NOVA

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Narrator

These 14 people are about to experience DNA ancestry testing for themselves. 'Cause there are so many kids I'm growing up with who are all in the same situation. We don't know our heritage. We could probably safely assume that our ancestors ancestors had something to do with like slavery and things like that, but we don't really know where we came from.

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Narrator

Cherry Richardson is taking part in a research study at Westchester University in Pennsylvania. So we have a research protocol by which we collect data for this particular project. -

Narrator

The study is run by two communications professors, Bessie Lawton and Anita Foeman. The question they're asking is, "How does DNA testing affect our understanding of who we are and also, our ability to understand what makes us different?" -

Bessie

And after we received the results, we bring it together. The whole idea is to listen to each other and talk with one another. -

Narrator

Anita was inspired to start the project because of her experiences as a diversity trainer. I thought looking at our DNA was a really interesting way to approach this whole conversation about race and diversity in a way that was not going to make people defensive. And that has happened. We don't identify ourself with Africa.

We just say we're black. You know, we literally separated from that which we came from. -

Narrator

In our previous tests with ancestry, Tyquine Golden was told his roots were 80% West African and 20% British. They got everybody. -

Narrator

In today's test with FamilyTreeDNA, he hopes to learn more. My suspicions might lead me to say, somewhere in slavery 20% might've came in and have been integrated with our DNA and that might not have been voluntary. I think as an African-American, it's a tough thing to grapple with when you think about the origin of your Caucasian or white ancestry, that often happened due to rape and mistreatment. But it is part of your history, so you have to confront it on some level and understand it.

It's part of how you got here. I don't want to hide from the truth no matter how bad it could be. -

Narrator

Now it's time to collect DNA... -

Bessie

You can turn it around a little bit to capture more. -

Narrator

...and ship the samples off to Houston. So, how do D.T.C.s like FamilyTreeDNA come up with a breakdown of your ancestry? It's a process that also centers around SNPs, those places in our DNA that most frequently vary between people. The company compares your SNPs with those of people in what are called "reference groups", people alive today whose DNA has been tested and who share patterns of SNPs that scientists have found to be typical for the region in which they live.

Those patterns are compiled into a database, but how well does it represent test takers? They're telling you, "This is your background based on our database." Well, if something's not in their database, they can't tell you that it's in your background. -

Narrators

The D.T.C.s have less data about people of African and Asian descent than they do about people of European descent. Most of the genetic testing that has been done has been done on North Atlantic Europeans. So, our reference databases are biased. Why don't we all just take a minute and open your results and take a look at the map for the first time.

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Narrator

FamilyTreeDNA has given Nick Pasvanis, whose parents trace their ancestors to Greece, Germany, England and Scotland, a detailed breakdown. -

Nick

I am 45% Southeastern European, which is about what I expected. I've always felt like I was just a general European mutt and that's pretty much what the map shows. So I was wondering when I got it like if it would say if I was black and I am 94% West African, so yeah, I'm pretty black. -

Narrator

But Cherry Richardson's African bubble provides little detail. Hana Wiessmann and Viola Wang, who were both born in China, have even bigger bubbles. I mean, I have just these giant bubbles and they're like, "You're super Asian." Like I kind of already knew that. Basically people who have huge bubbles are considered the minorities.

And it's unfortunate because it perpetuates a kind of Eurocentrism that has tainted our scholarship, that is a foundation for notions, false notions of white supremacy, and it highlights the disparities that are currently prevalent throughout science and particularly in genetics. (soft music)