 So why doesn't everybody go ahead and open up the boxes? There is a little test tube there that has a funnel on top, and what you're going to do is you're going to spit in the test tube. DNA testing has become cheap, easy, and fun. All you have to do is spit into a tube. Try not to have it like a whole lot of bubbles. You really want to give them a sample so that they can read it. Six weeks later, you have the results. Millions have done it. But what exactly do DNA tests tell us about who we are? Researchers at the DNA Discussion Project at West Chester University in Pennsylvania are seeking answers to these questions. When the human genome was ultimately mapped, articles started to come out to say that you could trace somebody's ancestry by looking at their genome, and I thought, here's a way to link science and the discussion about diversity. How do people talk in your family about who you are, about what race you are, about your ethnicity? How was that explained in your family? My family always talks about intermarriage or intermingling with Native Americans, but never about intermingling with whites or Europeans. But there's very clearly lots of lighter-skinned black people in our family. I know that it's somewhere down the line, I'm assuming, but nobody has ever discussed it. And the first time I told my mom I was doing this, she was like, oh, God. She was scared. I feel like in my family there's a lot of different little secrets. The goal of the DNA Discussion Project is to encourage conversations about race in a positive way, beginning from positions of perspectives of similarity rather than of difference. With the sequencing of the human genome in 2003, the door is open to ancestry testing. A team of scientists at Stanford University is using DNA to study the complex origins of human diversity. What DNA changes do you carry that make you unique? What DNA changes do you carry that are similar to mom? What DNA changes do you carry that are similar to dad or granddad? And it is a book about you, and everyone's profile is completely unique. Humans are much more similar than you may think. All human beings are 99.9% identical. That 0.1% variation actually comes from ancient DNA. Somewhere between 50,000 to 100,000 years ago, at the inception of our species, the human genome pool was sampled. As we went through the great human diasporas and migrating out of Africa to colonize the rest of the world, and most of the variation that we think of today, so-called common DNA variation, is actually quite ancient and shared across different human groups. The Ancestry Test compares your DNA to the genetic signature of different regions of the world. Most companies keep large databases of all the people they've tested, so they can match you to close and distant relatives, and also give you clues to where those people may be located in the world. And so what we're literally seeing are the ancestors, and the segments of the ancestors' genomes that have percolated down into modern-day populations. For the past decade, Lawton and Foman have been inviting groups of students to take the Ancestry Test. The first thing I always like to ask is, did anybody have, like, an immediate reaction to their results? After the reveal, we asked people to discuss the relationship between their stories and what they find in their DNA. I think when I was here last time, I was talking about how, and Black families, we don't talk a lot about having, like, European blood, and so my family's story is that we never mention it, and so the, but the story is that we have a lot of, like, Native American or indigenous blood, and then I, like, get the results, and it's, like, 13% European, and I'm, like, and 3% Native American. I was most upset that there was no Native American. That really was the thing that upset me the most. Oh, tell me why that upset me. Because I had always thought that that was a part of who I was, not to show up at all. That shocked me. How many of you had stories in your family of Native Americans? A big majority of our respondents or participants in the study received profiles that include a lot of races or ethnicities that they did not expect, and when this happens, they have to reconcile that piece of scientific information with all the other factors that go into their process of identification. I've just got some questions to ask my father, that's all. My mom will be getting a call when I get out of here. What ends up happening is you break down any simple traditional notion of race. There aren't three or five or ten human races, but rather there's this beautiful continuum. On average, an African-American individual would have about 75 to 80% West African ancestry and about 20 to 25% European ancestry. I got 28% Africa, so I could say I'm quarter African now, but it doesn't change who I am and my identity. I still identify myself as Puerto Rican. You don't know what you're going to get when you do an ancestry test, and that's part of the fun and part of the risk, right? So you could find out that you have a more diverse history than you expected, or you might find out that Grandpa wasn't Grandpa, and you have to be prepared for that going into it. I love the idea of using DNA to encourage more discussion among a wider variety of people about our backgrounds, and I also like to think that it's a way of approaching the discussion of diversity that assumes that we're all diverse, that we're in it together, and that we're more alike than we are different.