The scientific research now underway constitutes yet another dimension of a long-standing human rights struggle among African Americans. . . . We seek to restore knowledge of . . . African-American origins and identities.
One of a handful of African American biological anthropologists, Michael Blakey has a passion for the material culture of the past that was ignited in his childhood. His biologist mother had African American and Native American ancestry; she was related to the Nanticoke Moors of Delaware, a mixed-race community dating to the 1700s. In his youth, Blakey spent a good deal of time in Delaware with a great uncle who “walk[ed] the fields and collect[ed] artifacts from their ancestors. . . . He was one of the biggest pothunters in Delaware. This was one of my favorite things to do. . . . My hero was [anthropologist] Louis S. B. Leakey. . . . I was in all-black schools and public schools and it was a strange thing [to be interested in]. But that’s what I was about.”1 By the age of fifteen, he was working as an archaeological intern at the Smithsonian Institution.
After attending college at Howard University, where he majored in anthropology with an emphasis on Africana and Mesoamerican studies, Blakey earned a master’s degree and a doctoral degree in anthropology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, in 1980 and 1985 respectively, gaining experience in bioarchaeology and physical anthropology during his course of study. There his dissertation focused on “the political economy of psycho-physiological stress” on living persons in the United States and the United Kingdom in order to better “understand how racism and class affect stresses that lead to things like elevated hypertension rates.”2 The author of scores of scholarly publications, Blakey also coedited an influential volume on “the socio-politics of archaeology” in 1983. A man of wide-ranging research interests and talents, Blakey was involved with research on remains excavated from a cemetery at Philadelphia’s First African Baptist Church in the 1980s, which, until the discovery of the New York African Burial Ground, was the largest US archaeological site of African and African American remains. The experiences would prove germane to his work at the African Burial Ground.
Blakey submitted his research proposal to Howard Dodson, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, who was serving as the chairman of Mayor David Dinkins’s Advisory Council on the African Burial Ground. After the proposal was approved, the Howard researchers embarked upon an ambitious interdisciplinary investigation of the African Burial Ground remains proceeding from Blakey’s June 1992 project design.
In studying the African Burial Ground remains, Blakey’s research unit combined methods and insights from the social and biological sciences to generate “historically and ethnographically informed interpretations” of the origins and life course of the persons laid to rest at the burial ground more than two hundred years prior.3 At bottom, the intent of these efforts, for both scientists and activists, was to explore these fundamental questions: What could we know about these 419 African-descended people buried in lower Manhattan over two hundred years ago? How and why did they die? From where in Africa might they have hailed? In order to shed light on the experiences and identities of the deceased men, women, and children, the GSA funded an interdisciplinary research project, based at Howard and staffed by specialists drawn from the fields of archaeology, biology, biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, and history.4 Among the methods employed by Howard’s researchers in studying the centuries-old remains were craniometric analysis, dental morphology, and molecular genetic assessment—a then-emerging form of DNA analysis.5 Researchers hoped that this multidisciplinary approach would redirect the research mission from the narrowly forensic trajectory of the Lehman College team in order to return to today’s slave descendants the “country marks” of their symbolic ancestors, which had been obliterated first during their lives and then again in their burial.
The Blakey team engaged in skeletal analysis of the remains recovered from the African Burial Ground site to shed light on the experiences of these individuals—insights into nutrition, disease, and the physical toll of enslavement. As part of this inquiry, researchers conducted analysis of twenty-seven recovered skulls, using “morphometric” techniques including the measurement of crania—a method for which the Lehman researchers had come under fire.6 However, the dramatic shift of interpretive register from race to ethnicity and ancestry that accompanied the project’s move to Howard was evident in the Howard researchers’ utilization of these methods. What was at stake was not the techniques but the interpretative filter. For Blakey and his team, these forensic tools were useful if the data were appropriately interpreted—that is, analyzed with an eye for uncovering richer details than mere racial typing would allow.
