Race, Ethnic Communities, Genealogy and DNA

Throughout history, racial and ethnic disagreements have been a driving force in starting wars. During my lifetime, millions of people around the world have lost their lives as a result of "ethnic cleansing" and racial strife. In the United States, racial conflict is a constant and ongoing theme. Underlying this racial tension are beliefs based on supposition, speculation, and incomplete and inaccurate oral tradition. One outstanding fact that is starting to emerge from the widespread genealogical DNA testing procedures is that for almost everyone, both racial and ethnic purity are illusions.

The above chart has nothing at all to do with DNA testing. It is a chart showing the composition of my ancestors by country of origin taken from the FamilySearch.org Family Tree. Am I Engish? Am I Irish? Am I Danish? Or am I something else entirely? I can claim to be partly American back to the beginnings of European settlement, but does that make me a native American? What happens when I add DNA to the mix from MyHeritage.com?

How much "Italian blood" do I need to claim to be Italian? How did I get Italian DNA? Who are my Middle Eastern ancestors? What happened to my ethnic purity? If there is a racial conflict between any of these groups, whose side am I on? I have "white" friends who would have been subjected to intense segregation in the southern part of the United States if their DNA testing results had been known showing that they had more than "one drop of Black blood." Because I have Middle Eastern ancestors will I be subject "ethnic profiling" and questioned when I board and airplane in the United States?

Does the fact that I share over 98% of my DNA with chimpanzees make me a monkey? See "Animals That Share Human DNA Sequences" Perhaps the 90% of my DNA that I share with mice makes me a mouse.

In the past, genealogy has been used to "prove" racial purity. What we are learning today is that any idea that someone is "racially pure" is an illusion. We are all one huge human family and we only differ from our animal and plant cousins by very small percentages of our DNA. If there is one thing that comes out of the extensive genealogical DNA testing is should be that the concept of "race" is destroyed.

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