pasta aficianado. Obnoxious laugher. Chronic forgetter. Lover of bad puns. And of course, if you chose any of those aforementioned labels you’d be right. And while each of those descriptors give me varying degrees of fulfillment, pride and embarrassment, there has always been a desperate longing for resolving that question which has marked so much of my life up until this point. A desire to get to the end of the racial identity road with a few less questions than when I started.
So you can probably see why that bright yellow, cheery email notification boldly proclaiming “Victoria, welcome to you!” was so appealing, and simultaneously terrifying. What if the you that I found wasn’t the you I was looking for? What if the you that was depicted through varying percentages of ancestry didn’t answer Who am I? but simply posed more questions?
As you can probably predict, despite my attempts to convince myself to take the test results with a grain of salt, they still loomed powerful. I’m not going to share my results publicly, because that’s not the point of my ramblings. Let’s just say my results confirmed what I already knew. I’m biracial. Surprise. Despite the fact that I adhere strongly to my biracial identity in life and resent the constant push from the outside world to box me into a definitive category, there was a part of me, the tired, shell-shocked, battle scarred part of me that lives the tight rope of racial identity day in and day out, that hoped for something absolute. I hoped that those magic numbers would push me over the line in one direction once and for all, would give me concrete data to pick up the BLACK or WHITE racial identity marker and walk forward with confidence in a singular identity, not one that straddled the fence. I wanted, for once, a strong footing. I wanted to be free of the pendulum of biracial life and foolishly thought 23andMe results could get me there.
Even if I was 90% white that would not have changed my lived experience as a person of color, perceived by and treated by the world as such. If I was 90% black that would not have changed my lived experience in a culturally and socially white community.
I’ve learned two things from this fascinating endeavor. 1. DNA tests cannot supplant your lived reality. 2. Being biracial is not a journey with a destination.I’m going to keep having experiences which test, attack and question my racial identity. I’m going to continue to vacillate between white and black and I’m going to continue to advocate for the middle ground. I’m going to often be tired, frustrated, lonely and at a loss.
I’m going to end with another excerpt from a New York Times Opinion article by Trevor Noah that truly encapsulates the one constant good I’ve learned on this biracial rollercoaster:
“I grew up under the harsh racial oppression of apartheid as a person of mixed ethnicity. The lines between black and white were clearly drawn and enforced with guns and tanks, but because I am neither black nor white, I was forced to live between those lines. I was forced to communicate across those lines. I was forced to learn how to approach people, and problems, with nuance. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have survived.
We can be unwavering in our commitment to racial equality while still breaking bread with the same racist people who’ve oppressed us. I know it can be done because I had no choice but to do it, and it is the reason I am where I am today.
When you grow up in the middle, you see that life is more in the middle than it is on the sides. The majority of people are in the middle, the margin of victory is almost always in the middle, and very often the truth is there as well, waiting for us.”
I didn’t discovery anything ground-breaking in the 23andMe results as the email notification might have suggested, at least in terms of my ancestry. My biraciality was simply confirmed. And that biracial identity isn’t changing anytime soon. So I might as well keep living that messy, middle life that demands patience and grace with both sides of the color line, that teaches me daily to see the nuance in others, to recognize their multitudes, their sometimes conflicting asymmetrical selves and love them anyway. And while I’m at it, I might as well get to work on loving my truth which lives in the middle. And if that’s the only discovery I got at the end of the day, I guess I’m doing okay.