All these years later, I find out it’s Ghana. . . . What if it’s true?
Genetic genealogy testing aligns with an enduring human desire: the search for roots and identity.
The appeal of genetic ancestry testing cannot be understood without also understanding the backdrop of the specific example author Alex Haley provided about how this should be accomplished and what effects it might produce. Haley cowrote the autobiography of Malcolm X in 1965, the late activist’s influential story of political transformation. Malcolm X’s life account concludes with his pilgrimage to Mecca, the high holy city of Islam. Around the same time, Haley began work on a second book about race, Roots: The Saga of an American Family, which would reverberate with Malcolm X’s narrative, and also entail a pilgrimage of sorts.1
Now known to be fiction based on fact, Roots was published in 1976—the year of the United States’ two hundredth anniversary—to great fanfare and with tremendous critical and commercial success. Christened as “the most astounding cultural event of the American Bicentennial” by esteemed Civil War historian Willie Lee Rose—who would also take Haley to task in the New York Review of Books for sloppy historical research—the book’s first two-hundred-thousand-copy print run sold out immediately upon publication. Millions of copies have been sold in the intervening decades the world over.2
Roots, for which Haley received a Pulitzer Prize, tells the story of Haley’s colorful family genealogy, which he traces back to The Gambia. The story is framed as the author’s “epic quest”: his prodigious efforts across years and continents to uncover his family’s past. In 1977, when Haley’s work was transformed into a television miniseries, the story of his ancestors’ trials, tribulations, and resilience held the country in rapt attention for eight days. The airing of Roots bested audience numbers for the inaugural television broadcast of Gone With the Wind, the previously most popularly watched show, and one that was notably also concerned with the formative role of slavery in US history.3
Haley’s story came under scrutiny soon after it began to circulate, and was criticized for historical inaccuracies. He was accused of plagiarism on several occasions; one case would result in a settlement amount so large that it was effectively an admission of guilt. But these accusations did not present an obstacle to the story’s power, and the narrative remains a commanding cultural symbol, national script, and racial allegory. British literary critic Helen Taylor, in an exhaustive essay on the book and television show, described their significance this way: “The impact of Haley and Roots has been profound. For African Americans, deprived for centuries of their ancestral homes and families, enslaved and exploited, denied basic human and civil rights . . . this book . . . offered a fresh perspective on their history, community and genealogy.”4 Writers who have followed the trajectory of Haley’s Roots and written critically about it have hailed the work’s cultural impact, despite its flaws. For Philip Nobile, for example, Haley was a “Colossus” with a “cultural halo” who “salvaged his lucrative career and preserved the myth of Kunta Kinte.”5 Taylor suggests that there has been a surprising public reticence surrounding accusations that Haley’s work was marred. She ventures several reasons for these “surprising silences,” including the fact that Haley was ensconced in elite networks. To borrow a contemporary phrasing, Roots was simply too big to fail. This was also the case because Haley’s account of the Middle Passage and its consequences became an urtext—or primary narrative source—of African diasporic reconciliation for a generation of Americans. The story provided a narrative about slavery and its afterlives on the two hundredth anniversary of a nation that had never fully acknowledged its past. In place of a presidential apology for slavery, or a national discussion on racism, or the promise of reparations, we had Roots.
Haley started a social transformation in how we access and interpret the past. Roots generated excitement around family history; it encouraged the democratization of a practice that had previously been the provenance of the nobility. In the wake of the phenomenal success of Haley’s book and miniseries, “root-tracing kits” containing family-tree templates and fill-in-the-blank genealogical charts on “imitation parchment” came on the market in the late 1970s; they were progenitors of today’s genetic-ancestry-testing services.6 Family-history research became a popular pastime for those seeking to discover unknown ancestors. Roots was the result of the author’s efforts to uncover the mystery of his ancestral origins with clues garnered from Gambian griots, archival research, and his own genealogical imagination. Many have modeled their own ancestry pursuits on Haley’s embellished account of his efforts to trace his familial lineage to Africa.
Genealogists of African descent frequently reference Roots when describing how their interest in family-history research was piqued. Many of the genealogists with whom I spoke—typically aged forty years or older, college educated, and predominantly female—were inspired by Haley’s example as teenagers or young adults. The predominance of women in genealogical communities is consistent with the literature on “kinkeeping,” the term coined by Carolyn J. Rosenthal to describe how the practice of maintaining family ties—through activities such as fostering communication between members or providing emotional and financial aid to them—was a form of gendered labor. Genealogists can be seen as fulfilling the role of kinkeeper in their families. With genealogical practices of prior times and of today, kinkeeping involves the work of connecting past and present kin with purposeful narrative.7
The experience of one of the genealogists with whom I spoke, Elisabeth (a pseudonym), is typical. I met Elisabeth, a computer scientist in her late forties, in an online community of black genealogists to which we both belong. Subsequently, I interviewed her at her home in the northwestern United States in 2004. She described the chain of events that had led her to become a genealogist and, some decades later, a genetic genealogist, and waxed nostalgic about a presentation by Haley at her midwestern high school that had stimulated her interest in genealogy:
Haley came to my high school in 1970. This was before Roots came out. He had a Reader’s Digest article about it out and he was on the road just telling everyone about how he traced Kunta Kinte. And I was in ninth grade and I just sat there mesmerized. . . . Actually, I have a copy of the tape [of Haley’s presentation]. I got in contact with my old high school civics teacher, out of the blue, last year. And he says, “You know, I was going through stuff and I found this old Alex Haley tape. I didn’t know what to do with it—would you like it?” Of course! And it’s phenomenal! . . . It was just a fascinating talk; it really was. That’s when I got bit by the genealogy bug.
