Thirty years ago, if you’d told me to spit into a tube, I would have assumed I was being tested for pathogens and cooties. Not whiteness.

Whiteness was not something I thought I needed to establish. I’m white as hell. Maybe not that kind of redheaded-white that make you worry you’ll be incinerated by the sun one careless day, but pretty dang white. My father’s line is saturated with prim piety in a pasty package, and Mom’s sturdy Norwegian contribution did nothing to darken anything up.

And so when I sent in my vial of spit to 23andme, lo these many years ago, I wasn’t too surprised by the results. I appeared to be about 44% Scandinavian and most of the rest British Isles, with a nice healthy Neanderthal element and some random notes from northern Africa. Those I put down to ancient Viking conquests of a raping-and-pillaging nature although one should never, as a principle, rule out love.

The cool thing about spitting for strangers is that there is now so much saliva out there in the labs that people who study these things are figuring a lot of stuff out. It’s like putting retroactive GPS trackers on the human migration highway. There are probably ten times as many spit sisters out there than there were when I first did it. The scientists are now this close to finding my ancestral cave. Which means some day they might find a tiny cave painting of a salamander, my favorite animal, and I can die happy. One wants to know where one comes from, right?

The site sends lots of fun notifications so that if I really wanted to know how likely it is that I can smell asparagus pee, for instance, I can, even though I personally know the likelihood is 100%. I was relieved to discover that I am highly unlikely to have a photic reflex. Because ever since I heard people sneeze when they look into the sun, I’ve tried to make that work, and it never once did. I thought: so is this kind of like the low-libido thing? Just a roll of the genetic dice?

Apparently, yes.

So 23andme sent me an email notice that I had new DNA relatives. I usually don’t bother to check on them. They’re usually fourth cousins, removed every which way, which means they are complete strangers, our interconnecting strands long frayed, and our chromosomes wouldn’t recognize each other in an elevator. They might even be Republicans.

But I was bored so I went on the site. And discovered they’d narrowed down my heritage quite a bit. I am now officially 99.6% northwestern European, fully half of that Scandinavian. Them people, apparently, didn’t move at all. And Northern Africa has disappeared, replaced by that last point-four percent of Peninsular Arab. I’m just about as white as they get. Which means I have been completely liberated of the burden of imagining people are suspicious of me. In America, I’m the default template. Sure, in these last nanoseconds of my race’s time on earth, I could be Karened, but I’m not much of an asshole, so it doesn’t come up often.

And looky here! Apparently I’m highly likely to be a descendant of someone aboard the Mayflower. Well, no shit. I’ve known that since our family tree was unscrolled for me when I was in third grade. Not merely a direct Mayflower descendant but a descendant of one of the main dudes.

But it would be a lot cooler if they had me traced to some woman with fat blond braids and a broadaxe who cleaved her way through a herd of terrified menfolk and earned a moniker like Birgit the Bitchy or On The Ragnhild.

Keep spitting, people. That may be in the next email.