Hobo stew

When we finally get Medicare For All or whatever our national health service is called, there should be a provision for nationalizing Ancestry, 23andme, and the other "genomic" companies that promise to analyze your saliva and tell you who you are.  Testing is now a hobby for people with disposable income, a vague understanding of DNA and a secret hope that they're descended from royalty.  It needs to be compulsory and universal, like vaccination before the demented came out of the tall grass and began talking to Oprah.

We are a mixed breed, and we should be proud of it.  Every nation is, of course, but all our intermingling occurred in the last five hundred years, not in the mist of pre-literate time.  After tens of thousands of years' worth of hunting expeditions, invasions, migrations, pilgrimages, journeys of exploration and just getting lost, can anyone imagine there is a "pure" race anywhere on earth?  Yet this notion has been the source of much suffering, because the people who need to be confronted with the history contained in their cells are the people who would never seek it out.  Do you think David Duke wants to know his great-great-great-great grandmother came here from Senegal, shackled to the great-great-great-great-grandfather of the man who cuts his grass?  

I have always been suspicious (in Nietzsche's sense) of these companies, probably because of their silly commercials.   You know, the guy who wears lederhosen and yodels until he finds out he's really Scottish, so he acquires a kilt and some bagpipes to celebrate his breakthrough in self-knowledge.  He's truly happy now, we're supposed to think.  Ask an American what nationality she is and you'll generally get an answer like "Well, I'm one-eighth Italian and one-sixteenth Cherokee and the rest Latvian," not "I'm American."  How long will it take before we see ourselves as a nation?

Fact:  most of the stories you were told by Nana or Uncle Paulie are wrong, because they were lied to by parents who wanted to protect them in a place where it was unsafe to be Navajo or Jewish or Algerian.  Fact:  Americans have "passed" for white from the beginning, to have a chance at freedom, education, employment and decent housing.  (A daughter of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson lived in Philadelphia as a white woman and nobody was the wiser.)  Fact:  the "mongrelization" that the racists dread happened long ago.  Now we need to make our peace with it, and that's where the compulsory DNA testing comes in.  And if it turns up a genetic predisposition to a disease or a birth defect, so much the better.

And the sooner the better.  Asked an inconvenient question about her boss's racism today, a White House employee demanded of the reporter, "What's your ethnicity?"  I hope he responded, "American.  What's yours?"