Elisabeth’s friend Marla (a pseudonym) expressed similar sentiment about Haley’s influence when I met with her. Although she made a start at genealogical research in the 1960s, following the death of the eldest member of her extended family—its kinkeeper—it was not until a decade later, when she attended a lecture by the author at a local community college, that she became serious about the endeavor. This encounter impressed upon her that a nonspecialist researcher could employ insurance records, land deeds, slave-ship manifests, and family history libraries to trace her roots to Africa. As she explained to me, “It was interesting to hear [Haley] talk about . . . going to the Mormon temple and going to Lloyd’s of London and all of that. I never figured that I would have access to those kinds of records . . . I never ever thought that the average person could have accessed it. So I never anticipated being able to . . . go back to slavery.”
Until recently, for persons of African descent and others, pursuing one’s family history has typically entailed genealogical excavation of the type depicted by Haley. Although root-seeking methods have evolved, Haley’s influence remains; the example of his project established an expectation among a generation of readers and viewers in the United States and abroad that recovering ancestral roots was not only desirable, but possible.8
Why this avid interest in genealogy today? The fact of Haley’s Roots—the powerful testimonies that I heard from Elisabeth, Marla, and others notwithstanding—by itself is an incomplete explanation. Haley’s narrative did provide an inspirational account of African American genealogy, but it also prompted an international conversation on slavery’s bequest to us.
And notably, it supplied a narrative for black life. Noting the black-power-era context of Haley’s book, historian David Gerber commented on the striking similarity between Haley’s ancestor-protagonist in Roots, Kunta Kinte, and his coauthor Malcolm X, noting that both fulfilled collective emotional need for inspirational models “of strength, dignity, and self-creation in a hostile or, at best, indifferent White world.”9 Gerber’s insight points us to the fact that Roots says as much about the time at which it was written as it does about the past. Roots is, as Taylor argues, a book that resounds at a personal familial level yet also invites historical reckoning, social identification, and political resonance.
Similarly, the interest in genetic ancestry testing needs to be understood as reflecting the particular concerns of this moment. As the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs argued in his important work on collective memory, we conjure the accounts of the past we need in order to tackle issues of the present.10 With this in mind, we can understand how practices of genetic genealogy and family history that are anchored in the past become a form of contemporary racial discourse. The popularity of DNA testing is a symptom of Roots’ unfulfilled promise, and it should therefore come as no surprise that it is sought to balance the ledger of a racial economy of inequality.
Despite Haley’s heroic, if flawed, example, few African Americans are able to fill in the contours of their past as he did, owing to the decimation of families that was a hallmark of the era of racial slavery and the dearth of records from this period. As a consequence, genetic genealogy testing, which is now broadly available and also less taxing—and, owing to the social power of DNA, seemingly more authoritative—than conventional Haley-esque genealogical research, holds considerable appeal for many root-seekers.
Genetic genealogy testing emerged from techniques developed in molecular biology, human population genetics, and biological anthropology.11 Direct-to-consumer genetic testing was first available in the United States in 2000 from Family Tree DNA, a pioneer in this field that remains an industry leader.12 When African Ancestry was launched just a few years later, the company was as notable for joining the cutting edge of a new social and technical practice as it was for its niche mission and customer base. By 2004, five other American companies had joined the ranks of African Ancestry and Family Tree DNA. By 2010, thirty-eight companies worldwide offered an array of genetic-ancestry-testing services, with twenty-eight of these based in the United States.13
The companies that sell DNA analysis for genealogical purposes offer three principal forms of analysis for which they create brand names, such as African Ancestry’s MatriClan and PatriClan. Rather than provide companies’ brand descriptions and for the sake of analytic clarity, here the tests will be classified by what information they provide as an end result to the consumer, because the forms of social orientation that the test results suggest are of primary importance to root-seekers. The genealogists I have spoken with purchased particular genetic tests in order to fulfill distinctive genealogical aspirations, such as corroboration of a multicultural background or association with an ethnic community.14 The three broad classes of DTC genetic ancestry services can be categorized as spatiotemporal analysis, racial-composite analysis, and ethnic-lineage analysis.
With spatiotemporal testing, a consumer’s DNA sample is classified into a haplogroup (sets of single nucleotide polymorphisms [SNPs] or gene-sequence variants that are inherited together) from which ancestral and geographical origins at some point in the distant past can be inferred. The result orients a consumer in space and time but does not provide identity per se. This form of analysis was made possible by the ambitious Y-DNA and mtDNA mapping research that resulted in theories about the times and places at which various human populations arose. Y-DNA and mtDNA have distinctive sequence combinations; similar sequences can be classified into broad groups, called haplogroups. Human population geneticists have devised a system of letters and numbers to identify the region of one’s ancestors, and also the time in history (hundreds of thousands of years ago) during which they would have migrated from Africa. Family Tree DNA, a forerunner in American genetic ancestry testing, supplies customers with haplogroup information, as does National Geographic’s Genographic Project. An inferred match with the mtDNA-derived L2a haplogroup—a designation shared by some of Venture Smith’s descendants—suggests that one’s ancestors lived in Africa approximately sixty thousand to eighty thousand years ago.15 In short, spatiotemporal analysis offers “deep” ancestry results that open a window onto the geographic past of ancestors who may have dwelled in a time and place far removed from where root-seekers presently abide.
