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DNA Tests, Race, and Ancestors with Wendy Roth

Feb 28, 2021

The ads promise to tell “the story of your family” through genetic tracing. The results can be surprising. When it comes to gene tracing or racial makeup, nothing is as simple as black or white. University of Pennsylvania researcher Associate Professor Wendy Roth helps us understand it all and whether it’s actually possible to look forward by looking back.

DNA, race, and ancestors this time on the Corner, the BehavioralCorner. Come hang with us.

About Prof. Wendy Roth

Wendy D. Roth is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses primarily on how social processes challenge racial and ethnic boundaries and transform classification systems, as well as how these processes change conceptions of the nature of race. Her book, Race Migrations: Latinos and the Cultural Transformation of Race (Stanford University Press 2012) examines how immigration changes cultural concepts of race, not only for the migrants themselves, but also for their host society, and for the societies they left behind. Her current work focuses on how genetic ancestry testing influences racial and ethnic identities, conceptions of race, racial attitudes, and racial interactions.


She has received several awards for her research, including the 2007 American Sociological Association Outstanding Dissertation Award, the 2011 Oliver Cromwell Cox Article Award from the American Sociological Association Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities, the 2016 Canadian Sociological Association Early Career Scholar Award, and a 2017 Killam Faculty Research Fellowship. In 2019-2020, she will serve as Chair of the ASA Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities.



Ep. 40 - Wendy Roth Podcast Transcript

The Behavioral Corner 

Hi, and welcome. I'm Steve Martorano and this is the Behavioral Corner. You're invited to hang with us as we discuss the ways we live today, the choices we make, the things we do, and how they affect our health and well-being. So you're on the Corner, the Behavioral Corner, please hang around a while.


Steve Martorano 

Hi, everybody, welcome again to the Behavioral Corner. I'm Steve Martorano, one of the world's great hanger outers. I figure if I stand on the street corner long enough, I'll run into a lot of interesting people and that's usually been our great good luck. Today's no different. Our guest has done some fascinating work in an area that obviously is much in the news much on our minds. And that is about race. You've seen the commercials on television, I know you have these consumer genetic tests, companies, 23andMe, and Ancestry.com. These companies have compelling ads, they're very emotional, they offer the promise of revealing something to us, my guess which relatives we can be proud of, and which relatives we keep in the closet or something like that. That's one of the questions I wanted to ask our guests. Wendy Roth is an associate professor of sociology at, University of Pennsylvania. Her specialty is in race and genetics, as well as immigration. And she's taking a look at those companies, from an interesting perspective, not so much about their efficacy, although I want to get into that with her, but what the effect of their results are on the people who paid for them. So it's really an interesting area. And I'm so grateful for her time. Wendy, thanks for joining us on the Behavioral Corner. Let me begin with the kind of, you know, dumb guy questions I get paid to ask, first of all, two things. What a people who sign up for these tests looking for? What do they expect to find out? And what were you looking for - watching them look for it?


Wendy Roth 

I don't want to suggest that there's only you know, one kind of person who takes these tests or that everybody is going in with the same experience. But I think there are a lot of people who take these tests, to find out more about their family history, to find out something more than what they've got in their records, their family tree, or their genealogy. And there are some people who are very invested in research about their family history and they use these tests as a sort of another step to help them in that research. Then there are a lot of people who take these tests, not necessarily knowing much, but thinking, Hey, I'll just see what I find out. Maybe I'll find out an interesting story. Maybe I'll find out that I have a different ancestry than I expected. Maybe I'll find out something amazing, or surprising or shocking. There are a lot of people who come to these for different reasons. There are also people who take these tests, basically, to bridge a gap in the historical record, and here I'm thinking particularly about certain groups who have lost a lot of their documentation about their family's past. So, African Americans who often don't have any documentation about where in Africa, their ancestors came from before they were forcibly brought into the slave trade, or a lot of Jews whose family records were destroyed, either during World War II or before with various pogroms and in various regimes that were, you know, trying to wipe out these populations so that there are also people who feel like this is a way to kind of connect back to a past that they felt had been lost.


