General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: This message was self-deleted by its author [View all]Ms. Toad
(34,062 posts)for not taking the test are pretexts for racism. First, alleged against your co-workers (point blank), and implied in your repeated provocative comments in this thread.
Taking the DNA test, especially one that matches you with relatives, should not be done on a whim (or to prove you're not a racist).
My daughter found her biological father via 23 and me.
For us, that was a blessing - since we had given up on ever finding her (donor) father. And the social dynamics have worked out well.
His wife enrolled them both to find out health information. At that point, had it been a secret, he would have had to choose between disclosing information he might not have wanted to disclose (that he might have dozens of children out there via donation) - and hoping none of his donor children used the same service. (She knew, but that is not a given for all spouses of donor dads)
When she (the wife) contacted our daughter, she had no way of knowing if our daughter knew the circumstances of her conception - it might have been a secret we were trying to keep. In that era, the donor was matched as closely as possible to the husband (if there is one in the picture) and characteristics that they couldn't match with the "father," they matched to the mother, in order to create a child with similar appearance and abilities - AND the couple was told to keep on trying to conceive so there wasn't certainty as to whether the child was biologically related to the father or not (that didn't apply in our case, since we were both women, but there was no reason for the wife to know that.
Fortunately, for us, she has known since she was old enough to understand the concept that she was conceived by donor insemination - and we had already spent time and money trying to find him, without success. So her, "I'm curious about why 23 and me has identified you as my husband's daughter," wasn't a shock we had to explain to her - she knew immediately what it meant. . . . and then we had to be careful about how we responded because we didn't know if she knew - and thought, perhaps, her husband had fathered a child via an affair.
Most matches are not direct father-child, but aunt/uncle/grandparent etc. - child. So the chances of finding an unknown parent are larger than just whether or not he donated to the same service - but whether any relative did.
And - what if the unknown parent is a rapist (and you are a child of rape, but don't know it)? (Or other scenarios in which one, or both, participants in creating you had chosen to keep that information secret.)
That is not to say that knowledge is bad, but the kind of information packaged with the DNA test is much more emotionally complex than just what country you came from.
So your assumption that white people who choose not to take it are afraid they might find out they are black (and repeated prodding suggesting that it is the reason even progressives/DU people don't want to take the test is a gross oversimplifications of a very complex decision (even without the relatively mundane, but significant factors that others have mentioned, of cost, what will they do with my DNA, etc.)
As for my ancestry (which would have shown up through my daughter) - there weren't any surprises. But I honestly don't recall whether she/I have any African DNA or not. Because it truly wouldn't have been surprising, or even crossed my mind as one of the factors my daughter should think about before deciding to having her DNA tested through 23 and me.