Autonomy and belonging factor into this article, throughout the whole thing. In the beginning we meet Sigrid Johnson, who was called upon to become a research participant for a study about ancestry DNA. Johnson was adopted when she was a baby from a mother who had an affair and her husband did not want the baby. When she found out the news, she was shocked. Her whole life she has grown up thinking that she was African American, or at least half. She found out that her birth parents were Italian and African American. Johnson had a lot of trouble accepting who she was. It threw her off and she didn’t know what culture to accept, “While Johnson was at Wilberforce, she told no one that she was adopted and no one that she was half white.” (4) This is where she had trouble finding where she belonged. She was stuck between accepting the fact that she was half white, or staying with what she had grown up knowing and what she was comfortable with. Even her DNA result were confusing. She tried them from three different companies and they were all different. None of them matched up, which causes her to have even more trouble finding where she belonged. Some said that she was not Italian at all, some said she was half Hispanic, and others said she was half African American. In the end, she did finally come to accept that she was adopted because through all of this she found her half sister and all of her birth mothers children and relatives were contacting her on Facebook and social media saying how happy they were that they could find Johnson.
