There comes a time in the life of every community when it must look humbly and seriously into its past in order to provide the best possible foundation for moving intoa future based on healing and hope.
Charting the social life of DNA, we discover that forms of genetic testing considered “recreational”—such as those used to infer an individual’s ancestral origins—can have as great an impact on society as testing in seemingly more weighty sectors like medicine. In tracking a social path for genetics, our attention shifts from a limited focus on the individual to the broad spectrum of ambitions surrounding these tests. Among these ambitions is the effort to make “whole what has been smashed.”1 Put another way, DNA has become an agent in the politics of repair and reconciliation; it is sought after as communal balm and social glue, as a burden of proof and a bridge across time. Though even a molecule as elegantly complex as DNA cannot possibly fulfill all these expectations, its recruitment into unanticipated social and political uses is both fascinating and telling.
Reconciliation projects epitomize the expansive sociopolitical use of genetics that is the focus of this book. These activities include reparations activism and the quest for acknowledgment of a social injury. They can be campaigns for state apologies following internecine conflict or the uncovering of political atrocities. Public deliberations that have as a goal a new collaborative understanding of the past also fall into this category. So too does the work of bringing together estranged communities.
What these diverse missions share is a forensic mechanism for getting at “the truth.” “Forensic” here relates to both legal discussion or public debate and scientific evidence used to support a claim. Whether witness is borne through testimony and narrated memory as in formal truth and reconciliation processes or acquired through genetic data, forensic information is used in attempts to repair, reunite, or renew a community.
Geneticists play an increasingly central role in the evolution of reconciliation projects. Sharing their expertise with communities seeking social change, they act as “biocultural brokers” who bridge scientific and sociopolitical spheres. One such individual is the renowned medical geneticist Mary-Claire King, whose activism dates to the mid-1960s when, as a doctoral student at the University of California at Berkeley, she protested against the Vietnam War and the US invasion of Cambodia. Over the next three decades, her passion for social justice and work with Las Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo) would make her a pioneer in the humanitarian use of genetic analysis. She was simultaneously engaged in the pathbreaking laboratory research that would lead her to uncover the first “cancer gene,” BRCA 1 (and later also BRCA 2). King became a role model for a generation of ambitious geneticists with an activist bent, including Rick Kittles, whose innovation of similar techniques would enable people of African descent to gain knowledge of their continental origins.
In August 2014, Estela Barnes de Carlotto received the long-awaited news: DNA analysis had confirmed that a boy known as “Grandchild 114” had been located and was indeed the son of her late daughter, Laura Carlotto, and Walmir Oscar Montoya. Laura and Walmir were left-leaning political activists who, like scores of others in Argentina, had found themselves in the crosshairs of the military dictatorship that ruled the nation from 1976 until 1983.
In 1977 Laura was abducted by government agents and placed in a state detention center. She was pregnant at the time, and gave birth to a son the following year. Shortly thereafter she was killed by her captors. In a rare act for a regime that induced fear through “disappearance,” the government returned Laura’s body—which showed evidence of bullet wounds as well as disfigurement to the head and stomach, the latter an attempt to hide evidence of the pregnancy—to her mother in 1978. In 1979 the tragic loss of her daughter and her frustrated search for her grandchild inspired Carlotto to join the human rights group Las Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, which had been founded two years prior.
When she joined Las Abuelas, Carlotto became part of a campaign that would result in the landmark application of emergent genetic technologies to a novel kind of political action: reconciliation projects. During its regime, the country’s right-wing authoritarian government waged a “Dirty War” against its opponents—students, trade unionists, and others—conducted through imprisonment, torture, and murder. Estimates of the number of desaparecidos or “disappeared” range up to thirty thousand people. The young children of dissenters were abducted with their parents and then placed with members of the military regime or its allies. In addition, pregnant women imprisoned by the state were held hostage at detention facilities repurposed as crude maternity wards until they gave birth to their children. Afterwards, the mothers faced persecution and death, while their children were given over to allies of leaders of the authoritarian state. These children, estimated by Las Abuelas to be upwards of five hundred in number, would become known as the “misappropriated babies of the Dirty War.”
