A little Monday mirth..Sorry, I was looking for the alliteration...
My brother has been looking into our family heritage and, to get a sense of our origins, did the good ol' DNA analysis thingy...
I was born and raised in Africa. South Africa, to be precise.
All my life I benefited, however ignorantly initially and ultimately unwillingly, from a regime that used ethnicity, skin colour and hair curls (pencil test) to determine if you were human or lesser than human...somewhere just above animal.
Yes...Apartheid! A blight on the historical record of humankind.
The tests were all phenotypical, so far as I am aware.
Genetic testing was not a "thing" in those days.
So... based on the fact that I had blonde hair (then), blue eyes(still) and a fair skin (although I have always tanned very dark and very quickly and never burn...ok ...almost never).... I was and am considered a white male.
Here is the funny bit that makes any attempt at racial bias, no matter the form it takes and who is doing the judging, absolutely and ludicrously pointless and unfounded, in my imho:
That little DNA test thingy revealed that I am only about 80% "white" 😃 .
In "old SA" I would have been labelled 'coloured' and treated as only marginally less despicable than 'the blacks'.
I would have had no say in the political future of the country, no access to education at international levels, no access to career forming jobs and no access to ANY space white people were and did not want non white people to be...
As I write this, my kids are around me muttering things like "thats crazy". They are aware of the history of SA..., but bringing it home like this makes one think of it anew.
When our genetics are so irreversibly intertwined, despite what we look like, no one can ever claim to be truly one or another race...one or another culture...superior or entitled to any more than any other...
This applies to ANY OTHER aspect of perceived identity - claimed or perceived identity.
Simply put if we care so much about identity we will miss the beauty in each other and in ourselves.
We will clash where identities differ, as fewer and fewer people seem to accept "other" in this world again.
haha...I am a walking racial #diversity spectrum (North African - Tunisian, Egyptian and Nigerian, Southern African- Zimbabwean, South Asian - Indian , Nordic- Finnish and Belgian, Germanic - German and Dutch, Meso American - Mayan and Aztec)
Today I identify as.... Kidding! 🤣
We are all, from before our birth into this incarnation and after we depart it, one life.
Identity is overrated...don't base your life on it!
It is integrity that counts!