Among the more spectacular claims of genetic ancestry testing is the ability to infer not merely where we come from but what we are, in the most essentialist sense. These tests, which I classify as racial-composite analysis, claim to ascertain the percentage of three of four supposedly “pure” racial groups. In contrast to spatiotemporal and ethnic-lineage analyses, which rely on mtDNA and Y-DNA, this genomics testing involves the analysis of nuclear or autosomal DNA, which is unique to each person (identical twins excepted, although this is now being debated) and consists of the full complement of genetic information inherited from parents. A DNA sample is compared with panels of proprietary SNPs that are deemed to be “informative” of ancestry. Algorithms and computational mathematics are used to analyze the samples and infer the individual’s “admixture” of three of four statistically constituted racial categories—African, Native American, East Asian, and European—according to the presence and frequency of specific genetic markers said to be predominate among but, importantly, not distinctive to, each of the “original” or “pure” populations.16
This form of analysis was first developed by the DNA division of DNAPrint Genomics. When this Florida-based company launched in 2002, it offered the “first genomic ancestry test”; that is, a test based on complete autosomal DNA.17 A subject of this racial composite testing might learn he is estimated to be 80 percent African, 12 percent European, and 8 percent Native American. DNAPrint Genomics went out of business in 2009, but other companies offer similar services, including African Ancestry’s myDNAmix and 23andMe’s Ancestry Painting. This type of analysis proves useful to those who think that what we understand as racial groups are self-contained and, therefore, that mixture can be ascertained. However, it offers little guidance about one’s geographic or ethnic origins other than in the broadest sense. As African Ancestry cautions its customers on its website, “YOU WILL NOT LEARN COUNTRIES OR ETHNIC GROUPS.”
With ethnic-lineage testing, an individual’s DNA is searched against a genetic-ancestry-testing company’s reference database, which is in most cases proprietary, thus the claims made using it cannot be independently verified. (This is also true of the other types of analysis; DTC genetic testing companies hold data and algorithms as trade secrets.) A match between the sample and the reference DNA or shared haplotypes suggest a shared, distant maternal or paternal ancestor. Most companies offer this type of testing. A typical ethnic-lineage result may inform a test-taker that her mtDNA traced to the Mende people of contemporary southern Sierra Leone. Or a male customer could be inferred to be ancestrally linked to a group of male genealogists who share his surname and Y-DNA profile. African Ancestry’s analyses might thus be regarded as ethnic-lineage instruments through which an undifferentiated racial identity is translated into African ethnicity and kinship. By linking blacks to inferred ethnic communities and nation-states of Africa, African Ancestry’s service offers root-seekers the possibility of constituting new forms of identification and affiliation.
Each of these three types of tests thus offers a different window onto the past and, as Halbwachs would remind us, also a distinct vantage on the present. Root-seekers demonstrate their preferences for genetic information in the form of the testing they select and purchase. The usefulness of test results depends on the perspective of the root-seeker and the particular questions he or she seeks to answer through genetic genealogy analysis. In my encounters with genetic genealogists, one of the more important insights I gained is that root-seekers’ preferences are shaped by the problems to which they are applied. It should also be noted, however, that many of the test-takers I met used more than one type of genetic genealogy analysis, typically to compare results received from different companies or obtain new information from a company from which services were purchased previously (for example, when a company releases a more robust form of test that employs more markers or has added a significantly larger number of samples to its reference database).
Identity and self-making are primary ambitions for genetic genealogists. Questions and desires, and not “pure” science alone, set the terms for how a personal reconciliation project—the pursuit of African ancestry—is carried out. Consumers come to DNA testing with genealogical aspirations: with particular questions to be answered; with mysteries to solve; with autobiographical narratives they want to complete. These aspirations may precondition how genetic test results are received by consumers, and may prompt an uneasy negotiation with the information supplied by genetic genealogy companies.
Like those family members and researchers interested in the genetic ancestry of Venture Smith, the root-seekers I encountered over the years have come to invest more confidence in the ability of DNA analysis to augment their family history research in new and exciting ways. These root-seekers tend to know far less about their enslaved ancestors than Venture Smith’s kin, but they share the same genealogical aspirations for ethnicity voiced by New York African Burial Ground activists and researchers (sometimes alongside other ancestral goals). They are united in the aspiration to African ancestry as an end in itself. They are also engaged in a form of reconciliation, for genetic ancestry testing is, in an elemental sense, always as much about the reconstruction and reunion of the family and community as it is about the individual.
While today’s popular genealogy television programs would lead us to believe that root-seekers take up wholesale the information provided to them by genetic ancestry tests and accept it unconditionally, something far more complex is at play. Genetic genealogy tests are deemed reliable to the extent that they are useful for consumers’ myriad aims; for many, this involves strategically marshaling the data. Some use their genetic results as usable narratives that open up new avenues of social interaction and engagement, for example. It is through these sorts of negotiations that contemporary racial politics have begun to move into the terra nova—if not the terra firma—of genetic genealogy.
Racial composite testing has proved unsatisfactory to some root-seekers who want to re-create Alex Haley’s Roots journey in their own lives. Although composite testing analyzes an individual’s full genome, its results nevertheless lack specificity and usefulness for some users. This was the case for one genealogist I spoke with, an African American woman I will call Cecily. Attractive and about fifty years of age, she wore her hair in short twists and sported a relaxed linen outfit on the day we met at an AAHGS meeting, striking up a conversation after one of Kittles’s genetic genealogy presentations. As we sat near the display booth of the African Ancestry company, from which Cecily had previously purchased ethnic-lineage analysis, I asked whether she planned to pursue racial-composite testing as well. In response, she declared, “I don’t need to take that test. We’re all mixed up. We know that already.”
