I’m sorry if you feel maligned by my indictment of systemic white supremacy in America and how it shows up in this particular instance. “We” was meant generally as Americans, and particularly white Americans like myself. I think that you and I just have very different perspectives on just how ingrained white supremacy is and how it unconsciously influences business practices, advertising, and discussions. I think you may feel maligned by my perspective because this particular discussion involves your field - if it helps at all, I think this insidious kind of white supremacy is true for most businesses, fields of study, and language in the good ol’ USA.
I agree with you that DNA analysis has the potential to eliminate racial purity testing - that’s part of why I related my husband’s experience with the Geno 2.0 project. It really made him feel connected with the history of all of humanity.
Just to throw a spanner in the works: I can’t find the damn link, but there was a university course that used to have students take DNA tests as part of the curriculum. They had to stop because students who had always identified as African-American were finding out they in fact did not have any African ancestors (at least not any since the big “out of Africa” migration 250,000 years ago).
Needless to say, they were very upset about this, even though they may have understood intellectually that race is a social construct etc. etc.
If someone wants to argue it’s different for white supremacists because they support (more) restrictive laws based on heritage, I’m not going to disagree. I think it’s fair to say that DNA testing is exploding a lot of old myths about how people look = their actual heritage.
This Vice article makes some good points about how identity from community has really nothing to do with one’s DNA:
I’m really confused. I really took my time reading all of your posts and trying to respond in a way that clarifies my perspective. I’m still not sure what you think I’m missing - if anything, I think it’s pretty clear that I agree with you on most points. If you feel that I owe you a more specific apology, please let me know.
I don’t think this throws a “spanner” into the works at all! The examples that you provide are exactly what I mean regarding white supremacy as an insidious, unconscious framework for discussing heritage. What does it mean to “belong?” How does one “belong?” Why does one person “belong” and another doesn’t? On the reservation where I grew up (I’m not Indigenous/Native, just grew up there) the question was “Who are your people?” but it meant “How do you make sense of who you are and how you got here?” The Vice article (written by an Indigenous person) just shows how complicated this stuff gets. Thanks for sharing.
This is our family “scandal”, though the angle on it changed between generations.
My grandmother (on my mom’s side) grew up thinking her paternal grandparents were dead, but as a Doreen, it was pretty obvious what the ancestral background was. Turns out, not so much, and while great grandpa admitted to being born in Rangoon (now Yangon), he lied about them being alive because he didn’t want Victorian/Edwardian societal prejudice turning against his family and thus became a victim to its social mores: turns out that great-great-grandma was Burmese.
My grandmother was furious when she found out, and that’s what I mean by the angle changing between generations. To her father, the scandal was being mixed race. To my grandmother it was the lie about her grandparents’ deaths. She didn’t care where her grandmother came from, but being denied (through dishonesty) the opportunity to know her.
That dishonesty is why a) I can only claim genetic background – any culture was entirely lost when great-grandpa assimilated and this far away it feels more like appropriation than heritage and b) funnily (not really) I come from a solid White People background, as in “Dear White People”. The only reason I mention this is that we didn’t need DNA tests to learn the story, but I can imagine that there’s a few families out there where the masquerade didn’t fall apart. They have no idea about great-great-grandma, and so the results surprise them. It’s the shock that somewhere along the way, a child erased the existence of their own parent. So I know from experience that it happens: for many people that’s just a story they heard.
OTOH, as much as it intrigues me, I won’t get tested until after my Dad is gone, because he was adopted and has been adamant about never wanting to know about his birth family (if you knew my paternal grandmother, you’d understand that he had a million and a half mindgames played on him, especially in regards to that). My curiosity can wait – finding something out isn’t going to fundamentally change who I already am.
I’m curious as to why you keep explaining my own field to me. Do you think I don’t understand that my genetics grant is not very likely to be funded? Do you just feel like rubbing that in on a Monday morning? Do you think I don’t understand that we have knowledge because of the types of grants that fund my lab?
I don’t mean to be a pill about this, but I’m sitting in my office, having just taught my genetics lecture, about to revise a genetics grant budget sheet. The way you’re speaking to me about my own work, including accusing me of starting conspiracy theories, is completely unwarranted.
I don’t agree with this. They can never get perfect sampling, but the failure condition of “perfect” isn’t “shrug it off and change nothing about your marketing or outreach”. Particularly since they’re getting into the pharmaceutical game, and race biases in basically every step of the drug discovery and testing pipeline is a huge problem.
Edit: This discussion isn’t worth having. I’m writing my grant. Maybe it gets funded, maybe it doesn’t. But those of us working in this field will continue to do good work, and expand the availability of knowledge, whether you think it’s a good idea or not.
I don’t recall anyone having to not use a genetic testing product in the classroom, but every university I’ve been at that uses them in the classroom has stressed that it’s optional, and provided some pre-cooked output for students to play with. But every university I’ve been at already had some policy in place from the old days of doing PCR to amplify Alu regions.
Those sound like biology classes. The classes where it’s an issue sometimes are social science classes. Pre-cooked output doesn’t matter much when you’re trying to discuss the intersection of ancestry and identity, unless you want to just use hypothetical characters – something that would be considered inadequate when other people are using their lived experiences in the same discussions.
As I have already explained, I responded to only you at first but it was due to having two different posts on the subject in quick succession. Your post wasn’t the one that made me think of how conspiracy theories start.
