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[TAJ]

In genetic genealogy, this is called "misattributed parentage". We just had one of these cases in my family last summer - a first cousin who was born in 1922 that no one in my family had ever heard of before who was revealed through Ancestry DNA. This is still a sensitive topic in my family.

That's probably because it wasn't really a surprise, just like how noone would admit that my older sister existed until a couple years ago and how mentioning my mom's brother who died young will result in panic and rage, followed by denying he existed. I've personally never seen proof of him but a couple family members in my generation swear they have and the whole situation is just bizarre and sad.

 

[Cocaloch]

I couldn't have made my point clearer, or at least, I hope someone else who can does.

I think I understood what you meant. I have this conversation all the time with my students. My problem is with some of the fundamental assumptions that rest behind this sort of extremely common thinking.

My whole post was about semantics -- in that people use the word race to mean the phenotypes that are determined by our DNA (for the most part).

I know it's about semantics, I was pointing out that word to dispel the idea that this isn't important and calling attention to the adjective you used to qualify it.

Except they don't use it to mean that. Phenotypes are identifiers that people use to put other people into social categories. When you say black you don't just mean black skin, you also refer to the host of other social baggage that comes with it. That's what a category is.

We put these in categories, where typically skin colour is the main determining factor.

There's actually a lot of social research that questions this in particular. It's a major component of the ideal type for specific races, but it isn't merely skin tone alone that determines someone's race.

That part is a social construct but in that definition, then yes, race is determined by our DNA.

Except it isn't. It is determined by a host of complex things, language, culture, appearance (in both a transient and phenotypical sense). You keep on making massive leaps directly to your thesis. You say something, skin tone plays a part in race, and then jump directly to what you're arguing for, genetics are the basis of race. You completely neglect the actual argument that gets you from A to B. There's an implict one, and I'm well aware of it, but it's essentially wrong for the reasons I've spelled out several times above. The most obvious example here is "passing".

The point about the squid cartoons is that "black" means skin of a certain colour. Other people wanted to talk about "afro people" and "afro features", which in my opinion is removed from any real purpose of anyone being identified as or self-identifying as black, since in this instance skin colour takes precedent. I even tried to make a point in that thread about one of the darkest tribes we know of being black despite not "African" any more than Europeans are -- and yet someone mentioned how that doesn't mean they are "black".

I don't see your point here. The reason someone said that doesn't mean they are black, which I don't necessarily agree with, is because it's not just genetic. Part of the reason I don't understand why you're saying this is because this just highlights exactly what I am saying. Race is social even if something like genetics has some part in how some people are identified quite often.

All of that is a mix of unscientific personal opinion, semantics, social etc. but it is the discussion we have when we take these tests.

Now I'm really confused. You admit it's unscientific, though I get the sense you mean this in a negative way, and social. That is my point.

Would you believe that when I was like, 14 or so, I asked a random black dude on a train who had some features like I did and asked him what his heritage he was? I mean, at that point I was trying to figure out half of my heritage. Ofc this dude just chuckled etc. but the point is, I wanted him to tell me something that 23andme is advertised for.

So why would you ask a random person about this? What does the fact that you did that say about what the category of race is and how it is determined? I'm assuming you had no indication that he was a geneticist, yet you figure, correctly, that his understanding of what "heritage" he had was legitimate for categorizing both him and, presumably to at least some extent, you.

Of course, it isn't going to tell you where your great great great mother lived, but I for sure know that it isn't from East Africa or Central Asia.

The purpose of this? Meh. It shouldn't matter outside of our health, and we can already see what we look like, but no one is expecting any more than that.

Look at this thread though. That's clearly not true, people are clearly expecting this to tell them something about who they are in some platonic sense. That's part of my issue with it, besides the general epistemological ones of course.

Anyway, to clarify and tl;dr, I think most people know the race groups provided in census forms aren't at all something you can pinpoint to certain DNA combinations etc. But for phenotypes that we do have, where they might come from and wonder about our recent heritage, these tests are just merely okay for that stuff.

I'm not saying they literally do nothing, I'm saying people's understanding of our ability to interpret them, specifically translating them from a genetic to a social context, is deeply problematic and rests on even more problematic understandings of what race is.

 

[Izuna]

Okay, I think we need to take a step back for a moment here.

As you say race isn't determined by DNA, could you define what you mean by race?

Because, (sorry for repeating) I say it isn't something you can systematically define. But as a social construct, in society we have this thing we call race.




I am trying to see what you mean and if you mean, how we conduct ourselves, our cultural personality, I don't think genetics has anything to do with that, but I also don't consider our culture to be our race. Which, paradoxically, is something I agree doesn't really exist.

