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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.
It's even more strange when I see 3rd or 4th generation children from immigrants call themselves "Greek" or "Italian" and many times they've never even stepped inside those countries nor speak the language
Or even worse, they think that they do some typical Italian food when in fact, if you gave that food to Italians, they would be disgusted.
You’ve got me thinking of the episode of the Sopranos when they go to Italy to seal a deal with an old mob family and none of Tony’s guys want to eat the real Italian food
Exactly. Damn, The Sopranos were a good series.
Vice versa as well! I've tried to share some chocolate salami with "italian-americans" in the past and they've basically run away screaming every time! For some reason theyre not able to comprehend that its not actually meat...
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.
My aunts' grandparents came from Poland. Their parents spoke Polish in the house. They were raised with a whole close-knit gaggle of cousins, also with Polish grandparents and parents. The old country wasn't that long ago for them. They've visited.
Me, eh. My dad married someone from Appalachia and I grew up away from his family. I haven't heard Polish spoken outside of my great-grandaunt'a funeral. I like pierogi, kielbasa, and sauerkraut because they remind me of my dad. He'd cook them when he was feeling nostalgic.
I have looked into claiming Polish citizenship through descent (mostly because an EU passport would be comforting what with USA politics), but my folks came over too early for that.
Same for me. My dad, while being born in Australia, is fluent in Polish and has visited the country many times
Yet I'd never call myself Polish, I barely know the language
As I understand it, that's a French thing specifically, not just a non-USian thing. Like, if you're a citizen of France, you're expected to be French and assimilate into that culture, no matter whether you're a native Parisian, you moved there from Algeria in the '60s, or you're from some random other place and got citizenship via the French Foreign Legion. It's a specific sort of national ideology that's different from the American "melting pot" one.
I've generally heard the opposite. You can immigrate to France, get citizenship, and be as French as possible, but you will never be French.
It's actually kjnd of the opposite: America has the dominant culture going back generations. It's just that culture is very materialistic, so people try to find something deeper. That's my theory anyway. Besides, most of us are immigrants and I think a lot of Americans want some connection to their place of origin.
My own theory is racism. Other countries in the Americas are not obsessed with ancestry. But bigotry against Scots, Irish, Italians, Africans, Chinese, Polish, etc. ran / run rampant.
Jeez, are there people the English didn’t hate? I wonder if the overall disdain for other people the English had in the 1800s wasn’t what was carried over to the new world and festered into this.
What's with the negativity from you and the other comments?
I can tell you why Americans care. Because identity matters to people. The story of the melting pot is central to the American story as a nation of immigrants (even today) and central to individual identities. Thus, there is a lot of interest in backgrounds and geneology. If you ask the average American about their heritage you're likely to get a surprising answer - so people talk about it more.
I get why it seems weird to many other cultures - if you ask the average French person (for example) their heritage they'll say 'French as far back as we can tell'.
The French person celebrates their identity through the lens of the French story, and the American does too, it's just that the American story is the immigrant story.
I hope you do actually care. I hope in this era of rising nationalism and online hate enough of us value diversity of backgrounds and ancestries.
I'm not being hateful about it. I'm just puzzled as to why people think it makes any difference to their lives, or why they'd be disappointed in having the "wrong" ancestry.
I see a lot of Americans obsessed with it so much that it borders on being fetish-like, particularly when it comes to people claiming to be Irish or Italian, and it's bizarre to me.
I can speak to this phenomenon a bit. It’s part of what was drilled into us from our families. My father’s maternal grandparents were from Donegal, Ireland. Any time a single person from a Donegal family passed away in the entire city of Philadelphia, whether they were known to my family or not, my father, his brothers, and my grandmother were going to that wake to pay their respects. Once he became an adult, he became a member of the AoH, which is an Irish-American fraternal order. They’d keep some Irish customs alive (and being separated by the ocean, no doubt hallucinate some new ones). For people that are heavily invested in their families, it’s a way of feeling connected to your ancestors. I think leaving was rather traumatic for many people, so I think there is an element of mourning in the connection for some too.
I myself wouldn’t call myself Irish, but I know a great deal about Ireland and I share a deep appreciation for it despite being a Yankee. I get that it’s no doubt annoying when someone who knows nothing of the place they are claiming ownership of says they’re Irish or Italian to someone actually from Ireland or Italy, but at the end of the day I think it comes from a well intentioned place. If my family came to find we weren’t at all Irish by ancestry, I would definitely feel shocked as much of my upbringing was framed by that identity.
Calling people out as "fetish like" for identifying with...anything... is a bad look.
A person's perception of themselves, their identity or self image isn't for you to qualify as being good enough
Don't try to compare an American claiming to de a different nationality just because they may have had an ancestor from XYZ to something like transphobia.
They are not the same. And rolling my eyes at the 'plastic paddy' crowd is not bigotry.
That is an absurd comparison to draw.
No not hateful, you're just giving off a weird vibe about it. But you're half way there actually, transform that energy into curiosity.
