It is an utterly absurd situation that someone like Kamala Harris, who is half-Tamil and partly English, is considered "black". Our present notions of race continue to maintain the repugnant fiction that the hereditary material of some populations is "marked" and those who have even a few such ancestors are "contaminated". Of course, this is very far from accurate. It may reflect present social realities, but there is no rule that says present social realities must not be absurd.

> One said that any percentage not marked “low confidence” was 100 percent certain. Another said each percentage was 99 percent certain. When I asked that representative to check with a supervisor, she did, then returned to tell me that the company’s certainty was 99.7 percent.

Obviously this is a confidence interval covering three standard deviations assuming a normal distribution. If the last assumption can be considered accurate, the correct interpretation of the results' precision is "pretty good", but non-normal distributions occasionally show up and cause the 2007 mortgage collapse.