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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.
We are in 2024 and they still use the word "race" to segregate the American population in several groups. So no surprise a DNA service could be so popular in the USA.
If they were American citizen and just that - without subdivision and the legal right to ask or use their gene, color skin or whatever_they_think_is_important_to_distinguish_themself - well a lot of issues and strange "behaviour" (aka racisme) would have disapeared.
Or at least decreased as nobody would have the legal tools and data to enforce it: gerrymanding, blaming a vote on a "community", having your town split in "community" sectors and no shame at all to call it like that officially! Which others country put "chinatown" on their map?
This DNA service is just the result of this global problem: the american society and its laws are still allowing passive racism.
So americans want to prove (to themself, to others?) via DNA results that they can’t be racist because they have a ~~black friend~~ sorry : black DNA ancestors.
Some will tell you: "ho it’s just for fun". But is fun really the only motivation here?
And congrat to them as they don’t only expose themself (genetic data are priceless and should be protected at all costs) but also they expose all their children, children's children, etc. These chidren probably wouldn’t have agreed to that if they were born.
I applaud your idealism, but the tricky thing is that if you stop measuring race, then you also stop being able to measure institutional racism. That'd be great for the closet racists who want to pretend that it doesn't exist, but it does still exist and we really need to be able to quantify how well measures to stop it are actually working.
At this point it's time to accept this approach simply does not work.