Oh look: this has become a thread about whiteness, because they’re victims too!
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Same as it ever was.
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Do you have any videos you can share that are good at explaining what you are getting ?
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Well, right, it got very meta here. Exactly, you can’t play the victim game if you’re a white male. It makes it hard to relate. Like, if someone talks about what it’s like to be gay, I can at least say, oh, I can relate because I’m Jewish and there are things people don’t get about that. But then white man, you can’t play. You aren’t allowed to relate to people’s issues around identity.
But I do think that a lot of other people are pointing out lot of real education that needs to go on about what it’s like to live with a certain kind of identity that isn’t in the majority.
I have a good friend who is trans and she is super informative about what issues she deals with,.I hate that she is always having to catch me on basic assumptions I make (like I assumed that because a woman that was a new acquaintance for us both was married and had kids that she was married to a MAN. D’oh). But I like learning about what it’s like for her, though I can’t really totally relate.
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Again; not “a game.”
Metaphors aside:
It’s very hard to take someone seriously about how ‘persecuted’ they are when they already have advantages that many other people have never had.
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I ran into a woman I know the other day, and she told me she had recently started dating a new man, but added, “But he’s really depressed, so I’m not sure if it’s going anywhere.” And I said, “But of course he’s depressed. Would you date a guy without a mental illness?” Now there’s a lot to unpack in that joke and how I knew it would be understood between us, but basically it just seems like most white men actively behave like privileged assholes, and when you meet one who doesn’t they end up being gay, trans, mentally ill, or otherwise part of an invisible minority that lets them in on what it’s like to not have privilege.
I do have a few hetero, cis, neurotypical, white male friends from non-impoverished backgrounds without disabilities (you know, peak privilege), but even though I’d say they are people I like (and people I should make an effort to see more often) I don’t think any of them have been especially laudable in their relationships with women. My father-in-law who seems like a perfectly nice person and who I like just fine, during the election, said something about how if Hillary won he thought Bill would be pulling the strings and I recall thinking, “What could that possibly be based on other than sexism?” (I still like him just fine, it was just weird). I’ve always thought very well of my sister’s husband, as well as the husband of another friend, but I just found out over the last few months that both suffer from depression. (I can actually think of one guy who appears to have all those traits that land one at the top of the privilege heap and seems totally empathetic and non-discriminatory).
I brought this up once in the “Fuck Today” thread. I’d like to think that we can understand one another’s situations via empathy for others rather than by having parallel experiences, but examples from my experience seem so rare that it makes me wonder if they don’t just have an invisible disability I don’t know about.
I am, from the perspective of most people who know me, a hetero cis able-bodied well-enough-to-do white man with no disabilities, and I know that experience very well. Still, I have never had trouble “playing” (shoutout to @Melizmatic on not being a game). I was about to make a huge list of times when people have reached out to me or included me in ways that white men don’t get reached out to or included (e.g. four women have asked me for advice on feminine hygiene products) but I realized that would be more for me than for anyone else here (I usually double check things I think about myself against evidence I have for those claims, which can seem indistinguishable from bragging over the internet, but is actually just self-distrust). So I don’t really buy into the rhetoric about white men being excluded somehow because I’ve been a white man and I have never been excluded. I think white men exclude themselves by their behaviour.
ETA: Tons of other people also exclude themselves by their behaviour. White men don’t have a monopoly on being jerks or anything.
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Which aspect?
My mom’s bro came up 10% American Indian – presumably Maya – but everyone in our family tree we’ve identified is either born in Spain or has ancestors all in Spain. But there’s a lot of blanks and someone somewhere introduced it. Also, nothing to say the men identified as fathers are the real fathers. Or that the child wasn’t adopted outright.
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Yup, exactly. And that’s when volunteers like me step in: when someone contacts us and says “My DNA test doesn’t match up with what my family told me.” Happens a lot more than people realize.
The official term is NPE: Non Parental Event. Can be anything from formal or informal adoption to an affair to a parent dying in childbirth or within the first couple of years of a child’s life and the other parent remarrying quickly (which was normal) and all records for the kids showing only the new spouse’s info.
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I found one of those, I think. My great-grandfather’s brother died in a boating accident (1890’s) leaving behind a young wife and an infant. She remarried and in some censuses the child is listed with the new husband’s last name.
You do family history / genealogy stuff for a living? How’d I miss that?
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Not for a living. It’s one of my hobbies. CeCe Moore is a professional in the field of genetics and has the official title (and blog) of “Your Genetic Genealogist”, but basically that’s what I am too, just for kicks. There are a lot of us, actually. We all have our areas of expertise, so if someone comes to me and I wouldn’t be the best person to help I don’t have to feel guilty for saying so, because there are plenty of other people who would be a better fit.