The two you picked especially have a real fascinating history and I'd encourage you to check it out because both of those groups had a tough time in their early immigration days. They aren't fetishising at all - those communities had to stick together because they weren't exactly welcome, and that mentality became ingrained. Over time, it was less necessary for survival so it transitioned into more of a cultural tradition.
Kinda weird obsession when a big part of the population hates strangers so much.
And even British/Irish/Spanish/.... doesn't mean much as there was mixing for centuries
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.
If you want to fix institutional racism in the US you need to fix social mobility because that's the primary mechanism by which it gets perpetuated. For that you need educational status of the parents and their tax declarations, not skin colour. You need to stop financing schools from local taxes so primary and secondary education is as good or better in poorer areas instead of having quotas lowering standards for people who got a worse education because they live in the wrong neighbourhood. You need free tertiary education.
Focussing on race is a convenient way to ignore actually addressing the issue and instead continue to deepen societal rifts and to breed resentment among non-racialised disenfranchised people.
I totally agree with you here. These rules don’t make racism disappear but make it far more difficult to use it as a tool (passively or on-purpose).
At least if someone (anybody, including politician, company) use these terms, they will be immediatly stopped with more ease than your current system.
You still have a need for watcher (justice system, neutral party like associations) to keep track BUT nothing official can track your race in any documents at all level. That include the resume of an employe or even a customers service listing. You will have immediate sanction and bad PR for the company/individual if you do that.
Same for your religion or your political party by the way. They are too much officialy tracked and categorized!
Racism will always exists unfortunately but all these laws can reduce the global impact on the population. And put on shame the one using it as discriminative element.
Europeans: haha you guys have no history!
Also Europeans: haha you're curious where your family emigrated from! Losers!
Those two sentences are not in contradiction. USA's history has been moved to casinos. Knowing which language your ancestors spoke, when you won't bother learning it, has nothing to do with it.
You speak for yourself. As an Englishman I get 5% water resistance and +2 charisma when dealing with non-Europeans.
You lose that buff two weeks after acclimitizing to another country, and the perceived extra charisma is actually people nervously smiling around you to mask their limited english (half the language is just obscure idioms)
...English is not the "default" ancestry for Americans. I think I know one dude from Michigan who has English heritage. Most folks I'd know have blood from Poland, Ireland, Italy and Germany. It varies regionally.
As far as white/Caucasian Americans, I'd bet money it's Germanic ancestry.
I recall reading that at one point in the 19th century, 52% of American newspapers were printed in German. And, you still find towns with German names from coast to coast. Anaheim California, Hamburg Minnesota, Berlin New Hampshire.
If you're near Eastern Indiana, check out Oldenburg.
I'm aware. There's an absolutely huge amount of Germanic-descended people, for example. That's why I spoke of it being the 'perceived' default.
"It wasn't until I learned that I was 90% British that it all made sense... my inhuman ability to queue for hours, my fastidiousness surrounding permits, and hatred for the French... I knew I was special, but I never imagined how special."
One guy writes an article. literally just one dude.
the comments: "AMERICANS ARE WEIRD AF. ALL AMERICANS DO THIS AND FEEL THIS WAY."
It's not just him. The "I'm Irish/Italian" crowd is a widely known-about American thing.
I didn't mean to offend you. Relax. I never said all Americans do it, you don't need to come up with some reactionary strawman just because you took my comment to heart.
America is a lot of people from different places settling in one continent. lots of people care about what their family history is. I'm not sure what's weird about that.
there's a lot of people with bloodlines from different parts of the world in every country. it means something to some people. not everyone, but quite a few.
that particular phenomenon is everywhere.
No, it really isn't much of a thing for the rest of the world. You'd never see someone from, I dunno, Poland saying they're Irish because 23andMe says they're 2% Irish.
I wouldn't understand, but then I'm 1/128th Cherokee, so...
A large number of Americans generally seem to grow up with a main character complex thanks to all the individualist & jingoist propaganda people get bombarded with over there.
The search for something "exotic" as you put it is just an ego-driven search for the piece of evidence that they are, in fact, more special and unique than everyone else.
If you're an American and you're not a native American you're family immigrated here. Why is it so weird to want to know where your family or ancestors come from, I'm lucky and can trace my family name back a couple hundred years. I'm still American I just got family history that's fun to know about.
I think there's a big difference between knowing your family's history and drawing an identity from it.
Either they immigrated recently enough that you can just ask them, or it simply does not matter. You think most Europeans speak the language of their great great grand parents?
The rest of the world has no ability to understand, because they've been in the same place for 700 generations.
I think having English heritage is not trendy for several reasons.
ETA: Man, you really riled up some people!
Some people are just looking for a story. I don't think there's need to view it so pessimistically. I'm lucky to have grown up with family, but people like my grandparents didn't. You got traded off as a farm hand at the age of 5, or dropped off on the church steps. Seems a very human thing to want clues where you came from, and at the time they couldn't conceive of the black mirror shit the world is now.
You say that, but the luck stat is entirely dependent on it.