Enoril

Yes, lost my long-time friend and fiancée (a car hit us… I survived, she didn’t) while coming back from the beach. We were living together, doing our studies together at the same university and we were in planification stage of our wedding and may be soon parent (i will never know…)

I’ve dropped all of that, couldn’t continue without her, never came back to my town and moved far from it. I switched off my brain for 6 months, refiling paper and ink in a littke shop.

So a complete change of life due to a 5 min event and a drunk driver who didn’t stop to help…

One day, a little old lady who i was helping told me a sentence i will never forgot: “young man, you seems very intelligent/clever… i hope you don’t plan to do your actual job forever”

She was rigth, i was destroying myself in this shitty job. So i sent resume to the big companies around me, at random. To do something totally different than my original formation.

I got hired in a very big corpororation at a middle entry level (as i didn’t got my engineer diploma). In the following decades, I’ve focused only on my job (was still in denial), slowly raising in the organization, and I’ve managed to have a very good career that exceed now - by far - the level i would had with the initial diploma. And because i started by the low level, i have a real good experience that help me a lot today.

But all this success and money didn’t stop me to encounter several depression periods, burn-out, etc… I’m following a therapy since my last very serious depression 2 years ago but i’m still unable to get in couple. I’m still working on that.

Sometime, i wonder what could have been our life if we departed 5 min earlier or later. Or if i didn’t encounter this old grandma (probably dead today) in this shop.

It’s crazy how our life and direction can be so random.

I totally agree with you here. These rules don’t make racism disappear but make it far more difficult to use it as a tool (passively or on-purpose).

At least if someone (anybody, including politician, company) use these terms, they will be immediatly stopped with more ease than your current system.

You still have a need for watcher (justice system, neutral party like associations) to keep track BUT nothing official can track your race in any documents at all level. That include the resume of an employe or even a customers service listing. You will have immediate sanction and bad PR for the company/individual if you do that.

Same for your religion or your political party by the way. They are too much officialy tracked and categorized!

Racism will always exists unfortunately but all these laws can reduce the global impact on the population. And put on shame the one using it as discriminative element.

We are in 2024 and they still use the word “race” to segregate the American population in several groups. So no surprise a DNA service could be so popular in the USA.

If they were American citizen and just that - without subdivision and the legal right to ask or use their gene, color skin or whatever_they_think_is_important_to_distinguish_themself - well a lot of issues and strange “behaviour” (aka racisme) would have disapeared.

Or at least decreased as nobody would have the legal tools and data to enforce it: gerrymanding, blaming a vote on a “community”, having your town split in “community” sectors and no shame at all to call it like that officially! Which others country put “chinatown” on their map?

As a teenager, I was shocked by this fact when visiting the USA 25 years ago. That and the fact i have found in a normal marketplace unprotected ammunition sold near the baby milk. “baby stuff, baby stuff, 9mm ammo… what!?!”

This DNA service is just the result of this global problem: the american society and its laws are still allowing passive racism.

So americans want to prove (to themself, to others?) via DNA results that they can’t be racist because they have a black friend sorry : black DNA ancestors.

Some will tell you: “ho it’s just for fun”. But is fun really the only motivation here?

And congrat to them as they don’t only expose themself (genetic data are priceless and should be protected at all costs) but also they expose all their children, children’s children, etc. These chidren probably wouldn’t have agreed to that if they were born.