Beginning in 1977 Las Abuelas gathered weekly on Thursdays in front of a government building demanding that the bodies of their children (abducted, missing, and likely murdered) and their living grandchildren be returned to them. Several members of this grassroots women’s and human rights group (it later became an NGO, or nongovernmental organization) investigated the techniques that might be used to identify their families. Among the strategies they weighed was the use of then-incipient genetic analysis. In 1984, two members of the group traveled to the United States to meet with representatives from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The activists were referred to the prominent Stanford University population geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza. Cavalli-Sforza in turn referred Las Abuelas to Mary-Claire King, a colleague at the University of Washington, who had spent time in Chile working as a science educator before political violence in that country made this work impossible.
Born in 1946 in a suburb of Chicago, King showed interest and talent in math and science throughout her childhood, and by the age of nineteen she had completed her BA in mathematics at Carleton College. At twenty-seven, she earned a PhD in genetics—after switching over from doctoral studies in statistics—at Berkeley. But not before she put in time fighting against social and economic inequality in the Bay Area, work that included conducting land-use research with noted consumer advocate Ralph Nader. After completing her dissertation, King served on the faculty at Berkeley for more than a decade before taking up her current post at the University of Washington in 1995. From this period to the present, extraordinary milestones in research and advocacy marked King’s career. Known for her scientific philanthropy, King won renown as the geneticist who identified the genetic markers that highly predispose some to breast cancer; later she would be heralded for challenging corporations that wanted to charge large sums for the life-saving breast-cancer screening tests that were developed drawing partly on her research.2
What members of Las Abuelas needed was evidence that they were related to the children they claimed as family; their desire was to be reunited with their missing grandchildren who were a bridge between the activists and their lost sons and daughters. What had been rended was the biological family, and this was what the activists sought to restore even as they themselves became a chosen family wedded by heartache.
Las Abuelas required specific and indisputable proof that a grandmother and supposed grandchild were indeed related. King, aware that identification of human leukocyte antigens (HLA) was useful for matching patients needing organ transplants with compatible donors (because these proteins “help the immune system distinguish ‘self’ from ‘non-self’ ”) applied this analysis to Las Abuelas’ mission.3 Comparison of the HLA of the grandmothers and their suspected kin could be achieved through a simple blood test. In 1984, in the first successful case in which King was involved, a girl’s HLA was closely matched—with 99.8 percent accuracy—to that of her paternal grandfather. This evidence compelled Argentina’s Supreme Court to demand the return of the girl to her birth family. King and Las Abuelas had successfully repurposed a technology used for matching organ donors and recipients for a project of familial reunion and sociopolitical recovery. But while people sharing the same HLA sequence may be related, they are not necessarily related. Could a more precise method be found?
King soon began using a new technique that had been developed by her graduate school advisor and collaborator Allan Wilson.4 With Rebecca Cann and Mark Stoneking, Wilson coauthored the trailblazing 1987 study in Nature that confirmed the existence of “Mitochondrial Eve”—the woman hypothesized to be the common maternal ancestor of modern humans, the genetic mother of us all.5 Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), the energy catalyst of cells, is inherited by male and female children exclusively from their mothers in an unbroken genealogical line. This quality of mtDNA was proved especially fruitful for Las Abuelas’ work because all maternal relatives, be they male or female, have the same mitochondrial sequence. This meant that biological grandmothers could be matched to biological grandchildren in the absence of the remains of “disappeared” parents and with more precision than the HLA method.6 King thus brought the latest advances in molecular biology into the realm of contemporary political advocacy. Las Abuelas found in King a geneticist without borders, who was willing to think beyond the boundaries of the scientific lab and put DNA analysis to political and humanitarian uses that were previously unimaginable.