Somewhat similarly, spatiotemporal testing results may be deemed too remote by some root-seekers, as was the case with Marla. A black Californian, Marla is in her late fifties and retired from a job with the US Department of Defense. With her salt-and-pepper Afro, impressive knowledge of many subjects, and precise language, she put me in mind of interviews with the late novelist Octavia Butler I’d watched over the years. In addition to the genealogy chapter she leads with Elisabeth, Marla also moderates an Internet forum dedicated to discussion of DNA testing for genealogical purposes and has purchased several tests. An mtDNA test purchased from African Ancestry matched her with the Tikar people of Cameroon. As I have found is frequently the case, Marla’s initial testing experience stimulated further curiosity about her ancestry rather than satisfying it fully. She then purchased a racial-composite test for herself and also paid for three family members to have ethnic-lineage testing through Trace Genetics (a company known for its large database of Native American reference samples, which was purchased by DNAPrint Genomics in 2006 before the latter company ceased operations in 2009; it is now defunct).
For another round of testing, Marla sought to find out more about the maternal line of her deceased father. As a seasoned genealogist, she knew that this information could be accessed if she had a paternal second cousin’s DNA analyzed. In an e-mail exchange between Marla and me that followed from a conversation we had at her home, she detailed Family Tree DNA’s spatiotemporal analysis of her cousin’s genetic sample:
The mtDNA of my 1st cousin’s daughter (paternal grandmother’s line) traced to “Ethiopia” and ±50,000 years ago. It is Haplogroup L3 which [according to the information provided by the company] “is widespread throughout Africa and may be more than 50,000 years old.” Her [the cousin’s] particular sequence “is widespread throughout Africa” and has its “highest frequency in West Africa.”
Marla stated that the results were “deeper” than she had wanted and referred to ancestry “far before the time that I am interested in.” She expressed her frustration that these genetic genealogy test results did not provide her with more information than she might have surmised on her own:
Huh???? Ethiopia? West Africa? Didn’t just about everybody outside Africa come through the Ethiopia area 50,000 years ago? Maybe I’m off by a few thousand years. . . . These kinds of results are meaningful for those tracking the worldwide movement of people (like the National Geographic study), but not really meaningful to me in my much narrower focus.
Marla concluded our exchange by informing me of her plan to send these results to the African Ancestry company for reinterpretation and comparison against its African Lineage Database.
As my interactions with Cecily and Marla revealed, successful genetic-ancestry-test outcomes are those that offer root-seekers what they deem to be a serviceable account of the past. For Cecily, racial-composite analysis would merely confirm the “hybridity” she knew existed given the history of racial slavery in her family. To her mind, this form of genetic genealogy testing provided information that was neither novel nor useful. Given Marla’s stated aim to try to derive ethnic-lineage results from her spatiotemporal ones, the “much narrower focus” that would be “really meaningful” to her would apparently take the form of a genetic genealogy result that affiliated her with an African ethnic group and possibly a present-day nation, thus fulfilling the genealogical aspiration that was seeded when she attended a presentation by Haley three decades prior. Taken together, Cecily’s indifference toward racial composite testing and Marla’s preference for ethnic-lineage analysis suggest that not just any scientific evidence of ancestry will do. Genetic root-seekers strategically seek out the right tools to fulfill the genealogical work at hand.
Genetic genealogy test results may challenge not only the genealogist’s prior expectations but also other evidentiary bases of self-perception and social coherence. As Marla’s response to her spatiotemporal result implies, and as I elaborate below, root-seekers are not only judicious about the types of genetic genealogy tests they purchase, but deliberative in ascertaining the significance of their results.
I attended a symposium on race and genetics at a large public urban university in the Midwest in the fall of 2003. It was a small, interdisciplinary gathering of scholars and included presentations by social scientists, geneticists, and bioethicists, among others. The audience consisted mostly of symposium presenters, but also included interested faculty affiliated with the university and members of the public, who sat in on discussions for short periods of time throughout the day. A number of non-academics were on hand for an afternoon presentation by Kittles, who was, at the time, a researcher at the National Human Genome Center at Howard University, in addition to serving as the scientific director of his recently launched genetic-ancestry-testing company. In his talk, Kittles discussed the scientific research and sociocultural assumptions behind the ethnic-lineage analysis his company had begun offering several months prior. During the presentation, I sat next to a middle-aged African American woman whose steel-toed work boots and navy cotton jacket emblazoned with Teamsters Union patches placed her in a somewhat different category than the academics in attendance, who, like me, were dressed in business-casual attire and hunched over our notebooks and laptops. While Kittles spoke, the woman nodded enthusiastically in assent and, from time to time, looked over to me seeking mutual appreciation of the geneticist’s presentation. I smiled and nodded in return. This silent call-and-response went on for several minutes, when at one point she leaned in and whispered to me that she had “taken his test.”
At the conclusion of Kittles’s presentation, the woman (Pat) and I continued our discussion of her experience with African Ancestry’s genetic genealogy service as she walked with me through the labyrinthine campus. She spoke of her interest in conventional genealogy and of recent events that had prompted her to use DNA analysis to trace her African roots. Pat (a pseudonym) shared that she was a long-standing member of the AAHGS and of two other genealogical societies. For almost thirty years, this root-seeker had assembled archival materials, reminiscences, oral history, and linguistic clues from family members. This evidence led her to deduce that her family’s maternal line may have descended, in her words, from “the Hottentots” (or the Khoisan of southern Africa). Despite some success with her genealogical research by traditional means, Pat had not been able to locate a slave-ship manifest or definitive documentation of her African ancestry. She told me that, as a result, “some missing links” remained to be uncovered.
I asked if she thought genetic ancestry testing was reliable. Pat replied, “I’ve seen people let off jail sentences based on DNA. . . . I’m not question[ing] about DNA . . . given my experiences [working in the lab], there is no reason to doubt the technology.” Prior to Pat’s employment at the university, she processed forensic evidence for a police department crime lab in the same city. This work experience bolstered her confidence in African Ancestry’s product.