Steve Martorano 

Yeah, you know, it's easy to understand in that context, there's the other context, I guess, of people who were adopted and cut off from their biological parents who have a desperate need to know about that. So that's certainly understandable. Before we asked about what you were looking at, as they were availing themselves in the service, what do we know about the efficacy of these tests? How accurate are they?


Wendy Roth 

So I get this question a lot. And what I like to say is that it's not so much a question of accuracy, as it is a question of misunderstanding. Because what the big problem is, is that people just don't understand how to read and how to interpret the test. Not that they're necessarily inaccurate, but that a lot of people look at these tests that have been very largely simplified, and they honestly just take them as being much more definitive than they're meant to be than they are. And that's partly the way the companies are presenting them. So you've probably all seen these commercials that show you a pie chart, right? A pie chart that says, you are you know, X percent this and y percent that, so people think, oh, that's me. That's my ancestry, my ancestry Is experts on this and why percent that that's not what it means it's a much more technical understanding of what they're looking at what they're doing is they're looking at a certain number of places in your genetic code. And they're saying of those particular spots, those markers, how many of them tend to be associated most often with this population versus that population. So really, what it's saying is, let's say 26% of those markers are most often associated with the British Isles, than with any other population in their database. But, that doesn't mean that you have British Isles ancestry, that marker through a totally different population. So people look at that, and they say, "Oh, 26% British Isles, that's who I am." But that's really not what these tests are telling you. You know, there are a lot of other ways in which they get misinterpreted. You know one is also that they have a margin of error, that isn't always clear to people. So you know, again, it's not this very clear, definitive-sounding percentage there's a chance.


Steve Martorano 

With that range of ambiguity and openness to interpretation, I can see where, where your field of study would come in because there's a real danger that some misconceptions and falsehoods could be strengthened. When we say race. What do we mean, when we say race? I mean, some people will tell you, well, there's only one race, what is the truth of that matter?


Wendy Roth 

So I'm going to give you the understanding of it that sociologists have, I understand as race is a set of categories that refer to certain aspects of people's biology or their ancestry. But there's nothing in the biology itself that says, I am in this category, I am in this group. These are categories that are imposed by people to basically say, we want to group you together, and we want to group you together. And I'm going to do this on the basis of your skin color, or I'm going to do this on the basis of how your eyes look, or I'm going to do this on the basis of the fact that one of your grandparents, you know, was Native American or, or was black or according to these rules. But there's nothing in the genetic code that definitively says this person is black or anything else.


Steve Martorano 

It was a sociologist shouldn't surprise us, you accept the notion that it's a social construct, that there are differences, different races. There's a lot of, I suppose, bad reasons and good reasons. They used race to categorize people. And that's fascinating in itself. I mean, you know, the most obvious example I can think of is the former president, who, for all practical purposes, in terms of his place in history, and how he's viewed, he's an African American, but we know he's, he's not a total African American, he has white ancestors, but we do classify people that way. So as a sociologist, you understand it as a social construct. And look at it in that context, right?


Wendy Roth 

Yes. And I just want to emphasize that while I am a sociologist, this is a view that's supported biological.


Steve Martorano 

Yes, right. But the great quote from some sportswriter a million years ago, when he heard the expression used a million times about Joe Lewis, the heavyweight champion, he's a credit to his race. He finally said, "Yeah, the human race," which I thought really summed that up. So let's get to your work. Wendy is a researcher, you looked at 23andme and ancestry.com, I guess, to see what people were getting out of this and how their attitudes and beliefs were changing, what did you find out?


Wendy Roth 

So I didn't look at those particular companies. 


Steve Martorano 

Okay. 


