Your DNA Results Came Back….
March 15, 2021
The gift of knowing. For Christmas a year ago, mom decided to bequeath us with it. Knowing what our deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is made up of. These are the tiny instruction manuals the organisms in your body run around carrying. They're needed for you to develop, live and reproduce. This recipe, found in every single cell is, passed down from your parents.
As you might imagine, I was looking forward to finding out exactly what recipe makes up the Amber sitting before you. I wanted to know what genes I received that gave me these kinky curls, these sparse eyebrows, and these hobbit feet. For years mom told us we were Scottish, Irish, and Pakistani…and a little American Indian (but she didn’t know from which tribe). It made sense. She’s white and dad was from Pakistan. The general “knowing” from which people group you came from gives one a sense of stability. One would think anyway.
So, when I finally got my results, I was a little…shooketh.
Scandinavian, Italian, South Asian and…one percent Inuit?? So mom was right, but a little off at the same time. Still a tossed salad, but with different flavors than what I was used to being told. No Scottish and no Irish…not even a little?
This opens the hatchet for a non-definitive dwelling, which leads to zero conclusions, on the term “race.” New Oxford American Dictionary defines the term as, “each of the major groupings into which humankind is considered (in various theories or contexts) to be divided on the basis of physical characteristics or shared ancestry.”
That’s fair I guess. But, the ambiguity in this definition leaves an unsatisfied, bad taste in my mouth that I can’t quite explain. What I am really trying to sort out in this stream of thought here is what we have been taught vs. what we experience vs. “time and place” and how all of these factors contribute to the term race. The cultures that influence this person are muddied by current realities. So, what is the modern human race, if not a compilation of histories that have overlapped and intermingled over centuries?
I feel like Jackie Chan in the 1998 film, “Who Am I?”