Begun as a small-scale project of research philanthropy, Las Abuelas’mission was transformed by the Argentinean state into a project of national reconciliation. The Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, an NGO, was formed with the assistance of US forensic scientists in 1986 for the express purpose of locating and identifying the remains of victims of the junta state and returning them to their families. The administration of Raúl Alfonsin, the first democratically elected president of Argentina after the fall of the military dictatorship in 1983, immediately put in place the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons. This commission produced a report the next year that detailed the brutality of the military regime, including documenting the disappearance of thousands of Argentinean citizens. In 1987, the state also established the National Genetic Data Bank, a repository of genetic samples from family members of disappeared persons that can be used for matching and identification.7 By 2009, Argentina’s Congress passed a law compelling persons to undergo DNA testing if other evidence suggested they may be a child of a disappeared person. As of 2015, more than one hundred children—now adults—had been identified and reunited with biological kin.8 In cases in which parents had been raising children they believed to be adopted rather than stolen, shared custody arrangements were made.9 Guido, the thirty-six-year-old grandson of Estela Carlotto, was the 114th child to be identified. Several weeks later, the granddaughter of Alicia Zubasnabar de De la Cuadra, a founding member of Las Abuelas who passed away in 2008, was discovered. She is “Grandchild 115.”
Reconciliation in the case of Las Abuelas was about both kinship and the nation-state. It was about the integrity of families and the future of a country healing from trauma and political violence. With state-of-the-art methods of DNA analysis, King, working with a transnational group of scientific collaborators, helped to spearhead what are now more than three decades of initiatives in which genetic science is engaged in issues of sociopolitical or historical import. Indeed, the organization now known as La Asociación Civil Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo has been heralded as the “first group worldwide to organize around genetic technologies as tools for human rights.”10
In the late 1990s, black researchers and activists in the United States would similarly characterize their use of genetic analysis as a human rights issue when they sought information about their African origins.
As a boy growing up in Central Islip, on New York’s Long Island, Rick Kittles demonstrated a penchant for science. As early as primary school, the Georgia-born Kittles recalls being the only black student in his classes and wondering why he looked different from his classmates. This curiosity would remain. In 1989 he earned a degree in biology from the Rochester Institute of Technology, and from there he attended George Washington University after a short stint as a high school teacher, first in Maryland and later in upstate New York. In the early 1990s, Kittles was coming into his own as a scholar-activist. While in graduate school in Washington, DC, he served as president of a “black study reading group” called Tu-Wa-Moja (which means “We Are One” in the Kiswahili language, said to be the most common on the African continent). The group did more than simply read books; they engaged in confrontational public theater, such as the day in September 1991 when they famously shut down the African Hall of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, believing it was racially insensitive and inaccurately reflected their history.
By the time he was a newly minted PhD, Kittles’s African-centered perspective and skill as a genetic scientist had converged into a mission of reconciliation for and among black people that led to his founding of the African Ancestry company. Kittles’s DNA analysis would enable the use of genetic ancestry testing as a forensic mechanism; he and his clients and collaborators took up the technical baton from Mary-Claire King and ran with it in new directions.
I have been on hand for more than a dozen presentations by Kittles over the last decade. On one such occasion, I watched in wonder as he brought a compelling combination of erudition, charisma, and folksiness to a talk before a rapt audience of over a hundred people—women and some men, mostly in their fifties and sixties. Kittles, then in his late thirties, dressed in a suit and tie and sporting a stylish goatee, delivered a lecture entitled “Trace Your DNA and Find Your Roots: The Genetic Ancestries of African Americans.” In his talk, he detailed the scientific assumptions on which his company’s products are based in nontechnical language accented with homey charm. Kittles considers public speaking about genetics to be part of his political work, and he feels as comfortable talking at a small community center as he does at the bench in his genetics laboratory.
Without fail, whether he is speaking to genealogists or human geneticists or a crowd made up of both, Kittles is greeted by enthusiastic audiences. A presentation on prostate cancer genetics might venture into a discussion of ancestry and how histories of social isolation and discrimination can be embodied in our DNA. A presentation touting his African Ancestry company will always include mention of the problem of racial health disparities. While some specialists might see little overlap between oncogenes and genetic ancestry, Kittles integrates them seamlessly. And the personal stakes of his research are evident in all his lectures.
Kittles’s public presentations inevitably begin with a basic introduction to DNA. The “Genetics 101” section of his discussions serves to establish a pedestal of knowledge upon which his subsequent observations about the historical losses of people of African descent can be balanced. In his signature jocular style—a laid-back performance showcasing his wide-ranging erudition and humor spanning the spectrum from blue to mordant, with respect to the graver aspects of slavery—Kittles details the four chemical bases comprising the DNA molecule. He then may recount his personal frustrations with traditional genealogical research, an account followed by passionate testimony about how genetic genealogy testing had helped him discover, through analysis of his mtDNA, that he was “related” to the Hausa of Nigeria. His next statement is often similarly poignant: he will share the sobering news that his paternal Y-DNA traced to Germany. Kittles attributes this result to what he describes as “the Thomas Jefferson effect,” gesturing at once to the sexual violence of slavery and to the DNA analysis that, along with archival records, strongly suggests the third US president fathered a child with Sally Hemings, a woman he enslaved.
