In solving our socioeconomic problems, it is imperative that we dispel the notion of race. Ancestry tests provide an interesting dynamic that may do more harm than good allowing one of the most potent weapons of those who oppress the vast majority of people, possession of new ammunition.
Basic curiosity may be the reason we are rushing to get ancestry tests, but the results may create a false belief that the results make us different. And this is something that plays into the hands of the Plutocracy as it needs to manufacture nonexistent consequential differences to prevent us from seeing what truly differentiates us, class, the few that are robbing and extracting from the masses.
Ancestry tests are no panacea
I ran across an excellent article titled “Ancestry Tests Pose a Threat to Our Social Fabric” that everyone should read in its entirety. The article points out, using statistics, that we give these tests more credence than we should. But the last few paragraphs sum up a reality we should all internalize.
Even if people don’t take commercial genetic testing seriously, they risk internalizing the outdated social and scientific assumptions hidden behind these reported results. As an anthropologist, I may be overly sensitive to the potential here for psychological, social, and political harm. Yet I cannot get away from the worry that having our genes profiled in this cavalier fashion can all too easily play into popular notions—and prejudices—that aren’t based on science but instead are grounded on Western assumptions about race and what it means to be a human being.
Human races are inventions of the human mind. Substituting words like “ancestry” or “heritage” for the disreputable old term “race” may sound like progress, but it isn’t. These tests are about more than just having fun with expensive laboratory equipment. By encouraging us to see ourselves as a mix of allegedly different ethnic groups, populations, races, and the like rather than as a mix of genes, commercial DNA tests may lend seeming scientific credence to ideas that by now ought to have been long dead and buried—enduring assumptions about human diversity that have ripped the world apart for far too long.
There is much to think about before signing up and sending off your spittle or swab. If you are like me, perhaps you are content with the number of relatives you now have, and you have no pressing need to add genetics data to your curriculum vitae or insurance records. Alternatively, if you do want to have more relatives around your table at Thanksgiving or Christmas than you have now, don’t waste your spit or the time it takes to collect it. You are 99.9 percent related to everyone else on Earth. There is no need to send anything off to anybody. Just look next door and down the street. Open your eyes and your heart. You can have all the cousins you want.
Preferable to ancestry tests, we should consider we should consider doing more of what I discussed in my article of a few years ago titled “America, let’s talk race without fear of saying the wrong thing,” as it applies more now than ever. Talking and dialogue more than testing is the ‘racial act’ we should be about now.
On my media show Politics Done Right, I always use a phrase similar to the following. “When we unite the ghettos, the barrios, and Appalachia, the Plutocracy will cease to exist.” You see, ‘race’ is the weapon and ammunition. When we get rid of that notion, we would have disarmed them.