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You’d love my sister in law. She came from a small family, parents, one sister, one aunt, one cousin, no great aunts or uncles on either side, least none that were alive when she was growing up. Then she married into my giant sprawling family where we didn’t know who was actually related to whom or how, everyone was a “cousin” and voila, instant family genealogist! LOL - she takes genealogy road trips with her genealogy friends to peer over old census records and church birth records. 
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But does she make everyone do DNA tests?
That’s the crossroads we’re at now: combining old-fashioned legwork and research with DNA testing. Doesn’t matter what the paperwork says, if your DNA says different. It’s still more art than science, though, so understanding what might or might not be shown by a DNA test can be tricky. That’s where people like me come in.
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Haha! No! But MrPants sister is always after us to do 23&Me and… I dunno mang, I’m a little weirded out with giving all my DNA to a for profit [American] Company.
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How do you feel about the reliability of those consumer tests? I’ve heard bad things about their process and the standards they’re held to for novelty.
Yeah: DON’T DO 23andMe. I don’t have time now to get into it, but your instinct about the company is spot-on.
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It depends on what you’re expecting to get from them, and also how well the people who’ve told you things understand the process.
For example, I’ll bet you’re talking about the fact that 23andMe makes it sound like you’re going to get a report you can hand your doctor that will spell out whether or not you need to be tested for various genetic diseases and disorders. To make matters worse, most people don’t understand either genetics nor statistics, so they think that “you have a 4% greater chance than the average person with western European heritage of having blue eyes” means the computer algorithm is ALL WRONG because they have hazel eyes.
There are a few (literally, 2 or 3) disorders that are on one SNP, which is known, and which is tested for. Yes, if you’re wondering whether or not you will get Huntington’s Chorea, the 23andMe test will answer that question. But anything else, even if one or two SNPs are known, the vast majority are not. You might have some SNPs that give you a slightly greater chance of breast cancer, while some others give you better odds, but then there are others we haven’t discovered yet, so what does that really add up to? Besides, a 10% greater risk of developing something that normally only happens in, say, 0.2% of the population doesn’t really up your risk factor much at all. But most people don’t understand that.
tl;dr : doctors will not accept a 23andMe test instead of an actual genetic test done in a hospital-based lab.
23andMe (here we go, @Missy_Pants!) makes all sorts of promises to get people to test. The testers aren’t the clients; the researchers who buy the aggregated data are the real clients. The more questionnaires you fill out about your family and your medical history, the more valuable your test results are…to them. In fact, 23andMe tweaked their test so that their newest version tests significantly fewer heritage/ethnicity/ancestral SNPs in favor of ones that researchers have indicated they’d like more of. They still claim taking their test will help you find out about your ancestors, because they know that’s a big draw for people deciding to buy a test, but they don’t support it at all.
Now, in general, determining ethnicity from DNA tests still has a lot of holes. It’s more art than science, as we say. We don’t have enough sample populations to compare against. Most of eastern Asia, for example, or Native American, or Oceania. And all of Europe is a mess (as are some other places) because there has been cross-pollination for thousands of years. So your result might say British Isles and/or Germany but you know your family is from northern France with vital document records going back for centuries. And the percentages are intelligent guesstimates in many cases, especially when the different lines of your family come from basically the same part of the world. It’s much easier to determine, say, 50% Chinese Han and 50% Scandinavian than 40% Germany, 12% northern European, 10% southern European, 8% Balkans, 5% western European undefined, etc. which all adds up to someone who is part English, part Polish, and part Dutch.
But, DNA is accurate. If you match someone at 25%, they are closely related to you (half sibling, aunt, etc.). Doesn’t matter if your family stories don’t match…your DNA does, period. If you were told your grandmother was a Cherokee princess (no such thing, btw) and your test comes back 0% for Native and/or East Asian/Chinese/Siberian but with 7% Ashkenazi Jewish and 5% western African, that means your ancestor was trying to hid their more dangerous racial heritage by claiming the slightly less dangerous racial heritage. Things like that.
One thing that’s coming out now is how many NPEs there are. Three siblings will test together, and two of them match at 50% but one matches at only 25%. (These are all approximate percentage numbers, obviously. It could be 24.5% or 25.8%, for example.) Or someone raised by Italians does the test and discovers they have no Italian or other Mediterranean DNA and no one in their match list does either; when confronted, the parents admit they were adopted.
Secrets and lies are coming out. That’s a good thing. It’s good to know the truth, and it’s also useful to know that you might not be able to rely on your family’s medical history.
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Some people have tracked back pretty far. I know of two families in different countries that trace to the GRA for example.
Almost the same here. But considering that Jews didn’t do family names for most of our history it’s not so important to me.
I’ve got a number of ZA Jewish friends who put it Mose as "we weren’t Afrikaans but we weren’t Black either "
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An allusion to the (very good, and relevant) Mike Leigh movie?
No, totally inadvertent!