This shift of register is similar to the kinds of strategic, judicious scientific engagement that historians Nancy Leys Stepan and Sander L. Gilman refer to as “recontextualization.” Given the tragic history of scientific and medical abuses against minority groups, including the surgical experimentation on enslaved men and women in the nineteenth century and the horrors of Nazi medicine in the early twentieth century, biomedical researchers of African and Jewish descent developed strategies for challenging scientific racism while sustaining a practice of scientific inquiry. With recontextualization, the “tools of science were used either to prove that the supposed factual data upon which the stereotypes of racial inferiority were based were wrong, or to generate ‘new’ facts on which different claims could be made.”7 In the African Burial Ground research project, Blakey and his team applied both tactics. Given activists’ and researchers’ concerns over “biological racing” of the remains, recontextualization helps us to understand how the Howard team were able to be both scientific skeptics and scientists. While the investigations involved the measure of skulls, these measurements were done alongside “extensive” collaboration “with project historians and archaeologists” to produce “biocultural, interdisciplinary” data.8
For example, researchers observed that the heads of the burial coffins faced west (perhaps to follow the direction of the setting sun). One coffin was embellished with a sankofa, a West African heart-like image that symbolizes the importance of knowing about one’s past in order to move ahead to the future. The bodies were wrapped in shrouding, a practice that may have indicated the buried individual was a Muslim. Many of the burials contained cowrie shells, the currency of sub-Saharan Africa, as well as glass beads from this region. Bodies were also laid to rest with coins, buttons, and jewelry. This and other archaeological evidence strongly supported the conclusion that the individuals hailed from the African continent.9
The team led by Blakey did not use “race” as a category of analysis. Rather they employed a broad range of analytical groupings. Carried out by team researchers Alain Froment (a biological anthropologist), Shomarka Omar Yahya Keita (a physical and cultural anthropologist), and Kenya Shujaa (an osteologist and lab technician), this mode of analysis “quantified craniometric diversity” in the burial ground sample and then compared this data to “a broad range of historical and modern African and non-African groups.” As the researchers detailed in their 2004 report to the GSA, with their craniometric studies, “no reference to any ‘racial’ definition was made.” Analysis was employed that showed similarities and differences between buried individuals based on volume, weight, and topography “without use of closed biological categories.”10
The presence of intact skulls in several graves permitted the Howard researchers to conduct dental morphology studies, relying on the examination of chemical traces in the teeth; “chemical signatures” can reveal information about a deceased individual’s native origins or environment. The Howard researchers had examined the skulls removed from the African Burial Ground for strontium, a chemical isotope that varies by geological context. Likewise, biological anthropologist Alan Goodman and his colleagues examined the teeth for chemical traces that might suggest “where in the world individuals’ childhoods were spent.”11 The presence in the bones and teeth of strontium 86 and strontium 87 indicated that the deceased were born and reared in West Africa before being brought to the United States. In a few other instances, the presence of different strontium isotopes suggested nativity in the Americas. Thus, in keeping with the goals of the research project under Blakey, the dental morphology analysis was used to shed light on the particular origins of those buried in the African cemetery. The findings offered scientific proof of ethnicity rooted in West Africa, rather than racial identity alone.
In addition to information gleaned from chemical traces, physical dental traits (including grooves, cusps, enamel, and roots) can also suggest distinctive human groups and therefore help to ascertain the origins of some of the individuals whose graves were found at the African Burial Ground. Moreover, the shared presence of dental characteristics could suggest familial relationships among the several hundred burial remains uncovered. The researchers also analyzed “styles of dental modification,” including chipping and aesthetic filing, known from archaeological and ethnographic research to be characteristic of certain African regions and cultures. The analysis of the chemistry of dental enamel aided as well in gaining insight into health conditions including anemia and malnutrition. With dental analysis, researchers were able to garner information about the general health of the individuals while making gains toward inferring the cultural practices and regional origins of the deceased.12
Perhaps most significantly, at the Howard lab, the social and biological scientists analyzing the African Burial Ground remains made use of relatively new methods of “molecular genetic assessment” to uncover the possible origins of the cemetery population. The researchers proposed that DNA studies could aid in the determination of “genetic affinities” between the individual burials and “specific cultural/regional origins in Africa.”13 Examinations of mtDNA and Y-DNA sequences would be examined to elicit haplogroup (clusters of gene sequence variants that are inherited together) designations that might suggest “geographically distinct lineages.”14
