#ethnicity testing

[magnetothemagnificent]

been thinking about this question and hopefully this won't be too awkward to ask. since judaism is itself an ethnicity and religion at the same time, imagine you have ancestors from like idk portugal who converted to judaism centuries and centuries ago and so their descendants are all jewish but don't know about the conversion part. can they call themselves ethnically jewish?

A person becomes part of the Jewish ethnicity when they convert to Judaism. Ethnicity is more than DNA, it's about your peoplehood. As a student of anthropology I honestly don't like how the rise of at-home DNA test kits have put into people's minds their identity is a complicated equation of DNA percentages. People are not math problems. If you were born Jewish you are 100% Jewish. If you converted to Judaism you are 100% Jewish. DNA tests only measure the genes you're more likely to share with certain populations, and even then they're not completely accurate. Ethnicity isn't about blood quantum, at least it shouldn't be.

Here's an example, using myself:

I've never taken a DNA test, and don't intend to, but if I had to guess it would probably give me a result of something like: 58% Ashkenazi Jewish; 25% Northern European; 15% Sephardi Jewish; 2% Northern African.

What does that tell me about my ethnicity? Nothing. It tells me percentages of DNA I have that are most likely shared with certain populations of people from certain geographic regions (haplogroups), but my ethnicity is 100% Jewish and I don't need a DNA test to tell me that, because I know I was born Jewish.

DNA tells you your haplotypes. Peoplehood tells you your ethnicity. And peoplehood is defined by the people themselves.

So yes, the descendents of converts are ethnically Jewish. All Jews are ethnically Jewish.

[nando161mando]

Colonial law and the erasure of Palestine w/Noura Erakat | The Chris Hed...

[rebellum]

Sitting white americans down and holding their hands and giving them a cup of tea and gently explaining that Not All Black People Are American

[kemetic-dreams]

Analysis of classic genetic markers and DNA polymorphisms by Excoffier et al. (1987) found that the Sara are most closely related to the Kunama people of Eritrea.

Both populations speak languages from the Nilo-Saharan family. They are also similar to West African populations, but biologically distinct from the surrounding Cushitic and Ethiopian Semitic Afro-Asiatic-speaking groups

The Sara people are a Central Sudanic ethnic group native to southern Chad, the northwestern areas of the Central African Republic, and the southern border of North Sudan. They speak the Sara languages which are a part of the Central Sudanic language family. They are also the largest ethnic group in Chad.

Sara oral histories add further details about the people. In summary, the Sara are mostly animists (veneration of nature), with a social order made up of several patrilineal clans formerly united into a single polity with a national language, national identity, and national religion. 

[bucephaly]

Its so funny how I'll get anxious abt something, redirect and try to distract myself. And so I'm not thinking about what exactly I was anxious about, but I have lingering anxiety and so it gets assigned to some random other thing

[swagging-back-to]

lying to a kid about if theyre adopted should be classified as abuse and no j am not joking

[noahtally-famous]

hot take (maybe??? idk how much of a "hot" take this is lmao):

out of the two of them: dave's good at cooking, but shawn's better at baking

[magnoliamyrrh]

by this point when i see balkan ppl who think the solution to things is as ethnically pure as possible ethnostates whichever way this is spun i just want to hit them square in the head with a pan. the most effective way to deal with this? yea probably not. is this what i want to do? yes.

[whats-in-a-sentence]

In 1950, UNESCO issued a strong "Statement on Race". It was the product of an internationally distinguished effort – the drafters and commentators included Otto Klineberg, Hermann Muller, and Julian Huxley – and its principal points summarized the new views on the biology of race: The idea of race was merely a convenient tool of classification. Differences between human groups resulted from various combinations of heredity and environment. Racial groupings did not necessarily coincide with ethnic and cultural differences. The results of intelligence tests depended on some combination of innate mental ability and environmental opportunity, and there was no proof that the groups of mankind differ in their innate mental characteristics, whether in respect to intelligence or temperament.

"In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity" - Daniel J. Kevles

[futuristicbarbie]

idk if i understood it right but usa will remove race from university applications..why are ppl calling this problematic and freaking out lol

[thedawningofthehour]

Wait tell us about your mom getting her own name mansplained to her

asdfghjk SO. I don't want to give too many identifiers about my last name because 1) it's not that long, and 2) there's less than two dozen people in the entire US with my last name and I'm related to all of them. Not that I particularly care if people here know my real identity, but my extended family didn't consent to that. (it's everyone's personal decision to keep their online and real life identities separate-I'd default to doing so, especially as a teenager, but everyone's situation is different) (on the plus side it makes my dad's decision to cut contact and hide from us REALLY funny. I know his address, cell number, and place of work. I fucking looked up his house on zillow. I didn't even have to pay anything, it was so easy to find)

BUT THE BASICS is that my name ends with a T. A hard T. And there's a bunch of vowels in the middle that nobody ever knows what to do with. So pretty much everyone at some point asks us how to pronounce our last name. My mom was at work when a new coworker or client asked her. She told them.

And her boss stepped in and fucking argued with her.

"No, it's pronounced like firstpartofname-ey. It's French."

We are not French.

We are not French-Canadian.

Yes, this was my father's name and therefore not the name my mother was born with...but at this point she'd had the name for twenty fucking years. It was her name.

Bonus story I remembered: I was relaying this story on Reddit and some other dude came in and mansplained why this guy must have mansplained my mom's own name to her. He said that German names were routinely butchered in the US, so he was probably trying to correct her on the proper German pronunciation.

For one, no, that definitely is not what he was trying to do, but I also don't think it was authentic German to begin with. That line of my family came from Norway. I don't think they were using the 'proper German pronunciation' even when they immigrated to the United States, because I think that was a few generations removed from when they actually lived in Germany.

And anyway, even if that's not how the pronounce it in Germany, THAT'S HOW WE PRONOUNCE IT HERE.

[dersitedreamr]

Homestuck fan artists’ humanstuck interpretations of some of the kids as Tan People Of An Unspecified Ethnicity/Race

[cafeconbrujeria]

It’s simultaneously true that the Latino erasure in American conjure is WILD, and that some people are way too comfortable reading two tumblr posts and going out to shove graveyard dirt into their purse.

[lifeseccess]

Unveiling Your Roots: Can DNA Tests Really Tell Your Ethnicity

At any point considered the beginnings of your progenitors? With the rise of direct-to-consumer DNA testing companies like AncestryDNA and 23andMe, exploring your heritage has become more accessible than ever. These services analyze your DNA and provide estimates of your ethnicity breakdown. But how accurate are these results, and can a simple DNA test truly determine your ethnicity? read more

[readjthompson]

So, ancestry.com updated my DNA test. Here is my more precise ethnicity estimate.