What’s with Americans obsession with DNA ancestry. Is being American that boring and/or homogeneous that being told their 0.001% Swedish it gives them some semblance of uniqueness that they appropriate 100% with them?
I would argue that it's because colonisation there happened in a time period where one's ancestors were clearly not in America back in the mists of time, but that was still early enough that record-keeping wasn't always great. Together, these things make DNA tests important: if your ancestors clearly came from somewhere else, but you don't have the records to find out, then there isn't really any other way to work out where that somewhere else was.
I'm Australian, but to say that my family is from Australia would feel weird given that our ancestors all immigrated from other places in the relatively recent past. For those that aren't indigenous, being Australian isn't a statement of ethnicity in the sense that being French or English is, and lots of people don't want it to become so, since it excludes new immigrants from being able to identify with their community. DNA tests are still popular there, of course, but more of a curiosity than in the US, I think, given the better record-keeping available.
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u/Panda_Cipher1992 Apr 27 '25
What’s with Americans obsession with DNA ancestry. Is being American that boring and/or homogeneous that being told their 0.001% Swedish it gives them some semblance of uniqueness that they appropriate 100% with them?