Blakey and his collaborators also hoped that analysis of the remains might yield some information about the health profiles of the persons buried at the site. How did the conditions of chattel slavery affect the health of those buried and how might genetic data drawn from this population shed light on black health today? The aim was to “establish the ‘baseline’ biology of the African American population in the United States” in order to better understand these questions.15
Although Blakey’s team opposed “biological racing,” they were open to physiological and genetic research that might shed light on clinal differences between social groups—that is, a perspective that considered human variation across a broad spectrum. By employing such an approach, the Howard researchers held out the hope that there was “potential for determining the ancestries of the African Burial Ground populations” without hewing to problematic racial essentialism.16 Fatimah Jackson, a coordinator on the Howard team, who would later become the study’s associate director for genetics, expressed hope that this research would yield the “likely ancestral homeland regions” of the deceased individuals at the burial ground, by means of a “thorough evaluation of extended haplotypes” in DNA extracted from bone.17
In these years when the mapping of the human genome, a process that used tissue from living individuals, was still plodding toward completion, there was little confidence in some quarters that the African Burial Ground researchers could accomplish the feat of analyzing the DNA of long-deceased persons. Not everyone was convinced that the Howard team’s molecular genetic assessment plan was a viable one. A reviewer of the Howard research proposal carped that the “feasibility and efficacy” of this assessment was “questionable.” This critic went on to contend that there are
few populations available in Africa to study for comparative purposes. . . . While it will probably soon be possible to extract usable DNA from ancient bones, there have been no truly convincing demonstrations of such extraction to date. A major problem in the extraction of ancient DNA is that of excavator contamination. It is a safe assumption that all the exposed bones from the African Burial Ground have been contaminated with excavator DNA, despite precautions taken during the fieldwork.18
A GSA peer-review panel similarly concluded that exposure to the elements that caused degradation and contamination of any remaining DNA threatened the viability of the genetic analysis.19 As the Howard researchers would discover, it would indeed prove challenging to extract, amplify, sequence, and analyze what genetic residue remained in the burials.
Howard University geneticist Matthew George carried out an initial feasibility study of fifteen of the burials in 1995. Trained at the University of California at Berkeley, where he took his PhD in 1982, George was an associate professor of biochemistry in the College of Medicine at Howard. His early research “contributed to the developments leading to the . . . hypothesis for the African origins of the earliest humans.”20 Indeed, George was a coauthor of an influential 1985 “mitochondrial Eve” paper, lead-authored by Mary-Claire King’s advisor, Allan Wilson. Like King, George was trained by Wilson and did his doctoral work in this senior scientist’s lab.21
George’s efforts met with limited success. While the extraction of DNA from skeletal or fossil remains has become widely possible, it still remains a delicate endeavor. In the early 1990s this was all the more true: the University of Oxford’s Alan Cooper and the Max Planck Institute’s Hendrik Poinar wrote in Science that “ancient DNA research presents extreme technical difficulties because of the minute amounts and degraded nature of surviving DNA and the exceptional risk of contamination.”22
Efforts to analyze ancient DNA had first been conducted in the late 1980s by geneticist Bryan Sykes and his colleagues in an important study demonstrating the ability to amplify DNA obtained from bone. Ancient DNA research relies upon analysis of mtDNA because it is very stable, and under ideal environmental conditions remains as viable biological evidence for thousands of years. Of fifteen attempts, George and his team were able to derive aDNA from “nine 200-year-old hair and bone samples.”23 Of this group, researchers succeeded in isolating the mtDNA of just four individuals. However, they were not able to clone these sequences for further study nor did they have a population of reference samples with which to compare the four.
In 1998 Rick Kittles, who was not an original member of the African Burial Ground research team but participated in the study from 1995 to 1999, while he was a graduate student at George Washington University, embarked on a new wave of genetic analysis that would prove much more successful than that of a few years prior, and in time make important contributions to the use of DNA analysis to infer the ethnicity and origins of the burials.24 As it was put in the final New York African Burial Ground research report, “Kittles was able to bring an updated methodology to the project.”25 Kittles’s skills proved to be a game changer for this facet of the research project.