Wendy Roth 

I did a couple of projects, where I recruited people, either who had bought genetic ancestry tests on their own, from any company. And then I did another project later, where I looked just at white Americans, I invited them to participate in my study, none of them had taken genetic ancestry tests, but they were willing to, and then I randomly assigned them to either take a test or not. And I compared their responses before and after. And what I was really interested in is, how do these tests and their results affect people's racial and ethnic identities? How do they affect people's understanding of what race is? does it lead people to think of race as being something that's determined by their genes? Or do they think of it more as a social construction or something that's not genetically determined? I was also interested in things like racial attitudes and whether it changes who they interact with like does it actually change the diversity of their contacts and ties. So I can tell you a little bit about the findings from the first study if you like, that was the one with people who had already taken these tests and there I was really interested in how people made sense of the results that they got. And what I found was that, despite a lot of the fears that, you know, some people had that these tests are going to automatically genericized race, everybody is going to think that race is genetically determined, again, I found that people were not automatically accepting whatever the test told them, and thinking, "Oh, this is who I am," they were being a bit more selective, they were picking and choosing from the results. But really, they were doing it in a way that was very consistent with social forces, like who they wanted to be, and how they thought the world would see them. So if somebody got a result that said, you are part Jewish, they would think about, you know, their own feelings about the Jewish group, did they like this group? Or not? Do they aspire to be a part of it and to make claims to be a member of the group? And they also thought about, are other people going to accept that? Are they going to look at me and say, "Yeah, you're Jewish?" Or are they going to look at me? And they're gonna say, "There's no way you could be Jewish." Because look, or how you act, or whatever else. So they're not just being influenced by the test results and their ideas of what their genes say. They're also thinking about how the world sees them, and what they want to be in the world.


Steve Martorano 

Sure, it's a, it's like that an uncertainty principle, they're changed by just the observation of this thing. I can see people being surprised by some of the things they would find. But me personally, I would be delighted to find out that I was all kinds of different people. I don't know that would change...


Wendy Roth 

Why would you say that? 


Steve Martorano 

Well, but I don't know. Because first of all, I don't believe it would change a single thing in my life, it would make a bit of difference to me, if I came from North Africa or Sicily or at work, or the British Isles, but it would be rich, and interesting.


Wendy Roth 

I'll tell you, the reason I asked you that is because I did find that in particular, the white people I interviewed who took these tests, were particularly interested in finding a diverse history, finding things that weren't just plain boring old...


Steve Martorano 

White.


Wendy Roth 

...you want to find something interesting story that made them more. And it was much more common among the white respondents I interviewed than any of the other people black, Latino, Native American, Asian, you know, they often would say, you know, I want to find relatives, or I want to connect to my history that's been lost, or I want to, you know, find my birth parents or something like that. But, you know, they weren't going in sort of looking to find something new and exciting or exotic.


Steve Martorano 

Our guest is Wendy Roth, Wendy's, associate professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, she's a sociologist of race, ethnicity, and immigration. And she's talking to us about the outlook, broadly, our attitudes about race, how it affects us, and what we're learning, through tracing our genetic ancestry, through these now commercial operations.


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Steve Martorano 

Wendy, let's pick up on this notion of how people reacted. Did you find examples of people who were upset at finding unexpected things in their ancestry?


Wendy Roth 

Some people didn't like what the tests were suggesting to them, and what most often happened in those cases was that they simply didn't believe them. They said that can't be right. That must be a mistake. I just don't believe it, or they would explain it away somehow. But there were, you know, people who found a way to sort of getting the answer that they wanted from these tests, whether it was by embracing the group they wanted, or by refusing to believe the tests when they didn't like what they said.


Steve Martorano 

Well, as a sociologist, you think that to what extent are these tests more like the inkblot test?