DNA spillover occurs when an individual’s experience with one domain of genetic analysis informs his or her understanding of other forms of it or authorizes its use in another domain; this was the case with Pat, who drew an association between criminal forensic genetics and genetic genealogy. A similar dynamic was at play for a genealogist I will call Ruth, who told me that she gained a greater understanding of the inheritance of disease following her genetic-ancestry-testing experience. “We think breast cancer runs in our family,” she explained. “Now that I understand my African Ancestry test—the difference between the mother’s line and the father’s line and all that—I have a better sense of what the genetic counselor at my doctor’s office was telling me.” DNA spillover has its upsides.
But, as Pat’s comments partly suggest, it may also cause us to be less critical of the Venn diagram nature of the social life of DNA than is warranted. With black men and women comprising close to half of the two million people incarcerated in the United States, the genome era coincided with the cresting of racialized mass incarceration. One of the predominant ways that many African Americans encounter DNA analysis is through the criminal justice system, for the purposes of both exoneration and conviction.
In 1992 Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck, faculty members at the Cardozo School of Law in New York City, initiated the Innocence Project. Neufeld and Scheck proposed to use DNA analysis to exonerate wrongly convicted persons and, simultaneously, shine a light on biases in the criminal justice system. The Innocence Project soon spread to other institutions and cities. Within a decade of its founding, there were forty-one similar projects nationwide. To date, 330 men and women have been released based on this advocacy. The bittersweet success in revealing injustice led scores of states to change their laws in order to make post-conviction forensic genetic testing more readily available. But the laudable work of the Innocence Project poses a continuing threat to the legal status quo: “[P]ostconviction review is dangerous to incumbent officials because of the possibility that it will reveal errors by individuals and the system,” criminologist David Lazer explains.18
The reticence of some authorities with respect to this legal advocacy, however, has been overshadowed by the dramatic press accounts, television programs, and films recounting the powerful stories of incarcerated innocents who have received some small measure of justice through the use of DNA. It is DNA’s liberatory potential that Pat had in mind when she spoke to me of her faith in genetic technologies. The social power of DNA (to exonerate) increased her confidence in genetic genealogy’s powers of ancestral identification. Yet an unanticipated outcome of the urgent work of the Innocence Project is the “halo effect” on DNA analysis both for good and for naught, including the growing practice of collecting DNA from individuals upon arrest for even minor offenses (following the Maryland v. King Supreme Court ruling permitting this practice), and the assumed unassailability of “DNA fingerprinting” in criminal cases.
Pat’s resolute belief in genetic analysis paralleled her faith in African Ancestry’s chief scientist. When I asked if she had had any apprehensions prior to purchasing her MatriClan test, she unequivocally replied, “I trust Dr. Kittles.” This comment is of signal interest in light of the fact that, owing to a legacy of racially segregated healthcare and experimental exploitation, including the notorious Tuskegee syphilis study, African Americans can be distrustful of medicine and scientific research. This distrust has been shown to negatively impact blacks’ health-seeking behaviors and to create a disincentive for African Americans to participate in clinical trials. In contrast, the growing popularity of African Ancestry’s services demonstrates that this understandable skepticism may be assuaged by the presence of Kittles, who wields authority as a scientific researcher and over the last decade has become a widely known figure.
Kittles is among the most well-known molecular biologists, and perhaps the best-known African American geneticist, in the United States—a reputation he has burnished through extensive media coverage, scholarly publications, and institutional associations. Kittles appeared, for example, in the 2003 BBC documentary Motherland: A Genetic Journey, as well as in Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s PBS documentary African American Lives in 2006, in which African Ancestry’s services were used to trace the genealogy of celebrities including Oprah Winfrey and Morgan Freeman, among other notables. He has also been featured on Good Morning, America; The Morning Show; and 60 Minutes. Scores of newspaper and magazine articles, including in the New York Times, Time, the New York Daily News, Black Enterprise, Wired, Fortune, and the Los Angeles Times, have included commentary from Kittles, while his numerous articles in the area of human variation and genetics have appeared in such leading journals as the American Journal of Human Genetics, Science, the Annals of Epidemiology, and the American Journal of Public Health. From 1998 to 2004 Kittles was an assistant professor of microbiology at Howard and a director of the molecular genetics unit at that institution’s National Human Genome Center, and he has also held positions at Ohio State University, the Cancer Research Center at the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and, at present, the University of Arizona College of Medicine. Even as Kittles was solidifying his position as an expert on DNA and ancestry, his “hard” scientific research on the genetic determinants of prostate cancer—a disease that disproportionately afflicts African American men—helped legitimize his forays into what is regarded by some as the “softer” science of genetic genealogy. At the same time, his renown as a scientist and his involvement with cutting-edge medical genetics research lend authority to his commercial genetics enterprise.
Kittles’s combination of scientific prestige and cultural competency is an unmistakably important aspect of the appeal of African Ancestry’s genetic genealogy testing and of consumers’ faith in the results it supplies to its customers. In his guise as a genealogist colleague who shares his customers’ desires for ancestral reckoning and their reservations about the potential for misuse of DNA analysis, Kittles establishes genetic genealogy testing as a legitimate and safe practice for African American root-seekers. Many root-seekers are as compelled by Kittles as they are convinced by genetic science. Kittles is a fellow traveller of African descent, familiar with the dialects of black experience.
