Race

[MikJerry]

Hello everyone,

I live in Canada and when i meet people they cant help but ask where i am from originally and i ask them to guess. Some of them think i look Chinese. I am happy with that. But the thing is when i ask a Chinese person the same question their answer is completely the opposite, they think i look European.

I would like to see what you think because i am not sure what my ethnicity is. well the thing i know is that my ancestors moved and migrated from all around the world and there is no one place i can call home.

a picture of me is attached.

thanks in advance

[Tres Juicy]

I would guess at somewhere in the middle (eastern Europe into Asia - Mogolia maybe?)

[iNow]

I think you're a homosapien. I could be wrong, though.

[tomgwyther]

Definitely Homosapien, possibly Peru or nearby. Could you ask your parents?

[michel123456]

You look like a friend of mine when he was young. He was charismatic, he ran fast, the girls were at his feet.

The moustache and black hair makes you look latin, like a spanish prince of the renaissance. Enjoy the black hair before it is too late (I speak from experience, the attractive grey hair is a myth).

 

well the thing i know is that my ancestors moved and migrated from all around the world and there is no one place i can call home.

That's terrific, the world is yours.

Compare that to all those mentally retarded who believe they "belong" to some town village or city just because they happen to be born there.

 

Since you seem to have a problem with your origins (maybe I am mistaken), maybe you should have a look at some genealogic sites over the net. You may realize that the moto "we are all cousins" is very real.

[Keenidiot]

I would like to see what you think because i am not sure what my ethnicity is. well the thing i know is that my ancestors moved and migrated from all around the world and there is no one place i can call home.

Might have to do with why you ethnicity is problematic?

 

I'm terrible (somewhat purposefully) at picking out ethnicity, but you certainly look of latin descent.

[questionposter]

People think your Chinese because those people don't actually spend a lot of time around Chinese people. Chinese people think you don't look Chinese because they specifically know the features typical of a Chinese person.

[Ophiolite]

I'm forced to go with inow's conclusion - you just look human. There is a hint of Japanese, but also of Mediterranean (both north and south shores), and I don't disagree with the person who thought you might be South American. Hell, my daughter looks Chinese, even to some Chinese, but she's no more than 1/16th, the rest being Malay, Scottish, English and Indonesian. (I've separated out the Scottish element because of the genes for red hair.) With luck, in a couple of hundred years, everyone will look as mixed up as you and her.

[CharonY]

I think you just need a shave.

[jeskill]

Can't you also do a home genetics test and send in the sample to see where your ancestors are from?

 

I must say, I've a Canadian friend who gets asked where's she's from all the time, and she just answers, "Ontario". Then they say, but no, where are you from originally? And she says, "Cambridge". It's quite fun.

 

 

 

 

 

[Chad Makaio Zichterman]

Ethnicity is a matter of cultural participation, not genetics. It involves active connection to a people, whose culture -- in turn -- coevolved with a specific area (i.e. software engineers have a general culture but do not constitute an ethnicity).

Because of the general trend in which most children are raised to participate in the practices of their parents -- and since most parents are the biological parents of their children, it's not hard to see how the false -- though popular -- conflation of ancestry and ethnicity came to be...but it is still false.

The short answer to the question "What ethnicity am I?" would be "if you have to ask, then the answer is 'none.'" As people become more insulated from their local environment, from their ancestor's cultural practices, and from the common practical challenges met in different ways by different people (in favor of the direction towards a generalized cosmopolitan lifestyle common to many large cities around the world, to take one example), it becomes more and more common for people to participate minimally or even not at all in ethnic life.

Even if one were to opt for a genetic test, this would -- at best and only in the context of a deeper body of background knowledge of the genetic samples taken of many populations throughout the world -- only give you some probabilistic sense of recent geographical ancestry.

[iNow]

Nice post, Chad. Welcome to the community.

[overtone]

Looks like Pacific Northwest or Alaskan red, from my acquaintances.