In order to examine the genetic data, Kittles needed to solve two problems: First, ancient DNA sequences are fragile and short in length, and Kittles would need to find a way to manipulate the sequences that were available to him without destroying them. And, second, in order to interpret these sequences with a measure of accuracy, he would need a comparative reference database.26
To solve the first problem, Kittles turned to technologies that allowed for the analysis of characteristic genetic markers in Y-DNA and mtDNA. Y-DNA is unique for its consistency, passing virtually unchanged from fathers to sons, and can therefore be used to trace a direct line of male ancestors. Following the methods of researchers in human genetics such as Mark Jobling and Chris Tyler-Smith, Kittles aimed to show how genetic polymorphisms (different forms of DNA or RNA produced as a result of substitutions or deletions) in the Y chromosome could be used to trace paternal ancestry intergenerationally and demonstrate that these small changes could be characteristic of distinct social groups.27 Even non-coding regions of DNA—called “junk DNA” because they have no known function—proved informative. Within these non-coding areas, short segments of DNA are duplicated in a pattern called short tandem repeat (STR). The number and specificity of STR markers can be used to distinguish between individuals as well as to discern ancestral relationships, because a male’s Y-DNA STR is shared by individuals in his paternal line; that is, men who descend from the same male ancestor will have similar STR patterns.
Mitochondrial DNA is transferred mostly unchanged from mothers to children, so this, the smallest of all human chromosomes, can be used to uncover matrilineage. If mtDNA is preserved under ideal conditions—protected from air, moisture, and other corrosive elements—it can be extracted centuries later. It is this quality of mtDNA that has been of crucial use in instances in which ancient remains are under investigation, from long-dead flora and fauna to the deceased members of the Romanov clan.
Using a method that has since become commonplace, Kittles compared DNA from a second sample of African Burial Ground remains with that of contemporary Africans. If the sample and the reference DNA matched at a set number or sequence of genetic markers, this individual was said to have shared a distant maternal or paternal ancestor with the person who was the source of the matching sample in the reference population. However, these markers were only useful if there was a robust reference database of “ethnically” and regionally specified “African” DNA with which to match them. The few existing reference databases containing this information—including GenBank, an online database of publicly available DNA sequences that was first compiled in 1982—were not comprehensive enough to make reliable inferences about the regions in Africa from which the buried individuals might have come. For example, the GenBank database lacked DNA samples from some of the contemporary nations known to be part of active slave-trading regions, including Ghana, Angola, and Liberia.28 Building on this incomplete foundation, Kittles began to compile a more comprehensive database.29 As geneticists have long done, he also obtained samples from other scientists’ private DNA databases, collaborating with molecular biologists with research sites in Francophone and Lusophone Africa, and collected his own samples from several African communities. Kittles’s analysis of this subsample “indicated a strong West and/or Central African ancestral presence in the studied New York African Burial Ground individuals.”30
In 1999, utilizing these techniques of analysis and database comparison on a third subsample that included forty-eight bone samples and two other hair and tissue samples, Kittles inferred that the “macroethnic affiliations” of forty-five of the burials he examined were in western and central Africa. The DNA sequences, suggesting the genetic diversity on the African continent, fell into the haplotype groups L1, L2, and L3—typically associated with African descent. The L2 haplotype that is indicative of West African Bantu speakers was present in close to 70 percent of the subset of burials that were genetically assessed. Kittles also deduced specific affiliations for some of the remains in Benin (the Fulbe people), Niger (Hausa), Nigeria (Fulani), and Senegal (Mandinka). (In 2000, after Kittles left the African Burial Ground research project, biological anthropologist Fatimah Jackson embarked on analysis of 219 of the remains at her lab at the University of Maryland and focused on correcting “the serious lapses in the existing database on African genetic diversity.” Working with West African researchers, she began to compile the “first human databank in Africa.”)31
These genetic insights about the burials were gleaned despite not only technical hurdles but also financial ones. Because the GSA funding did not cover DNA analysis, Kittles independently applied for a grant to support this research. Although he was not awarded the funding, his attempt to obtain it would further strain his relationships with the senior scientists on the project. For, according to Blakey, Kittles applied for these funds without informing the African Burial Ground Project’s principal investigators of his plans.