Pat told me that she proceeded to purchase an mtDNA test from African Ancestry following a persuasive pitch by Kittles at one of the three genealogy club meetings she regularly attends. Asked to recall her feelings as she awaited her test results, she responded, “I didn’t know what to expect . . . it’s like rolling a lottery thing; okay, this is where it landed.” Prior to testing, Pat had some information about her ancestry, but no preconceptions about her ethnic “match.” A comparison of Pat’s DNA with the company’s African Lineage Database did not place her maternal line in southern Africa as she anticipated from family lore and earlier research. Instead, she was associated with the Akan, a large ethnic group of Ghana and southeastern Cote D’Ivoire that includes the Asante, the Fante, and the Twi, among others. Pat’s results included “my genotype” printed out on paper, “a letter of authenticity from the lab,” and “a certificate saying I was Akan.” However, these authoritative artifacts did not leave Pat feeling fully settled about her genetic ancestry. She recollected, “I felt numb, blank. [I’ve] been doing genealogy since 1977. I grew up with knowledge of Hottentot . . . all these years later, I find out it’s Ghana.” She added, after a pause, “What if it’s true?”
Pat’s uncertainty about her results increased several weeks later, when she learned that other members of her genealogy club reported receiving the same ethnic match from African Ancestry as she did—Akan. These results were likely accurate in the statistical universe of proprietary gene-sequence variants used by the company and in light of substantial historical research showing that current-day Ghana and other western African countries were key nodes in the transatlantic slave trade. Nevertheless, the preponderance of similar ethnic lineage findings among her genealogist colleagues, and the inconsistency of her genetic result with the family genealogy she had assembled by conventional means, led Pat to conclude that “we still technically don’t know who we are.”
It is worth dwelling for a moment on the word “technically,” because the scientific credibility of genetic genealogical analysis can be fraught. The mtDNA and Y-chromosome DNA analysis that is widely used to infer ancestry is beneficial in that it passes mostly unchanged among mothers and children and fathers and sons, respectively; however, it provides less useful information about the breadth of one’s ancestry. Each genetic lineage is estimated to provide less than 1 percent of one’s total ancestry. Put another way, these analyses follow ancestry of a single individual back ten generations and more than one thousand ancestors, yet matrilineage and patrilineage testing only offer information about a portion of these. If we think of one’s ancestry as an upside-down triangle, these forms of ancestry tracing follow the lines to the left and right of the triangle point, but offer no details about the shape’s filling.
Purveyors of genetic genealogy testing claim that their services trace or reveal otherwise unavailable information about ancestry and ethnicity. However, at present, matching a consumer’s DNA against genetic databases comprising samples from contemporary populations, as genetic-ancestry-tracing companies do, cannot establish kinship with certainty; ethnic-lineage analysis does not associate a root-seeker with specific persons at precise locations in time and space. Also, owing to both technical limitations (e.g., mtDNA and Y-DNA tests compare a consumer’s genetic sample to a selective proprietary sample database and analyze a small percentage of a test-taker’s DNA; and provide probabilistic outcomes) and historical dynamics (e.g., racial and ethnic identities are sociocultural phenomena and the unpredictability of human migration patterns suggest that contemporary social groups cannot be easily correlated with earlier ones), the associations inferred through genetic genealogy are necessarily provisional.19
What’s more, contemporary populations cannot be technically delimited in any absolute sense. University of Massachusetts geneticist Bruce Jackson, who endeavored to help Bettye Kearse use DNA analysis to determine whether she is related to President James Madison, is, perhaps surprisingly, a strident critic of genetic ancestry testing. As he explained to a reporter, “One of the greatest myths . . . is that someone can link you to an African tribe. . . . There are thousands of ethnic groups in Africa, and there are only a handful that these people are studying. So how can you take a person and link him to a tribe?”20 He noted in the same interview that there are more than 250 ethnic groups in the nation of Nigeria alone, but few of these have been studied or incorporated into DNA biobanks or databases. Jackson’s observation prompts reconsideration of the claims African Ancestry makes for its proprietary database, which contains samples from more than 200 ethnic groups; according to Jackson, this number does not even exhaust the potential ethnicities of a single West African country. To their credit, African Ancestry and other genetic genealogy purveyors have focused their efforts on obtaining DNA samples from the areas most heavily trafficked during the transatlantic slave trade, since it is this information that is of primary importance to black root-seekers. Mindful of the company’s critics, Paige underscores African Ancestry’s broader mission: “It’s not a perfect science, but our goal is to give people some sense of place prior to the period of slavery.”21 Given the infeasibility of collecting DNA samples from across the continent of Africa, let alone the globe, Michael Darden, an African Ancestry spokesperson, put a finer point on it in the Washington Post: “Knowing that is better than nothing.”22
Additional limitations to the information supplied by genetic-ancestry-testing services involve the subjective nature of the enterprise. How ancestry is defined and established is in some regards unique to each entity. Companies use proprietary databases and algorithms that are not made available to the public, other scientists, or business competitors. At the same time, a gene-marker sequence of mtDNA that is used to determine maternal lineage may “not exactly match one of the previously published haplogroups” or, as was the case with Pat, the designation may be found in numerous geographic locations and among several contemporary populations.23
Pat’s use of the word “technically” in her estimation that “we still . . . don’t know who we are” indicates that although she had expected genetic genealogy to supply her with roots in Africa, the results did not fully convince her. However, given her prior positive assessment of genetic testing, her reference to technical uncertainty may indicate her discomfort with conceptualizing family history as a technical matter. Her words intimated that the genetic-genealogy-testing experience produced a lack of orientation, and more particularly, “genealogical disorientation” as an affect (“I felt numb”), and as an effect of her misgivings about its reliability (“What if it’s true?”). Pat also feels “blank.” In her search for family, she has lost the familiar. For Pat and others with whom I have spoken, the receipt of genetic facts about ancestry opened up new questions about identity and belonging rather than settling them absolutely.