He then describes how these As, Cs, Gs, and Ts join up in base pairs that take the spiral form of the double helix. Sometimes Kittles will note that while most DNA is located in the nucleus of cells, a small portion is found in the mitochondria and that this “maternally inherited” mtDNA is useful for understanding ancestry. On almost all occasions he ventures into the genetic paradox that human rights geneticist Mary-Claire King described to the Los Angeles Times as “Everybody is the same; everybody is different.”11
Kittles explained polymorphisms this way when speaking before an audience in Chicago in 2013:
“Poly” means “many,” “morph” means “form.” So, we have many different forms of the DNA. If you look out in this room, there are maybe a couple hundred people in here—there will be many different patterns in the DNA, if we compare any two people. In fact, we’ve cataloged over forty, fifty million of these polymorphisms. A class of polymorphism is called a “snip [SNP],” a single nucleotide polymorphism. So let’s say we are looking at a track of DNA:
A C T C A G T T C A
Maybe 94 percent of you guys in the room may have a C at that second-to-last position. While about 6 percent may have a T:
A C T C A G T T T A
That’s . . . a snip. Single nucleotide polymorphism. A subtle change . . . Some of them have detrimental effects in the gene, like sickle-cell disease, which is due to one polymorphism in the beta-globin gene. . . . Other diseases are due to several of these polymorphisms; they’re more complex. . . . The job that I have is to try and understand how the inheritance of these polymorphisms may impact the susceptibility for disease. Now, those snips actually reflect history. They are like tags. They are like markers. And just like if you’re a genealogist and you’re searching in your family tree, you have these markers that reflect time periods, and who married who, and how many children they had. These polymorphisms are useful for tracing family history, too. Think about it like this: We inherit them from our parents, our parents from their parents. And we can then trace these genetic variants within a family but also within a community. And those communities within continents.12
Reference to “the Maafa,” the compelled dispersal of African men and women from the continent of Africa, soon follows in a Kittles presentation. “Maafa,” which means “great tragedy” or “great disaster” in Kiswahili—rather than “transatlantic slave trade” or “Middle Passage”—is the term preferred by many African-centered scholars and activists. Kittles’s use of the term offers insight into his political commitments and to the motivations that lie behind his commercial and academic research.
In his talks focused on race, genetics, and health, Kittles may make only passing reference to the Maafa. On other occasions, however, he pauses his PowerPoint presentation—a deck of scatterplots, screenshots of scientific papers, gene flow maps, and text-heavy slides that we researchers are dissuaded from using during our talks but nevertheless do—to show the iconic image of the Brookes slave ship. This well-known drawing is an overhead, cross-section view of the ship, indicating the number of African men, women, and children that could be packed within its decks, basically stowed as human cargo, for the ocean crossing. The image was used by abolitionists as an indictment of the transatlantic slave trade. It stands out among Kittles’s other slides; solely visual, it is intended to make this point: as much as any other application, Kittles’s work has been directed toward the resolution of the Maafa. In a Kittles lecture, discussion of the Maafa counterposed with the image of the Brookes ship underscores his observations about the deep social damage inflicted by racial slavery.
One of the more interesting places I found myself in Kittles’s company was at the Harlem temple of the Church of Latter-day Saints. Located in a historic African American community, on Malcolm X Boulevard, this Mormon church community that by doctrine formerly shunned black members now welcomes them. On this Saturday morning in February 2007, I was among a group of African American visitors interspersed with a small multicultural cohort of church members called to celebrate Black History Month through a journey of self-discovery. The words on the flyer advertising the event echoed the sentiments of a member of the Mormon church who welcomed us: “You can’t know where you are headed if you don’t know where you are from.”