So as a simple question, what is race to you?


I'll address the rest of your posts after.

 

[BlastCore]

I'm like a 1/3 Caucasian. Still not enough to evade ICE's gaze though

 

[Cocaloch]

Okay, I think we need to take a step back for a moment here.

As you say race isn't determined by DNA, could you define what you mean by race?

Because, (sorry for repeating) I say it isn't something you can systematically define. But as a social construct, in society we have this thing we call race.

Yes, this is exactly correct. Trying to grasp too hard at what race is, as with most social constructs, is incredibly difficult because they are fluid and operative. Race isn't one things, but many different things at different times. But all of them are socially contextual, not genetic. No one is going around looking at people's DNA to determine their race. So while it's hard to say what race is, and I think the harder you grasp at it the less anything is there, we can say what it isn't, in this case material.

If you pressed me, I'd probably say race is a grouping of different levels of social categories roughly analogous to gender and class. Generally it's understood to be a group of people defined by a theoretical relationship to a particular political unit, speakers of a specific language, or culture, but, to borrow from Anderson, this is an imagined relationship. Often reference to an ideal type member of the group is employed as well, but that complicates this greatly.

I am trying to see what you mean and if you mean, how we conduct ourselves, our cultural personality, I don't think genetics has anything to do with that, but I also don't consider our culture to be our race. Which, paradoxically, is something I agree doesn't really exist.

Culture isn't race, and it isn't a singular for that matter, but we also associate specific cultures with race both in the ideal form and in applied forms, i.e. African culture vs creolized African culture in the western hemisphere. We still understand the latter in reference to the former race wise, but we also tend to understand both as being legitimate even if the former is indeed a kind of ideal type.

What is it you agree doesn't exist, culture or race?

I'm actually not saying either doesn't exist, in fact both very clearly do. That being said they aren't material, simply because they are social constructs. That doesn't mean they aren't real at all. I'm a social scientist. I very much believe these things are real, in fact I think they are very very important. Yet that realness needs to be understood as different, though not lesser, than the realness we attribute to the natural world and our knowledge of it. This is part of the problem with positvism here.

 

[Neverforget]

99.9% filipino. Kinda boring.

And the amount of health reports was disappointing. I read that 23andMe used to offer hundreds of reports, including cancer reports until the fda neutered them. Now they only offer a few.

They actually give it to you as raw data, you download it and upload to another website which I forgot the name of and it will give you the health report in more details than 23andme could have done.

 

[Makai]

We don't need petty positivism to explain everything that goes on around us.

I don't understand this at all. It's either true or it's not. And why are you acting like genealogy should be forbidden knowledge?

 

[Izuna]

If you pressed me, I'd probably say race is a grouping of different levels of social categories roughly analogous to gender and class. Generally it's understood to be a group of people defined by a theoretical relationship to a particular political unit, speakers of a specific language, or culture, but, to borrow from Anderson, this is an imagined relationship. Often reference to an ideal type member of the group is employed as well, but that complicates this greatly.

Right then. I hope I can congregate my point.

What you say is, of course, interesting nuanced and informative, but it isn't the simple definition people use. By saying, on its own, "race is not determined by genetics", people aren't instantly assuming your more complicated meaning of the word "race".

This is why I said it was semantics because it's sort of like saying "my MacBook isn't a PC". It's not true in a technical sense but we all know what is meant.

In the very simple sense, what race means to people who don't study social science, it is pretty much 100% determined by genetics and has nothing to do with culture.

That's it, pretty much. I'm only arguing your statement in that regard.

For this overly simple and unhelpful definition of race, the one that is used with the most frequency, it's what separates babies in a ward (disregarding how PoC babies look, but you get the picture). The word doesn't carry the weight of any of the things that are part of the meaning of "race" to you, at least according to your above statement, to the vast majority of people or to myself when I disagreed with your initial statement that it isn't determined by genetics.

But anyway, outside of all this, I'd love to have this discussion on genetics and ethnicity (with does carry the more convoluted meaning you provide for race) more, but I gotta get up for work.

 

[Kotetsu534]

I'll find out in a few weeks. Most of my family's history is known (back at least 3/4 generations at minimum) and I expect to be a mix of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon, mostly the former. I'd expect a fairly even mix of northern English, Perthshire Scots, and western Irish. There's a suggestion that I might be 1/8th or even 1/4er Jewish since my grandmother's dad was Jewish (we have no idea about his wife), so that will be interesting to see.