Since receiving her test results, Pat endeavored to reorient herself using the new information she received. She has begun a friendship with a Ghanaian neighbor and has embarked on research into the history and culture of the Akan. More recently, Pat has begun to explore the possibility of having roots in West Africa. Yet her genetic ancestry test has taken on deeper significance, not because of confidence in mtDNA analysis necessarily, but because of her own efforts to resolve her genealogical disorientation.
The growing appeal of Pat’s Akan-ness was powerfully illustrated in the following account she shared with me: at a community Kwanzaa fair, Pat was faced with a purchasing decision that revealed her vacillating ethnic identity. Coming upon an African immigrant flag-vendor as she strolled through the fair, Pat was confronted with two symbols of her ancestral roots and putative nationality. She inquired about the significance of a flag with three color fields of red, black, and green. The vendor replied that it was a “general flag,” indicating that it was a Pan-African flag, which symbolized the African diaspora rather than a specific nationality or ethnicity. Pat responded, “My DNA said I came back as Ghanaian. I don’t need the red, black, and green.” The woman replied, “Now you know, so you don’t need just a plain flag anymore.” She concluded that “if anything has changed [about how I perceive myself], it’s that I bought my first Ghanaian flag last year.” In this exchange, Pat’s testing experience emboldened her to invoke her biology (“my DNA said I came back as Ghanaian”) when offered an undifferentiated symbol of Africa by the vendor. She then asserts that she may not “need” the Pan-African flag. However, it is the African vendor’s not uninterested response, “Now you know,” that endorses and authenticates Pat’s claim to Ghana, leading to the purchase of a symbol of her possible “home.” To be sure, like other genetic root-seekers, Pat exercised choice in the interpretation of her test results. She had the freedom to link her ethnic-lineage testing to her purchase of the Ghanaian flag. Yet her exchange with the vendor suggests that her choice is somewhat constrained by the African flag vendor’s cultural authority, just as it is by African Ancestry’s authenticating but selective database. Although this social interaction authorized Pat’s genetic affiliation with the Akan, her opinion of her family origins nevertheless remains in flux. Now when asked by others about the outcome of her root-seeking pursuits, Pat admits to answering “Akan” and “Hottentot” interchangeably.
As described in the subtitle of Haley’s book, it concerns the “saga” of “an American family.” This account was a profoundly African American one. But Haley’s deep delving into his family’s past also resonated with a worldwide audience because the dynamics he described touched nearly every corner of the earth. Although racial slavery had especially severe effects in Liverpool and Kingston, Cape Coast and Charleston, Salvador de Bahia and Gorée Island, its shadow veils the globe. The dispersals of the transatlantic slave trade have created a diaspora of African root-seekers.
In 2004 I attended a symposium on race and genetics at the London School of Economics. One of the conference participants was Neil Cameron, executive producer of the 2003 BBC documentary Motherland: A Genetic Journey, who invited me to a gathering of the “Motherland Group,” black Britons who participated in the study on which the documentary was based. (Many of the genetic genealogy reality-television shows that would begin to appear in the United States in a few years’ time drew on Motherland as a model.) Study participants had volunteered DNA samples in exchange for the opportunity to have their ancestral links to Africa scientifically inferred. The Motherland Group first convened in March 2003, shortly after the premiere of the television show. According to Arthur Torrington, a participant in the study and leader of the group, members came together to discuss the “pros and cons of the testing,” because, as he expressed it, the test results were but “the beginning of a journey; there is much more to this thing.” Cameron and his production partner, Archie Baron, subsequently arranged presentations to the group by genetics experts. As Cameron said to me, group members “wanted to be able to talk to each other about the experience and learn more about the science behind the study.”
This meeting served as a forum for the coproduction of biological and social identities, for the making of what anthropologist Paul Rabinow has called “biosociality”—shared medical conditions and genetic predisposition to disease or disability.24 However, participants did not gather on this basis, but rather assembled to explore what biosociality might result from their testing experience. This was bios put to the task of creating a very particular kind of sociality: the possibility of affiliation based on ethnic-lineage and racial-composite DNA analysis.
Although DNA samples from 229 persons were analyzed for the Motherland study, the documentary featured just 3 participants, chosen by the producers for their telegenic appeal and for the dramatic potential of their narratives. Cameras accompanied Jacqueline Harriott as she traveled to Jamaica to explore her Caribbean heritage and await the results of her racial-composite analysis.25 Motherland viewers traveled as well with Mark Anderson and Beaula McCalla as they were transported to their supposed, respective pre–slave trade “motherlands” of Niger and Bioko Island (an island of Equatorial Guinea, a nation composed of mainland territory and five islands) for a dramatic “reunion” with their lost kin.
Mark Jobling—the University of Leicester geneticist who was involved in research in the 1990s to determine the paternity of the children of Sally Hemings, the woman owned by Thomas Jefferson—analyzed Anderson’s Y-DNA. The results gave Anderson quite a surprise. As shown in the documentary, he is stunned to learn that his Y-chromosome traces to Europe rather than Africa. His genealogical disorientation is raw and apparent. Because Motherland was a pioneer of genetic genealogy reality television, before the narrative arc and ritualized performance of these programs had been codified into a script as it is seen today in shows like Who Do You Think You Are? (also borrowed from British television), there is a compelling authenticity to Anderson’s reaction.