Following his presentation, audience members at the Harlem temple were offered African Ancestry’s MatriClan and PatriClan tests free of charge in return for participating in a scientific research study on pigmentation. Kittles was engaged in research seeking to draw correlations between genetic characteristics and skin tone—between genotype and phenotype—with collaborators Mark Shriver, a Penn State biological anthropologist, and Charmaine Royal, a geneticist then based at Howard University. The genetic samples used for root-seeking were being repurposed for scientific research. In addition, each subject had their skin color recorded with a spectrometer. Here, years before the DNA testing company 23andMe would sell its customers’ data to the pharmaceutical company Pfizer, the blurred lines of genetic testing were readily apparent. Scientific research and “recreational” DNA analysis were coming together at this event; the social life of DNA was expanding. (Several years later, when Shriver began to develop criminal forensic applications from this research, Kittles bowed out of this line of study, saying that he didn’t “want to help them put more black people in jail.”)13
There was a robust response to Kittles’s research proposition and there were lines of people in every corner of the upper floor of the temple where the testing was taking place. While research assistants collected genotype and classified phenotype, Kittles and I talked in a nearby stairwell—a location that kept him close enough to the work at hand should he be needed. He shared with me the importance of his African-centered perspective on life. He stated that his most profound intellectual influences were the black studies scholars Ali Mazuri, Molefi Asante, and Cheikh Anta Diop. Indeed, Kittles would publish his first peer-reviewed paper not in a scientific publication but in the Journal of Black Studies. Established in 1970, and edited by the Afrocentric theorist Asante, this interdisciplinary journal is dedicated to the “dynamic, innovative, and creative research on the Black experience.” Entitled “Nature, Origin, and Variation of Human Pigmentation,” Kittles’s article can be seen as an attempt to answer the question he pondered decades before in primary school—Why do we look different from one another?—and which he still sought to answer.
During our wide-ranging conversation, Kittles spoke of kinship structures that have been dismantled, of family ties that were cut, of broken links to the African continent. He offers his company’s genetic ancestry testing as a kind of homecoming, as a way to put the pieces back together, to bind the broken limbs of family trees. On another occasion, speaking about what inspires his research and his work with African Ancestry, he stated: “How often do you hear African Americans talking about Africa in a positive light? . . . Our history doesn’t start with slavery; we came through slavery, but so many of our youth don’t understand that . . . [and] they are the ones who are going to shape this reconciliation that’s occurring.” When Kittles presented the keynote address to the United Nations General Assembly on the occasion of the International Day of Remembrance of Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade in 2012, he similarly declared that he started his company because “I wanted to bring African Americans closer to Africa.” For Kittles, genetic ancestry testing of black Americans may hold the key to the reconciliation of Africa and its diaspora.
DNA analysis is today imagined as a medium through which societies may move toward truth and healing. These reconciliation projects comprise a wide spectrum of social actions and anticipated outcomes. And these projects may not have a practical or legal conclusion; indeed, their end points may be unspecified. Or, as political scientist Melissa Nobles observes of official state apologies, the “critical reexaminations of history” that may be occasioned through these practices allow us to appreciate the “ideological and moral stakes” that are being expressed and not focus solely “on anticipated material gains or losses.”14 Therefore, the inauguration of a reconciliation project may in itself warrant our attention.
The word “reconciliation” readily brings to mind the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the poignant public hearings in post-apartheid South Africa that began in 1996 and continued for four years. During these hearings, victims testified about their experience with apartheid state violence. (Some perpetrators of violence confessed their offenses and—controversially—were given amnesty from prosecution.)
Less well known is one of the United States’ own truth and reconciliation processes, which suggests the intensity with which racial healing is still being sought generations after the cessation of the transatlantic slave trade and decades after the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century. As in South Africa, testimony was the forensic vehicle. Although our interest here is in the social life of genetic ancestry testing, this US example sheds light on racial reconciliation strategies more broadly.