Wendy Roth 

Exactly. That's how I often describe them. I do think they're like those Rorschach blot tests. People are looking at it, and they're seeing what they want to see. And I think that that goes for identity. But I also think that that goes for the way that people think about race. Because another thing that I found is, you know, there are a variety of different views about what race is in this society. Although we'll stand by my sociologists' view and all the science that supports it. There still are people in the world who think that race is cheap. genetically determined and that there's a gene for being black, and there's a gene for being Asian, and so on. And no matter how you go into taking these tests, whether you have that sort of biological definition of race, what some people would call an essentialist view of race, which believes that different racial groups have these sort of core essences, different personalities, different things they're good at or bad, or some races are better at sports, or some races are inherently better at math, something like that. So that kind of an essentialist view, if you went into taking a test, with that kind of a view, the testing experience, reinforced your belief in them. And if you went into taking a test, with more of a view that race is a social construction, that it's not biological at all, taking the test reinforced that you came out, even more, likely to believe that we're strong like a Rorschach blot where, you know, as with so much else in our society, that is completely polarized into different ways of seeing the world. This is another thing that is sort of polarizing people even further into their own ways of seeing things.


Steve Martorano 

Yeah, you know, it's interesting hearing you talk about that, because that, these test which on the surface might appear to be a boon to understanding genetics and biology turned out maybe to be less of that, in terms of specificity or precision, and more of an opportunity for people like you to go look at the way they're reacting to this. Look at what opinions, they're forming as a base, you know, out of what they're finding. I think that's the far more interesting thing, and more valuable thing maybe about them, for those people who take this, as you say, an essentialist view so that I understand this. That's the crowd that says genes are destiny, as opposed to another group who might say, no character is destiny, how you behave, is destiny doesn't make any difference what your genetic background is, you see it divided that way?


Wendy Roth 

I would say with a little caveat, which is yes, I agree with you that essentially, are people who say that genes are destiny, the people who have a more constructive view of racism, social construction, you know, it's not that they don't say that genes don't affect intelligence, or genes don't affect personality or athletic ability. They just say that that's not linked to these racial groups. Right? So there might be a gene or a series of genes that affects intelligence, but that they're distributed across the human population, and they're not associated with particular races in a way that is deterministic or definitive.


Steve Martorano 

Or can those genes be more prevalent in one group, as opposed to another? May that distinction, you made that characteristic, be spread out and available everywhere, but more concentrated in one area than another? Is there any set?


Wendy Roth 

So the science that we have on this points to the fact that there's no support for the idea that these particular genes that affect these complex characteristics, like musical ability, athletic ability, are complex traits, and those complex traits developed way before the population migrations across the planet Earth. Right, so you had those traits back before we had races, and the populations that spread out across the world took those traits with them. The concentrations today where it seems like this group is better at this, what that group is better at that, that has much more to do with the environment, and what is encouraged amongst certain populations.


Steve Martorano 

That's the nurture over the nature aspect so that people understand that there is no math gene in Asians, there is no smart gene in Jews. So as a sociologist who bores down deep into this, why do we cling to those ideas? Why is it so important to use race to define things?


Wendy Roth 

Well, it's easy, it's easy to look at somebody in front of us, and try to put them in a box, try to put them in a category. You know, as with so many other rules of thumb or heuristics that we use, to try to make our life simpler. This is one that people use all the time. And, you know, stereotypes, unfortunately, exist for a reason. Unfortunately, when it comes to race exists a reason they exist because they make our thinking and our thought processes easier. If we can kind of use these shortcuts. Oh, well, I see this a lot. So, therefore, I'm going to think that that fits into this group, like all the other things I see that look like that. It's basically a shortcut or a rule of thumb. If you know, just take it at its basic level, but then that doesn't factor in all the ways these stereotypes can be abused when certain purposes are used by people in power to, you know, get what they want, whether it's political control, or whether it's a, you know, a workforce that behaves a certain way. I mean, those things definitely play a strong role, too.


Steve Martorano 

Yeah, the power dynamic is interesting, because you're right, in order to achieve and then maintain power, it's important to have your definitions clear about who you want up who you want down. This is a very deep thing, isn't it? This is a, I guess, it goes back to this fear of the other. That's not me, it's a threat. I need to identify the other. So I'm safe. Is that what we're seeing?


