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Re:Sigrid Johnson Was Black. A DNA Test Said She Wasn’t by jrochkind1 on Tuesday November 20, 2018 @11:38PM (#18500183)
A DNA test can say no such thing.

One test said "2.978 percent African", and she thought she wasn't Black. (2.978%? Three decimal places, really?). Another test said 23% and she thought she was. (23%? So that means like one grandparent? Not really, it's unclear what the "percentage" means or if it even means the same thing from one company's test to another. It means something like "23% of your DNA, the parts we look at, matches some reference sample, that we got from somewhere." What does THAT mean though? What does "matching a reference sample" _mean_ in terms of where your ancestors were from? How has that been validated? And many companies don't even reveal their statistical methods.)

Or maybe it was "0 to 58%".

These "ancestry results", despite being expressed with five significant digits, are scandalously unscientific and of unclear meaning. It is not even clear what "percentage of your ancestry from Africa" _means_. You think people didn't move around and have children with people from all over until the 20th century? Cause they did.

If your great-great-something grandparent lived in what is present day Greece, but THEIR parent was born in what is present-day Egypt (or vice versa; either would be fairly unremarkable)... and you want to know what "percent Greek" your "ancestry" is, like that even means something? Like your DNA could somehow even reveal that great-great-something was born in what is now Egypt but their parent was born in what is now Greece? It can not. All of this is based on a weird fantasy/mythology of being able to separate people into historically continuous categories which remain stable over generations, that just isn't any kind of scientifically or historically justified.

Re:Sigrid Johnson Was Black. A DNA Test Said She Wasn’t by Nasrudith on Tuesday November 20, 2018 @11:55PM (#18500235)
Yeah it is an attempt to correlate genes to geography with far more precision than actually existed and assumptions that populations were hermetically sealed when they weren't. Regional classifications are often even worse in GIGO associations from what I heard with trying to distinguish between say Dutch, Polish, German, and Swiss. It brings to mind sarcastically asking questions about connections to long gone civilizations that nobody really identifies as. How many people globally are Scythian? Babylonian? Carthaginian? Sumerian? Minioan?

It brings to mind the 'smartass genie' technically most accurate way of classifying blackness by just including a count of melanin producing genes.

Re:Sigrid Johnson Was Black. A DNA Test Said She Wasn’t by anon2775 on Tuesday November 20, 2018 @11:55PM (#18500239)
Everyone who's family has lived in North America for more than a few generations has at least some of both European and African ancestry. This means, that of these people, "black" Americans have European ancestors, and "white" nationalist Americans have African ancestors. We're all mutts, there's no "pure" anyone... just pure human.

Ancedotally: I'm an SAR member with non-tanning skin but have European, African and Asian/native American genes.

The conclusions: races are illusions and racism is completely idiotic. There are bigger things to worry about or look down on than which flavor of human a person ticks checkboxes for identity politics games.

Questions: Let's be honest, what is "diversity?" And then, why do organizations claim to be diverse when they either hire people that all look like them or hire only people that think or believe as do they? Isn't that the opposite of "diversity," but exclusive monoculture or groupthink?