 

[Novocaine]

I got a test for my mums birthday earlier this year. We always thought we were of Scottish descent but we turned out to be a mix of Scandinavian and French with a little bit of Indian.

Nevertheless I still swear like a Scotsman.

 

[dabig2]

They actually give it to you as raw data, you download it and upload to another website which I forgot the name of and it will give you the health report in more details than 23andme could have done.

Are you referring to Promothease?

 

[Metroxed]

hahaha.. so here is one.. my wife has a long long lost older sister (who was put up for adoption), who recently made contact (to great reception!)

anywho, my (new) sister-in-law's father was black, and my wife's mom was native american. So when my sister-in-law was adopted (70s), the agency was under the impression (and stated) that she was latino (specifically cuban). So she spent 45+ years of her life believing she was Cuban and black, and did an ancestry/DNA thing and came back..... first black, then native american, then white mix. zero latino DNA.

so she said (half joking half serious) that she had been repping and celebrating cuba all of these years to find out she was 0% cuban, and what she thought was cuban was american indian.

edit - though the be fair, their mom's tribe is southwestern US... and essentially an extension of mexican/regional heritage.. so there are a ton of similarities with their tribe to mexicans/north american latinos.

But the results make absolute sense with what she believed. There isn't any "Latino DNA" because Latino is not a race. Most Latinos are mixed race, usually a combination of European, Western African and Native American.

23andme had a video with some Latino woman doing a test and even they explained this, I would expect someone with actual Latino ancestry to know that Latino is not a race,you can't have Latino DNA, that would be like having Canadian DNA.

 

[Kain-Nosgoth]

never took one, but we probably have some Mongolian DNA, since both my sister and my cousin were born with a typical birthmark from there!

we can see it a little bit in their eyes too

we're european

 

[Deserted Maniac Island]

You both make great points, thanks for responding. I just worry about living a lie. There's this whole thing where white as hell people claim to be Indian royalty and stuff that's annoying, and I don't want to do that.

I was raised off rez so I am not steeped in the culture (jaahn) but have a ton of friends from Dine` and other tribes (Yakima and Pueblo mostly) and I'm trying to learn the language since so many are just not and it's dying out which would be awful.

Maybe I won't get the test. I guess it would be only marks on paper and not what's in my soul.

Edit: I'm really passionate about saving the language because it's so beautiful and just evolves with the times. Good example: New York City used to be Kin Yot aah Dee's (I can never do the damned accents on my phone ugh they are unique) which means "Where the buildings stand tall." Since 2001 it's evolved into a memorial: Kin Naaldozi: Where the buildings fell

Identity is difficult concept to grapple with personally, especially for indigenous communities, who faced systematic destruction of their people and culture. You shouldn't worry about being associated with white people who claim to have "native roots," you seem to have a respect and reverence for the culture and language, that those people don't have at all.

All my life people have denied my identity as an Arab/Muslim, because I look different, even though I was born and raised in the middle east and fluent in Arabic. The most important thing is how you consider yourself and the ways you reflect your identity.

 

[Cocaloch]

I don't understand this at all. It's either true or it's not.

What's either true or it's not, it's too vague for me to be sure? Is it the original issue about race being genetic? I clearly think it's not true, so I'm not sure what the point of this would be.

Anyway, the statement something always must be true or false is clearly wrong in the abstract.

Ethnicity is not genetic, see the many reasons I've given in this thread, and you haven't really argued for why it would be with the exception of the odd implicit argument that hereditary things must be genetic. That's a pretty weak argument. See my class example.

Again you're also disagreeing with essentially everyone who studies race and ethnicity here.

And why are you acting like genealogy should be forbidden knowledge?

I'm not acting like that at all. I don't think you're understanding what that statement was. It wasn't saying we don't need to understand what's going on around us, it's saying we don't need positivism to do that.

Right then. I hope I can congregate my point.

What you say is, of course, interesting nuanced and informative, but it isn't the simple definition people use.

I think you're half right here. It certainly isn't a definition that most people would come up with if we pressed them on it. That being said I never claimed it was. What that definition does is describes what people are doing when they talk about race regardless of what they think they are doing.

By saying, on its own, "race is not determined by genetics", people aren't instantly assuming your more complicated meaning of the word "race".

Well yes, that's the entire point of me posting on this topic. I, and essentially everyone that works on the topic, think people's understanding of race is quite bad and often misses what they are even doing when they engage with race. When I say it's not genetic I'm telling them their understanding is not particularly good because they are centering it on some nebulous, and it is never defined, conception of genetics. I'm arguing for a better understanding.

