Great Courses: Identity in the Age of Ancestral DNA by Anita Foeman

 Many people base a lot of their personal identity on their race and family narrative. What happens, then, if you take a DNA Ancestry test and discover that your race or family narrative is not what you thought it was? This is the guiding question of this 12-part Great Courses Lecture Series.  The presenter has spent 18 years doing research on this topic.  She finds volunteers that are interested in doing a DNA test, interviews them, and then gives them the test. When the results come back she interviews them again. She spends the beginning of the lectures talking about different ways people can deal with the results emotionally.  Then she does a couple of lectures talking about ethical issues surrounds DNA results, especially related to medical issues that might arise. Finally she talks philosophically about the different elements of personal identity and their importance in our lives.  

Sometimes when I finish a book and don't know what to listen to next, but I don't want to spend a lot of time selecting a new book, I just look at what Great Courses are available.  I don't know why I chose this one this week. It didn't turn out to be what I expected. I thought they would go into more of the science of how ancestral DNA tests determine where someone's ancestors are from, but this course dealt with that only tangentially. Instead it mostly dealt with how people feel when they get unexpected results.  It was a little amazing to me that the lecturer could find enough to fill six hours of lectures on this topic. After listening to it, though, I realized that because I am from a religion that encourages members to know their genealogy, I know much more about my ancestry than the common American. When I did an Ancestry DNA test it was no surprise at all that 97% of my ancestors came from the British Isles. Listening to these lectures opened my eyes to the plight of mixed racial people who might not know if their great grandparents were white, African, middle eastern, or American indigenous. I guess it could be a little disorienting if you have always identified as African American and then your Ancestry DNA test shows that you are only 1/4 African, 1/2 Asian and 1/4 white.  Do you then stop seeing yourself as African American and instead start identifying as Asian?  Or what if you do the test and find out that your parents used a sperm donor, and you have a dozen people who are your biological half siblings? It ended up being an interesting topic, though one I probably won't have occasion to apply to my personal life. (6 hrs, 2022)