Sigrid Johnson, of Philadelphia, had grown up going to school with other black children. She went to a historically black university. When she married, her parents derided her for choosing a black man with a dark complexion.
Then, at 62 years old, long after her parents had passed, she learned something new about herself: She was 45 percent Hispanic, 32 percent Middle Eastern, 14 percent European and less than 3 percent African. “How could I not be black?” she said to “The New York Times.” “I’d lived black. I was black.”
Then, because the data coming out of genetic testing sites is only as good as the data going in, Johnson’s numbers — and thus her sense of identity — changed. She took other tests, including AncestryDNA and 23andMe, with different results. “In a matter of weeks, Johnson’s African roots had bounced from 27 percent to 45 percent African — and her Italian roots had been reported as 0 percent, 49 percent and 20 percent,” according to “The New York Times.”