Why is everyone taking DNA tests to find out about their heritage? While Americans are fueling an industry selling them a story of global identity, the country’s President is spreading fear and hostility about non-white immigrants. Trump seems to have an idea of “Americanness” that is limited to those of a certain ethnic inheritance and anyone from places like Mexico or South America or Haiti is fundamentally foreign and ‘other’. The most obvious fact remains that the overwhelming majority of us came from somewhere foreign, that at some point, our heritage was ‘other’. This is the intersection Alex Wagner explores in her new memoir, “Futureface”. It’s a story about how we think about who we are based on where we come from and how that fits into our conception of our own “Americanness”.

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