Taken together, the researchers’ findings yielded a dire account of the lives of enslaved persons in New York City, the second-largest slave port in the United States (after Charleston, South Carolina) and, in the colonial era, the place with “the highest proportion of slaves to Europeans of any northern settlement.” In the eighteenth century, the “vast majority of Africans in New York were enslaved,” having arrived either directly from the continent or via the Caribbean. Among this population, “premature mortality” was very high, including infant mortality rates almost twice that of the whites in the New York colony. More than 50 percent of the population died in childhood, and analysis of the remains showed evidence of severe anemia, malnutrition, and stunted growth. Slavery took a toll on the bodies of African men, women, and children that was apparent long after their death, in limb bones and bone joints that were “stressed . . . to the margins of human capacity.”32 As Blakey would describe in a 2003 interview, the slaves “were worked at the expense of fertility, at the expense of life; they were worked to death.”33
The African Burial Ground research study formally concluded in the fall of 2003, with the ritual reinterment of the remains of the 419 African individuals whose graves had been excavated and the commemoration of their lives and those of the scores of others—estimated at between fifteen and twenty thousand in total—who had remained buried in the 6.6-acre cemetery.34 But although the remains had been reburied, “public curiosity about this country’s African-American past had been aroused by [this] New York experience,” and these seemingly local concerns have come to have a significant afterlife in broader US political culture.35
Even before the results of the African Burial Ground study were published, hoping to build on the significant methodological breakthroughs he had engineered, Kittles embarked upon a plan to convert these methods of genetic analysis into a commercial enterprise, a proposal that produced an immediate schism among the researchers. Blakey, for example, publicly stated that it was “a questionable matter that a former researcher should take part of our program currently in development and do what he is doing.”36 Although today Fatimah Jackson serves on the board of advisors of Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s for-profit genetic genealogy company, African DNA, in 2003 she criticized Kittles’s enterprise, declaring that it was “immoral to charge victims of slavery” for genetic analysis that might provide for them some indication of their ancestral origins.37 Others later charged that the African reference databases that Kittles and other genetic-ancestry-testing entrepreneurs compiled were as of yet inadequate to make reliable inferences, being overrepresentative of some African populations and underrepresentative of others.38
Kittles’s colleagues were also deeply bothered by his plans because they had imagined a different path for these technologies: Blakey and Jackson wanted the reference DNA database and genetic-ancestry-tracing techniques to be made available free of charge to members of the public curious about their ancestral links to Africa after the methods were more sound.39 Community activists shared this vision. Ayo Harrington, chairwoman of the Friends of the African Burial Ground, envisioned the site as including a museum of African history that would also contain a “DNA bank”—collected from the burial remains and stored at Howard University—that could be used by descendants “to determine their origins.” Said Harrington, “If we could find one person who could one day go to that DNA bank, and it was determined that that person was a descendent, although we all are, it would just be something that folks would celebrate around the entire globe.”40 Even Blakey, Kittles’s mentor-turned-critic, had articulated this potential for DNA analysis:
The scientific research now underway constitutes yet another dimension of a long-standing human rights struggle among African Americans. That effort may relate directly to the conventions of the United Nations pertaining to human and group rights . . . [elucidating] slavery’s impact on the lives of our ancestors and, by historic extension, its impact on living descendants. . . . We seek to restore knowledge of the African-American origins and identities that were deliberately obscured in the effort to dehumanize Africans as “slaves.”41
Just a few years after the decoding of the human genome, even well-educated skeptics like Blakey thought it held the potential to transform the terrain of social justice and human rights.
Yet as archaeologist Warren Perry recalled in an interview with me, Blakey’s aspirations for genetic ancestry inference were trumped by his concerns about its technical limitations and his deep disappointment that Kittles had “bought into black capitalism . . . [and] the mirage of commodification. So, Michael canned him, I mean quick! Michael told us, ‘Listen we’re getting rid of Rick Kittles. . . . He wants to go out and sell this.’ . . . A lot of us were surprised because [Kittles] was doing decent stuff. But Michael said, ‘That’s not what this project is about; it’s not the spirit of the project.’ ”42
Like Blakey, Jackson initially had a vision for the social potential of genetic analysis that did not extend to its commercial applications by scientists and lay people engaged in market collaboration. Reflecting on her work on the African Burial Ground several years later, Jackson surmised that the lesson learned was that “scientific effort (including genetic testing) must address the research issues of studied groups and not just the priorities of scientists.”43 She holds up the African Burial Ground study, in which collaboration between like-minded scientists and activists was mostly successful in steering the research, “as a prototype for future genomic initiatives, particularly among groups that have historically been victimized, rather than assisted, by genetic studies.”44
Despite the scientific and professional hurdles he faced, in 2003, just four years out of graduate school, the maverick Kittles launched African Ancestry, Inc. (www.africanancestry.com) with Gina Paige, in the roles of scientific director and president, respectively. A Washington, DC, native, Paige attended Stanford University, where she completed a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1988, following in the footsteps of her father, an economics professor. She would go on to earn an MBA at the University of Michigan. Paige then became a business strategist, conducted product development and strategy management for several major corporations, including the now defunct Sara Lee and Colgate Palmolive, while keeping a foothold in her own entrepreneurial pursuits.