This is why I said it was semantics because it's sort of like saying "my MacBook isn't a PC". It's not true in a technical sense but we all know what is meant.

Right, I knew what you were getting at with the semantics. Which is why I pointed out it's turned into a pejorative. This is about what we talk about when we talk about words. Of course that's a semantic problem. However unlike the lay understanding semantics are important. In fact they are extremely centrally important to everything because words are how we understand the world around us.

Thinking race is genetic completely misses how people actually interact with race, and often leads to problematic thinking like scientific racism and eugenics. Less importantly it also strengthens a positivistic viewpoint over a social scientific and humanistic one.

Besides the external issues, the genetic understanding of race is also not internally consistent. How would we come to strictly define races in a scientifically acceptable way? How would that definition be something that we can say is actually part of biology itself instead of mostly derivative of extra-biological social concerns.

In the very simple sense, what race means to people who don't study social science, it is pretty much 100% determined by genetics and has nothing to do with culture.

This is the crux of my whole argument. People think that, but they are wrong. Social scientists don't pull definitions of social categories out of thin air, we find them through looking at what people are actually doing and the effect of what they are actually saying rather than what people think they are doing and saying.

When people talk about race they think of it as genetic, but the way in which it they actually operate with it isn't. Language usage, appearance, categorization, none of these things are genetic. Moreover the actual content and meaning of the boxes we put people in is clearly not genetic, and here I think everyone would agree with me if pressed.

I get people think about a certain skin tone when they want to put people in boxes, but what I'm saying is that very thought is social and not biological. The meaning of the box is social and not biological, and the effect is social and not biological. Genetics play a role in phenotype which also plays a role in being categorized, but in practice this is both auxiliary and not direct. Think of passing here, and how much that complicates the whole scheme.

For this overly simple and unhelpful definition of race, the one that is used with the most frequency, it's what separates babies in a ward (disregarding how PoC babies look, but you get the picture). The word doesn't carry the weight of any of the things that are part of the meaning of "race" to you, at least according to your above statement, to the vast majority of people or to myself when I disagreed with your initial statement that it isn't determined by genetics.

Again see above for why I'm doing what I'm doing. People think this yes, but what I'm saying is they are wrong to think like that.

 

[Borgnine]

From my understanding, all these tests do is give you an idea of where in the world your ancestors lived. That's it. It doesn't tell you your race or your ethnicity. Just from which historical populations you likely descend from. You're talking about this like we're going to use it to create new Nuremberg laws.

 

[ghostofsparta]

But the results make absolute sense with what she believed. There isn't any "Latino DNA" because Latino is not a race. Most Latinos are mixed race, usually a combination of European, Western African and Native American.

23andme had a video with some Latino woman doing a test and even they explained this, I would expect someone with actual Latino ancestry to know that Latino is not a race,you can't have Latino DNA, that would be like having Canadian DNA.

It's sad how many people don't know this.

I'm really interested in the history of how Latino/Hispanic took over. My guess is the white controlled media in Central/South America, since originally Latino/Hispanic were Europeans.

 

[Cocaloch]

It doesn't tell you your race or your ethnicity. Just from which historical populations you likely descend from.

Yes, this is literally what I'm saying if we replace "historical", in no way a scientific category, with "geographical". Meanwhile plenty of the people in this thread are absolutely under the impression that it will tell you your race or ethnicity. That's what I've been arguing against.

You're talking about this like we're going to use it to create new Nuremberg laws.

I'm talking about this like people are using an understanding of race and ethnicity that shares fundamental principles with the understanding behind the creation of the Nuremberg laws. Which makes sense because people are using an understanding of race and ethnicity that shares fundamental principles with the understanding behind the creation of the Nuremberg laws.

This is not saying people in this thread are nazis. It's saying this is not only a bad way to look at things in a purely academic sense, but that this understanding has had serious real world repercussions.

I think this is problematic for a large number of reasons, a number of which I described above. Feel free to take issue with any of them in particular.

 

[Morat]

Yeah, they told me I was human.

 

[Borgnine]

Yes, this is literally what I'm saying if we replace "historical", in no way a scientific category, with "geographical". Meanwhile plenty of the people in this thread are absolutely under the impression that it will tell you your race or ethnicity. That's what I've been arguing against.

Well ok, I think this has mostly been coming from you but all right. When you replied to my comment that this test will be able to tell you whether or not you're descended from an Indian princess I didn't think I needed to completely spell out precisely that I mean descended from the native population that historically lived on the continent of America. Maybe you've been in academia too long but this is how people talk. We're just having some fun in here, it's ok.