Wendy Roth 

I mean, I think that is very much at the root of a lot of our discussions on race and ethnicity, and even genetics, to some extent. This feeling of wanting to find a place of belonging and safety and security by saying, "This is me." and I will establish closer ties and closer connections to the people in this group, by defining ourselves as different from some other group, where nations come from, right, the idea that if we define ourselves in a certain way, and we set the boundaries, then we can promote patriotism, and nationalism, that will get people to go to war, you know, in the name of this identity we all have. So it's a very powerful feeling. You know, it comes out in many forms. But I think that race is clearly one.


Steve Martorano 

Yeah, you know, and one of the fields, I know you, you are an expert in is immigration, all of what you just said is interesting for those of us who most people can't get our heads around the continuing racial problems that we have in this country. But if you step back for a second, it's not...it's regrettable and it's, but it can be understood, I think, in the sense of here's a country that was dedicated the proposition that everybody can come here from anywhere, and we'll sort of get along together and race and ethnicity, and religion wasn't supposed to matter. And for a couple of 100 years, it seems to be held together. But now it's straining, isn't it? It's a strain on that idea right now, isn't there?


Wendy Roth 

I believe so. I believe that that idea is being challenged, in part, because that idea existed at a time when, you know, there was this feeling that this land needed to be settled. Right? You know, I'm not suggesting that there weren't people here already. But there was this feeling of, you know, we can open our borders to anyone because we need people to come in here and settle this land, you know, sort of create a country for a purpose. Now, that condition doesn't seem to be there as much. And so of course, it makes sense that people would suddenly think differently about not so suddenly, but would start to think differently about immigration. But getting back to the point you were raising before to about feelings of threat for who is and who isn't in your group. You know, I think a lot of our discussions about immigration stem from that. And you know, the way some people think that the country might be changing in terms of those categories, that get drawn.


Steve Martorano 

with regard to people who are interested in one of these companies. It's a big deal. By the way, it's a multi-billion dollar company. Now, what advice would you give them? By way of, you know, expectation and caution, if they said, I'm gonna do this?


Wendy Roth 

Well, the first thing I would say is that, once you open that envelope, or you open up that email, you can never go back. Right? So if there is anything, anything, you could imagine that you could find out that you don't want to know, that really think carefully. You know, there are a lot of people who find out that their parents are not their parents, or a sibling is not a sibling, or that they were adopted or you know, there are a number of stories like that. situations like that of people who, whose lives are completely upended. So you really should think very seriously about that as a possibility. Secondly, I think that there are ways to go about taking these tests if you're going to do it. There are a lot of people who are very mindful of using this information as just one tool as part of a larger picture to understand their family or who they are. They're combining this information with a historical record with genealogical information. They're using it in order to connect to distant relatives and fill in their family trees. And that can be quite useful. You know, there are a lot of people who find distant relatives, I found, a cousin of my father's who I'd never met before and had become very close with, and it's an amazing experience. But I think that It's valuable if you're going into it with that in mind, not if you're going into this thinking that this test is going to tell me who I am. Or it's going to tell me something about my race or ethnicity because it really doesn't do that.


Steve Martorano 

Thank you so much. As I told you earlier, I'm a sort of person who, you know, might be mildly interested in this. I told my wife the other night, I might do it. If there were any chance at all, the results would come back and determine that I was Bill Gates's long-lost cousin or something. But anyway, Wendy Roth of the University of Pennsylvania, this is a great topic. We've just scratched the surface of your work. As I said, I saw a link from the New York Times article about this. It's just fascinating. I know. It's ongoing for you. Thanks so much for your time, and maybe we can do this again.


Wendy Roth 

My pleasure. I'd like to.


The Behavioral Corner 

That's it for now. And make us a habit of hanging out at the Behavioral Corner. And when we're not hanging, follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter on the Behavioral Corner.


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