Over the past year or so, there have been lots of ads for home genetic testing kits like AncestryDNA and 23andMe popping up on television and social media. For a quick primer on basic genetics -- but with a British narrator, so you know that shit is classy -- check this out:
BBC Knowledge Explainer DNA | Experience | Territory Studio from Territory on Vimeo.
For Christmas, my mother got me one of those spit-and-send kits, so I decided to go for it. Now, I'm not really someone who organizes his identity primarily in terms of "race" or "ethnicity," as dubious as some of those categorizations can be, but I was a bit curious to see where I stood on the tree of life, that balance between blossom and pollination. I sent the findings in at the beginning of January, and I just got the results today, so it's clear that the business is booming. However, I wasn't quite surprised with my results:
Europe West (53%); Great Britain (13%); Ireland/Scotland/Wales (12%); Scandinavia (9%); An Aggregation Of Some Other Random-Ass Shit (13%)
So I'm white. As white as you could think of being. No variants to shake my identity foundations, no ghosts in the attic to force me to uncomfortably question my parents. Just an affirmation that I'm a legacy American in the diverse tapestry of the 21st Century, a time where the white privilege that allows me to so cavalierly dismiss the impact of that very privilege on my life and my sense of self is starting to fray and erode. I'm a prototype of what people of color talk about when they say that it's time to move on from the mistakes of the past, the top-down power exertions of colonialism and Empire that have utterly destroyed the lives of those that don't fit the picture drawn by white people with flesh crayons. And really, who am I to disagree when the evidence of such devastation is so robust?
If my life was a video game, the aforementioned genetic code has given me so many advantages in this particular culture that I can't even articulate or see all the doors that have been opened. And while I try to put the percentages in the context of the only percentage that really matters -- as mentioned in the video, the genetic difference between the billions of people on Earth is less than 1% -- every time I look in the mirror, I see what America used to be, charged with teaching a small percentage of Americans what the future could be. And I'm not sure what the spit-test looks like for that slice of identity and self.
BBC Knowledge Explainer DNA | Experience | Territory Studio from Territory on Vimeo.
For Christmas, my mother got me one of those spit-and-send kits, so I decided to go for it. Now, I'm not really someone who organizes his identity primarily in terms of "race" or "ethnicity," as dubious as some of those categorizations can be, but I was a bit curious to see where I stood on the tree of life, that balance between blossom and pollination. I sent the findings in at the beginning of January, and I just got the results today, so it's clear that the business is booming. However, I wasn't quite surprised with my results:
Europe West (53%); Great Britain (13%); Ireland/Scotland/Wales (12%); Scandinavia (9%); An Aggregation Of Some Other Random-Ass Shit (13%)
So I'm white. As white as you could think of being. No variants to shake my identity foundations, no ghosts in the attic to force me to uncomfortably question my parents. Just an affirmation that I'm a legacy American in the diverse tapestry of the 21st Century, a time where the white privilege that allows me to so cavalierly dismiss the impact of that very privilege on my life and my sense of self is starting to fray and erode. I'm a prototype of what people of color talk about when they say that it's time to move on from the mistakes of the past, the top-down power exertions of colonialism and Empire that have utterly destroyed the lives of those that don't fit the picture drawn by white people with flesh crayons. And really, who am I to disagree when the evidence of such devastation is so robust?
If my life was a video game, the aforementioned genetic code has given me so many advantages in this particular culture that I can't even articulate or see all the doors that have been opened. And while I try to put the percentages in the context of the only percentage that really matters -- as mentioned in the video, the genetic difference between the billions of people on Earth is less than 1% -- every time I look in the mirror, I see what America used to be, charged with teaching a small percentage of Americans what the future could be. And I'm not sure what the spit-test looks like for that slice of identity and self.
Comments
Post a Comment