 

[Izuna]

When people talk about race they think of it as genetic, but the way in which it they actually operate with it isn't. Language usage, appearance, categorization, none of these things are genetic. Moreover the actual content and meaning of the boxes we put people in is clearly not genetic, and here I think everyone would agree with me if pressed.

I very much disagree with you. Appearance, for one, what do you mean? Facial features? Size of noses, hair types etc? This is genetic.

Language? What? What does race have to do with language?

At the very least in the UK, people don't consider a black person to have any inherent cultural differences, they simply appear different according to their skin, hair type, etc. So since that's how we differenciate race, it's 100% genetic.

What you seem to be describing is what people mean by ethnicity when it is separated from the word race. Which, in the UK, isn't typically done on official forms.


Tbh it sounds like some cultural difference in how we understand race to begin with.

 

[Cocaloch]

Well ok, I think this has mostly been coming from you but all right.

Please reread the thread then. People in this thread are saying things like this test will show that they are "Celtic" and "Anglo-Saxon". Are you sure this is coming from me, or are in people in this thread clearly under the impression that being English or Scottish or White or Latino is genetic?

When you replied to my comment that this test will be able to tell you whether or not you're descended from an Indian princess I didn't think I needed to completely spell out precisely that I mean descended from the native population that historically lived on the continent of America.

It's not that you need to spell it out further, it's that it's based on a fundamentally problematic misconception.

Maybe you've been in academia too long but this is how people talk. We're just having some fun in here, it's ok.

I know this is just a personal attack, this is some of the more blatant anti-intellectualism I've seen on this site, under a thin veneer of a joke so I probably shouldn't bother addressing it, but of course I know that this is how people talk. I have a problem with that because I think it causes issues in the real world. I've said that multiple times. I've spelled out what some of them are. You aren't engaging with that.

As much as it'd help your case I'm not just being a pedantic stick in the mud here. There are real repercussions for how we view things like race.

I very much disagree with you. Appearance, for one, what do you mean? Facial features? Size of noses, hair types etc? This is genetic.

Appearance has some genetic basis, but it also is imparted by other things. Clothing choice, makeup, and hygiene practices force instance. As I've said many times I'm not denying appearance plays a role. I'm denying the fact that genes having an effect on your appearance coupled with appearance having an effect on how people are categorized racially means that race is genetic. As I mentioned above there are a bunch of argumentative steps there that are skipped.

Again I'd recommend you think about how passing works here. What does passing mean under your conception of race? How does that work?

Language? What? What does race have to do with language?

Code-switching is a pretty obvious example.

At the very least in the UK, people don't consider a black person to have any inherent cultural differences, they simply appear different according to their skin, hair type, etc.

There is no such thing as inherent culture, but you're incorrect if you think that there is absolutely no association of black people with certain cultural ideas in Britain. Britain is more nuanced on this topic compared to the US because of the much more developed sense of class though.

What you seem to be describing is what people mean by ethnicity when it is separated from the word race. Which, in the UK, isn't typically done on official forms.
.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_British

Race and ethnicity are always going to be intertwined ideas. The original sense of the word race is what you're saying is ethnicity now. Differences in usage are going to be questions of degree not kind. What I'm describing here is Race, Ethnicity, and Race-Ethnicity. Which all exist on a kind of continuum of social category levels.

Tbh it sounds like some cultural difference in how we understand race to begin with.

You're right, but I'd say the cultural difference is academic vs lay. But here the academic one takes the lay understanding into account. That understanding derives from many examinations into the lay understanding itself and its usage.

It's also not that I don't understand what you're saying, I absolutely do, it's that I disagree with it. I do not think there is a valid construction of race that places it into a scientific category as opposed to a social one.

This is true even if some things in the scientific sphere impact the social one. I mean that's always true isn't it. The social world is built upon the natural one. There are reasons within physics for why the entirety of history happened. This doesn't mean history is something for physicists to study, or that historical categories are mechanical in nature. They aren't.

Again, the vast majority of scientists, social-scientists, and humanists would not say race is genetic. They do not use scientific methods to examine race. They use social-scientific and humanistic ones.

 

[99Luffy]

Just wondering are 23andme reports updated 'forever?'
A friend of mine did hers earlier in the year, checked it again recently and her reports were updated with a bit more information.

 

[Media]

Just wondering are 23andme reports updated 'forever?'
A friend of mine did hers earlier in the year, checked it again recently and her reports were updated with a bit more information.

I think (just guessing) that as they add more and more DNA profiles to their databases they find out more things/connections and add them as well?