Paige and Kittles met through Cynthia Winston, the former’s cousin and a mutual acquaintance. As Paige recalls, Winston “knew that [Kittles] wanted to commercialize his research.” While she is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, a black sorority, and joined the Black Student Union as a student at Stanford, Paige confesses that when considering the partnership with Kittles she did not necessarily share his African-centered political mission. “I was an integral part of the black community [on campus] socially, but not necessarily politically,” she stated.45
But she knew immediately that Kittles had both a good idea and an important one. Both recognized that in order to succeed this start-up venture needed someone with Paige’s experience. “I looked at it strictly from a business perspective. . . . For me, it was an opportunity to use my skill set to create and launch a product that had never existed before, for a group of people that I am passionate about. . . . That’s what drove me to partner with Rick.” For his part, Kittles had the technical vision but lacked business acumen. His efforts were “frustrated until I met Gina,” Kittles acknowledged in an interview.46
When African Ancestry launched in 2003, there were only four other DTC genetic ancestry testing companies in the US market, Family Tree DNA (2000–); Gene Tree (2001–2013) and Relative Genetics (2001–2008), both owned by Sorenson Genomics; and Ancestry by DNA (2002–2009). One of the earliest direct-to-consumer genetic-ancestry-testing companies in the United States and the first targeted specifically at persons of African descent, African Ancestry by its own account has today tested more than 150,000 root-seekers in just over a decade of business.47
MatriClan and PatriClan are the brand names that African Ancestry gives to its mtDNA and Y-DNA test kits, respectively. (In 2013, the company added an autosomal testing kit under the name myDNAmix.) Kittles and Paige’s African Ancestry is an information-age business—the exchange of a fee for service takes place online and through the mail. The company mails test kits to customers that contain the tools necessary to secure a DNA sample. The customer returns the sample to African Ancestry; it is then amplified and sequenced by the company’s lab partner, Sorenson Genomics of Salt Lake City, Utah.48
The MatriClan and PatriClan tests draw on the distinctive properties of mitochondrial and Y chromosome to infer ancestral ties to current nation-states or cultural groups. Using these analyses, a consumer’s DNA sample is matched against African Ancestry’s reference database of genetic samples. Known by the brand name African Lineage Database, it is said to contain “over 30,000 indigenous African samples” from thirty countries and more than two hundred ethnic groups in Africa.49 After several weeks, a customer will receive a results package that includes a printout of the customer’s Y- or mtDNA markers, a “Certificate of Ancestry,” and historical information about the African continent and the country with which the individual was affiliated.50
If the sample matches reference DNA at a set number of genetic markers (typically ten or more in the case of Y-chromosome short tandem repeat sequences, or hypervariable sequences in the case of mtDNA), this individual can be said to have shared a distant maternal or paternal ancestor with a person or persons in the database population. Making use of this form of analysis, a typical African Ancestry result informs a root-seeker that her mtDNA can be traced to a contemporary African ethnic group, such as the Mende people of present-day southern Sierra Leone. On the other hand, a male customer’s results might trace him back to the Bamileke people of what is today known as Cameroon and, in some rarer cases, patrilineage may connect a black root-seeker to the continent of Europe rather than Africa.
African Ancestry’s genetic-testing services would become the centerpiece of cultural practices through which repair and resolution of manifold injuries precipitated by racial slavery is sought.51 From its use more than two decades ago in an excavation project that culminated in the “first National Monument dedicated to . . . Americans of African descent,” genetic ancestry testing is now mobilized in efforts to investigate, adjudicate, and remember the history and extant consequences of the transatlantic slave trade.52 As an “emergent” practice that may open up new ways of rendering or expressing enduring social concerns, genetic root-seeking goes beyond the politics of the past.53 African Ancestry’s slogan, “Trace Your DNA. Find Your Roots,” has taken on many meanings as its services have been put to a range of purposes and functions beyond family history. The African Burial Ground project and African Ancestry together laid the groundwork for the reconciliation projects explored in the remainder of this book.