Inspired by the South African example, in 1999 the citizens of Greensboro, South Carolina, inaugurated a truth and reconciliation process—the first ever in the United States—in an attempt to confront and dismantle long-standing racial tensions between blacks and whites in that community. While the mechanism of truth differed between Greensboro and laboratories in Buenos Aires and Washington, DC, what was strongly shared was the sentiment that there is little hope of a tenable future for these communities if these historical injuries are not attended to and repaired. Similar to the Venture Smith endeavor, whose descendants sought societal healing, it emerged out of recognition that unresolved issues of racial discrimination would not simply dissipate over time. Notably, Greensboro is important in the history of US racial politics because it was here, on February 1, 1960, that the sit-in strategy of the modern civil rights movement was launched. Four brave African American students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University struck a blow against Jim Crow by ultimately succeeding—despite violent antagonism—in integrating the lunch counter of a local Woolworth store.
The Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission, however, responded to a lesser-known demonstration against racial and economic inequality almost two decades later, which ended tragically. In November 1979, a multiracial group of activists were beaten and fired upon by members of the Ku Klux Klan as they protested in a local public housing neighborhood in a legally sanctioned “Death to the Klan” march. The attack left five protestors dead and ten wounded. Local news cameras captured the assault on film. Astonishingly, police on the scene arrested one marcher, while the shooters fled the scene. After the arrest, the protestor’s bail was set at double that of those accused of murder and assault. With acquittals of the alleged perpetrators despite two trials, the “Greensboro Massacre” left behind festering resentment, immense pain, and profound feelings of injustice.
The Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Project began in 1999 on the twentieth anniversary of these events. After two decades, citizens from many facets of the community—including victims and survivors of the attack, college students, churches, NGOs, and civil rights activists—acknowledged that this incident remained an open wound in Greensboro and that work toward healing was essential. The reconciliation process stemmed from its backers’ recognition that the racist culture that spurred the violence “continues to effect [sic] the quality of economic, social, political, spiritual and educational life in Greensboro.”15 The project’s organizers contend that “confronting and reckoning with the past is necessary” if the city and the country is to move forward regarding race relations. Or as it is put in the preamble to the project’s official mandate: “There comes a time in the life of every community when it must look humbly and seriously into its past in order to provide the best possible foundation for moving into a future based on healing and hope.”16
The Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Project was the first time the process had been carried out in the United States, and the occasion also marked the first time in the world that the process was based in a city rather than a nation-state. Despite “fear of and hostility toward” the process, several years of research, retreats, assemblies, and two hundred interviews in Greensboro culminated in a series of hearings in 2005.17 A final report released the next year concluded that racial violence harmed the community in addition to the individuals who were murdered and assaulted and recommended that both the City of Greensboro and the perpetrators of violence formally acknowledge the events of November 3, 1979. It also recommended institutional reforms in city government, the courts, and the criminal justice system.
In Greensboro, the forensic mechanism was the multiple voicing of memories and experiences layered upon one another to come to a better understanding of harm, trauma, and discrimination, with the hope of a better future. While the South African truth and reconciliation process has been criticized as ineffective, it remains an obvious example of what has yet to be even attempted in the United States on a national scale—a public conversation about the history of racism in this country. And so, resolution of these issues is sought in other ways, including a repurposing of genetic ancestry testing techniques that finds its inspiration in Greensboro, Buenos Aires, and elsewhere.
We might think of African Ancestry’s genetic kits as grassroots politics writ small, as efforts at small-scale truth and reconciliation practices in which DNA test results are used as a form of testimony. Although there are notable differences with the work that transpired in both Buenos Aires and Greensboro, the uses of genetic ancestry testing that I trace in the pages to follow emerge from similar impulses to prompt awareness of injurious histories, and their legacies today, as a necessary precondition for charting a new way forward.
Genetics has become a medium through which the unsettled past is reconciled. The pursuit of historical and social repair that undergirds reconciliation projects has been described as a kind of politics of the past that risks dwelling there.18 Yet what is distinctive about reconciliation projects—whether the forensic mechanism is testimony or technology—is precisely the combination of historical reckoning and future orientation they effect. Future promise, anthropologist Michael Fortun tells us, is “an eradicable feature of genomics,” whether with respect to our predisposition for certain diseases or our prospects for our communities.19 Reconciliation projects are driven by the desire to effect change in the present and to shape a different future. Closure is not necessarily what is sought, for, as the moral philosopher Susan Dwyer states, reconciliation’s goal is largely “to make sense of injuries” in the general narrative of a person or nation’s life.20 Rather than miring us in the past, these efforts forensically excavate it to offer the hope of new social and political possibilities.