You can send a sample of your DNA to ancestry.com or one of its competitors, and they will tell you where your forebears came from, your ethnic mix going back many generations, and all sorts of things about your family tree that might end up surprising you. Clearly the people who subscribe to such services would like to know the truth about themselves and where their genes came from.<\/p>\n
Yet when it comes to other things, we might not be so eager to know the truth about ourselves. I’m thinking in particular about our attitudes about race, gender and other groups of people that society likes to lump together.<\/p>\n
As I watch the various responses to the tragedies in Ferguson and on Staten Island, I think that one of the tricky aspects of trying to discuss all of this is that most people don’t realize that they themselves harbor prejudices. Almost anybody you talk to will assure you that they themselves are not prejudice. Yet they are perfectly comfortable with the thought that a very large number of other<\/i> people are indeed prejudiced.<\/p>\n
Suppose we had the equivalent of genetic testing, but one that gives you a map of your prejudices, racial or otherwise, that you yourself never knew you were harboring.<\/p>\n
I would argue that a conversation in the U.S. about race could only be helped by such self-knowledge. After all, there is no shame in harboring prejudices. All of us have irrational emotional responses to things, and many of those responses stem from times in our early childhood when we had no control over whatever nutty ideas our all-powerful parents may have been feeding us.<\/p>\n
The real question is what you actually do and say, how you treat and speak about others, whatever your inner demons may be. It can only help to learn about prejudices in your own soul that you never knew you had. To speak truly about anything, you must first know the truth about yourself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
You can send a sample of your DNA to ancestry.com or one of its competitors, and they will tell you where your forebears came from, your ethnic mix going back many generations, and all sorts of things about your family tree that might end up surprising you. Clearly the people who subscribe to such services … Continue reading “Psycho-genetic testing”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15508"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15508"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15508\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15509,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15508\/revisions\/15509"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}