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Why I regret using 23andMe: I gave up my DNA just to find out I’m British | Technology | The Guardian
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2024
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Americans seem get really weird with the whole ancestry thing. There appears to be a desire to look into your family history and find something "exotic", which basically seems to mean non-English - I imagine because that's perceived as the 'default' ancestry, so-to-speak.
Honestly, who the fuck cares? What difference does it make? Nationalities aren't Skyrim races. You don't get special abilities. It makes no difference whether your ancestors were British/Irish/Spanish/French/whatever.
E: This is obviously not intended as a hateful statement, people. You have to understand that the rest of the world doesn't care about this, so we're confused when we look to the US and see them take it so seriously. We're especially puzzled when Americans say "I'm Irish" because their great great great uncle bought a pint of Guiness in the 1870s. It's an alien concept to the rest of the planet.
I worked with a French guy in Amsterdam. His parents were Portuguese, but he was born and raised in France. As far as he was concerned, he was French.
Contrariwise, I worked with an American woman in Virginia. Her grandparents were Irish, and she considered herself Irish, in spite of having been born and raised in America, and both of her parents having been born and raised in America.
It is a kind of fetish in America to hyphenate yourself. Irish-American. Cuban-American. And so on.
My own theory is that this is because America has no culture going back many generations, so people try to find one.
I mean you've basically hit the nail on the head except you're misunderstanding one important thing. They aren't 'trying to find one' they have one. Their culture IS that Irish or Cuban heritage and it wasn't retconned from 23andme or ancestry.com - it comes from the story they were told about their identity by their parents from an early age.
But they're not Irish or Cuban or Italian.
They're Americans.
Emphasis on "heritage".
I guess both 'identity' and 'heritage' are doing a lot of heavy lifting.
And I know this is mostly pedantry, but there're terms that actually do fit better. Like immigrants, settlers, etc.
My great grandad was from Sicily. I'm from Minnesota. I don't have any heritage or identity that has much to do with Sicily. I do have heritage as the progeny of immigrants from Sicily. But not Sicily.