I am a technology journalist – I like to think I am thoughtful about what data I share with corporations.
My brother in Christ, if you are a tech journalist then you, out of all people, should know not to give ANY data to corporations. That is a massive fuckup regarding your job.
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
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.
Nationalities aren't Skyrim races. You don't get special abilities.
"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."
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)
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.
claiming to be Irish
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.
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.
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?
As a teenager, I was shocked by this fact when visiting the USA 25 years ago. That and the fact i have found in a normal marketplace unprotected ammunition sold near the baby milk. "baby stuff, baby stuff, 9mm ammo... what!?!"
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.
...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.
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.
Oh, don't worry. If you hadn't given it to them, one or ten of your fucking rellies did anyway and had no clue of the implications either.
I want to upvote this, but ... Why did you have to shorten "relatives"?
I like it
Took me too long to realise that article is actually serious. I'd have sworn white people with huge ethnics fetish would show up as "Austrian painter" on their test, but I guess British works. Oh well 🇺🇸
I refuse to do it because I'm a twin. We both agree that it's shitty if one of us does it because then the other is forced into it basically, being identical.
Also our dad was a piece of cheating shit so we don't ever want to know about that possibility.
I mean obviously it would just discover that your mom was also a cheater?
Well I mean beyond the possibility of half siblings.
I had in some ways the opposite 23&Me experience and goals. My parents told me growing up that I had some small native ancestry. This is actually a common myth many Americans have either been told or somehow deluded themselves into believing.
So I did the DNA testing (which I now regret from all the obvious enshittification and privacy reasons) to prove that my ancestry was boring and predictable. Which it was, no indigenous ancestry, just the expected European countries that my great grandparents came from.
They also do a lot of nice health screening things and I think that's probably the much more valuable aspect of it. It really is very American that people are so much more concerned with what DNA says about one's race or ethnicity than about their health and wellbeing.
I'm worried about insurance companies getting it and changing rates/services based on my DNA.
Recreational DNA testing eventually led to discovering that I had never before met my biological father. Mom got it wrong. I met him and his family this summer finally. I am slightly irritated that my last name (and my child’s) is now kind of meaningless, and it’s too much of a hassle to change it.
I haven't found an article yet that can actually articulate the problem with 23 and me right now, and actually did research into it or even read the terms and service. The problem with 23 and me is that they are not maximizing the share holder value of the data they are sitting on. The CEO wants to keep the company in line with the principals they were founded on which is to protect the privacy and data of their customers, while using opt in studies to build data sets that can be studied or sold.
Investors want to enshittify the company, and have been organizing a campaign against to company to try to drive it into liquidation to buy the data, even though the company is profitable. I wouldn't be surprised is they are funding these weekly omfg 23 and me bad articles.
Maybe if I swab my mouth and send it off to a company, I'll finally be interesting and people will like me.
puts letter down
...maybe not.
I still find it funny people think these tests mean anything. "you have these 7/9 genes in common with Jasper Brittania and are therefore 77% british"
There's something hilarious about the author's disappointment to find out they're British, and nothing else.
Can't say I blame them though.
Title is misleading, FTA:
Confirmation that I am 63% British and Irish, 17% Danish and otherwise “broadly north-western European”. I felt a resounding ambivalence about the results, including some disappointment that I had not discovered a newfound heritage – a piece of information that would give my identity new dimension.
But also:
My father’s side of the family is meticulous about tracking our ancestry, with records that hold the name of the exact small village in Ireland our ancestors hail from.
Those results often can't narrow down to exact countries so it says he's 63% British and Irish. Seeing as his fathers family has records of being from a small Irish town it's likely he's more Irish that British, not that it means anything if you're actually American anyway.
I read the headline and went, “…I mean, what were you expecting?”
I’ve got to admit, I’ve wanted to do one of those tests just because my family is such a mix of “lol we don’t know.” Like, no really, what IS my maternal grandma? She does not look like the rest of her family and had a different family name from her siblings. And ok really, where DID my paternal great-grandmother who lied about her race so she could marry my great-grandfather back when “miscegenation” was illegal, come from? And WAS that great-grandpa biracial himself?
There’s a reason I call myself an ethnic Rorschach test, and I’d love to know why it is I am. But the rest of my family is against the idea of finding out because “it doesn’t matter” plus who knows how just data might be used one day.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
