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im so early do i help set up or...

I was thinking about this the other day. I was applying for health insurance and the race question came up. The race boxes said white, black, native, and then listed a bunch of nationalities??? Verbatim gave the options of Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Vietnamese, or Other Asian. Like what???? But then ethnicity only had two options. Latino/hispanic or not Latino Hispanic. Like we’re just making stuff up now

I really appreciate how you pointed out how lazy the concept is. Like its attempt to make ethnic Monoliths is so illogical and arbitrary since our histories are only recently "nationalized".
Through making Monoliths, the system erases it's own cultures. Like for example, my known family is German and Swedish, but only 2-3 generations in and we effectively swapped our traditions with "white ones".

Now to actually track down our history and cultures is crazy difficult.
It's just so dumb because it's a system that only harms participants. Excluding the controlling class (well technically they just become printer paper I guess, so maybe they hurt a little bit... But oh well *shrug*)

Gurl! those home DNA tests are storing your DNA indefinitely and selling it to data brokers. There was a case a little while back where one of them was bought out and their database given to god knows who! Don't trust them girliepop!

Huge fan Bittnia!  One of my professors, Dr. Sheena Mason, has a whole framework theory on this that boils down to race abolition and the understanding that we are all one species, racialized differences are social and cultural.  She has a wonderful book I recommend called the Raceless Anti-Racist, do check it out!!  Great work as always, love from upstate❤️

so I am Turkish, Turkey literally splits in two as asian and european, in some sources it is west asian, some sources it is european. middle eastern term itself is also doesn't make sense, before it was called near east. also stupid, because, middle of what and near of what. but my solution as a southeast Turkish, is in summers I am west asian, in winters I am south european, in summers  people wonder if am a terrorist, and in winters people wonder if I can make a good pizza

yk how frustrating it is to watch people debating abritary race structures created by colonizers and debating if a lebanese guy is white while our people are being genocided and thats the more important issue to them

I'm Black American + Choctaw/Cherokee (my black/indigenous side traces back hundreds of years in the US.) + Dominican. It's sooo rare to be mixed with my mixture and atp I just identify as my own race. This video is really well done! I think I want to talk more about my own heritage since I can't ever relate to most narratives that are out there about mixed race.

I also love that, on the topic of race, we can come together and agree on one thing: we’re ALL confused!

I've been feeling this way about the conversations around Raven Symone. I don't hear enough people speaking about the social construct behind race, yet the cultural reclamation behind what has been handed to us.

This is why, as a mixed race person, I just say “I’m a multiracial American of Northwest European and West African descent. If you’d like me to go into more details, I’m happy to provide you with percentage breakdowns and which countries my ancestry comes from specifically.” It solves a lot of confusion about my nationality/ethnicity/race etc. 😅

@bittnia I am a geneticist (PhD in genetics), and part of my research concerns genetic ancestry (the same concept behind the DNA test you advertised). I've had fascinating conversations with fellow scientists about having to define categories of ancestry that are somehow rooted in DNA and statistics. Your "genetic ancestry" is by no means a clear label. For example, your results showed 97% Nigerian, but the concept of Nigerian did not exist before the country of Nigeria, but humans sure did. There's an orthogonal line of questioning here: how does the science of human biology and health interact with the labels that we have constructed to define ancestry, geographic origin, race, and ethnicity. Happy to talk more about current trends in the genetic research community around this topic!

One of my favorite classes in college was Race and Ethnicity in Post War Germany. My prof was a white german american married to a turkish german who would be seen as brown (and frankly, especially in Germany), and she had a very similar thesis as you do. I note that because turkish people have faced a huge amount of racism in post war Germany, as they were brought in as guest works and white germans resent it heavily.  I would absolutely recommend the book "A Love Made of Nothing" by Barbara Honigmann and the graphic novel "Belonging" by Nora Krug. The german title for Belonging is "Heimat" which roughly translates to "home" but has a very complicated meaning, similar to how you explain the concept of being indigenous.

OMG thank you, i always feel crazy when people talk about race as of its more than just a social construct. being any type of “race” is a cultural identity, and even cultural identities are loosey goosey too.

50:58 I think she is referring to Rita Ora, the Albanian famous for blackfishing.

dominican girl here & ngl my own race has always confused me. im dominican & french and my mum is a mestiza from the northern part of DR (Cibao). i live in the UK so am never assumed hispanic, most people think i am Turkish/greek when they meet me. but Turkish and Greek people's race is always disagreed on/debated as well. so ig we'll never know 😭

5:17 american (us) black is such a different cultural landscape to dominican black that I still get what she was saying, I think colorism really ties into it too

6:57 this section really spoke to my soul😭being a Hispanic man that looks very much white when I cut my hair(to the point where old white people think I’m white😂) it is definitely an interesting experience in terms of thinking about my own Identity, especially since I don’t speak Spanish at all well, and I’ve never went to Puerto Rico, so I definitely feel a huge connection with that place, but it’s like only in terms of my ancestry 🤔not really in terms who I am personally, I’ve been whitewashed heavy😭😂

My partner is from Azerbaijani/Turkish and I’m Han-Chinese. While Azerbaijan is located in the Caucasus they are racialized differently than Armenians or Georgians since they’re predominantly Muslim (and the West is islamophobic af), and they’re very Persian looking but there’s a lot of Russians also due to Russian Empire/USSR colonialization (which is very under discussed). This is also due to the way the borders of Azerbaijan were colonially drawn up such that actually 1/3 of people in Iran are actually ethnically Azerbaijani. The region was colonized by the Ottomans, Arabs, and the Russian so they’re Russian speaking Muslims who look Persian. So my partner considers herself brown. So even within a region there is so much complicated history. Similarly in China, there are OVER 50+ ethnic groups. When my partner came to the Central Northern region where I am from she was surprised by how many Muslims and darker skin people there were (sorry we aren’t all actually slim and pale like Red Note influencers want you to think!). And when we say Chinese in the West we mean Han Chinese which is the dominant ethnic group and there’s multiple colonialisms that swept through the region where Mongols and Manchus where once the dominant groups. But now the Han are heavily oppressing the colonized areas of Tibet and Ughyurs in Xinjiang so… but point is there is such a long history of migration and colonialism there in the region that we don’t actually know what ethnic group(s) we are given all the movement. I think the question this brings up is how much each category is actually erased by collapsing so much difference into a monolith. And that is POLITICAL! I think we can’t just say we are all mixed and leave it at that because that eliminates accountability and positionality but when there’s history and records that are lost or destroyed we should acknowledge that all our histories of oppression are intertwined #solidarity