Like other of the African American genealogists I interviewed, such as Marla, Anderson wanted results that fit with his present self-understanding. Also like Marla, he turned to Rick Kittles for additional assistance. As the documentary depicts, Anderson sees Kittles as a trusted voice and perhaps even a hero. Kittles is shown explaining to him that more than 20 percent of Y chromosomes of men of African descent will trace to Europe. The black geneticist then provides Anderson with the information—the usable past—he was clearly seeking, a link via mtDNA analysis to the people of contemporary Niger. Mark is elated by this news. His embrace of results that better aligned with his self-conception reveals the extent to which these genetic ancestry techniques are valuable to root-seekers in fulfilling genealogical aspirations that can be deployed in the world. The utility of this scientific information is depicted in Motherland as we see Anderson taken “back to Africa” to meet with some of the Kanuri community, his inferred ethnic group in Niger.
Back in London, Beaula was in attendance at this meeting of the Motherland Group, which featured a specialist in African migration, human evolutionary geneticist Martin Richards from the University of Leeds, as the day’s speaker. His presentation outlined the theoretical and technical assumptions on which the study participants’ genetic genealogy results rested, and cautioned attendees about the limitations of mtDNA and Y-chromosome analyses for the purposes of determining ancestry. Specifically, Richards warned attendees that genetic genealogy does not link a consumer to ancestors at a specific location and historical moment. He stressed as well that the DNA databases on which genetic genealogical tests rely are incomplete, because they contain too few samples from too few sites in Africa to make robust claims.
On these points, Richards was repeating arguments first aired in an editorial critique of the Motherland study that he published in the Guardian newspaper one year earlier. Entitled “Beware the Gene Genies,” his opinion piece revealed that the genetic marker used by Cambridge University geneticist Peter Forester to link Beaula with the current-day Bubi people of Bioko Island, Equatorial Guinea—called a “rare marker” in the documentary—was also found thousands of miles away. Richards wrote that “a glance at the published mitochondrial database shows that Beaula’s variant is also found in Mozambique.”26 He continued, noting that “a huge area of central and southern Africa that provided more than a third of all victims of the slave trade is still unsampled. Beaula’s maternal lineage could have come from anywhere in that region.”27 I was later told by producer Cameron that Motherland Group members were familiar with Richards’s editorial. Nonetheless, Richards’s repeated criticisms of the project on this day supplied a moment of quiet tension in the room—expressed through hushed tsk-tsks and sheepish glances. I initially attributed this tension to the fact that Beaula (who I recognized from the documentary) was present as the geneticist delineated the two possible, but possibly conflicting, accounts of her ancestry. However, at the conclusion of Richards’s talk, it became clear that Beaula was not the only person in the room who might be experiencing genealogical disorientation.
During the question-and-answer period, a self-described “Grenadian-born British” woman, who appeared to be in her late fifties and who I will call June, announced that in addition to herself, “twelve or fifteen women came up Bubi in the [Motherland] study”; she concluded that the test “does not give a complete blueprint of who I am.” Here June established herself as the principal interpreter of her genetic genealogy test. Her use of the word “blueprint” with the qualifier “complete” indicates her belief that the genetic test offered only a partial account of her identity. June’s knowledge of the “twelve or fifteen” other “Bubis” in the study also undermined her sense of individuality—her desire for “a complete blueprint of who I am,” as she put it. The genetic findings did not seem to satisfy her criteria for either genetic or social exclusivity.
Many who attended the Motherland gathering stayed after Richards’s presentation to ask additional questions and socialize over tea and cookies. After hearing June voice her concerns, I was curious about Beaula’s opinion of the second possible interpretation of her genetic genealogy test. Did she, like June, question the test’s reliability because of the presence of the “rare” Bubi marker in several other Motherland study participants? Which result, if any, did she accept after learning that her ancestry might also be traced to southeastern Africa? On what basis did she decide between the alternative accounts of her maternal lineage? I introduced myself to Beaula and we began a conversation about her experience as a participant in the Motherland project. Before she could fully respond to my queries, a man who had been sitting next to her at the meeting joined us. She introduced him to me: “This is my brother, Juan. He doesn’t speak English. He speaks Spanish [an official language of Equatorial Guinea].” “Your biological brother?” I asked. “My brother from Equatorial Guinea,” she responded. From this point on, the discussion continued between the three of us, with me alternating between elementary Spanish with Juan, and English with Beaula (who spoke even less Spanish than I), but drifted from the topic of Beaula’s genetic ancestry tracing, to the purpose of my visit to London and Juan’s impressions of England. As a consequence, I was not able to inquire further about Beaula’s brief, but suggestive, statement of affiliation with Juan on that day. But several days later I exchanged e-mails with both of them.
When posing the question, “Your biological brother?” I wanted to know how Beaula defined her relationship with Juan. Although she is depicted in Motherland as living an Afrocentric lifestyle in Bristol, England, her classification of Juan suggested to me a relationship that was more significant than the vernacular term “brother” used by some blacks to refer to others of African descent. Moreover, in an e-mail, Juan informed me that “Beaula esta ayudando a encontrar a mi madre [Beaula is helping me find my mother]”—a mother with whom he had lost contact many years ago, and who may have migrated from Equatorial Guinea to Europe. This statement suggested that Beaula and Juan did not share a mother, nor was it likely that they were members of the same nuclear family. If Beaula did not regard Juan as a relation in either of these two senses, perhaps “my brother from Equatorial Guinea” described what Catherine Nash terms “genetic kinship,” affiliations fashioned from the facts of DNA analysis, the particulars of which are both unspecified and ahistorical. Genealogists also use the phrase “DNA cousin” to characterize persons who might share a set of genetic markers in a genealogical analysis, but whose relationship to one another remains unspecified. In providing associations that are underspecified, genetic genealogy tracing presents consumers with the paradox of imprecise pedigree. Root-seekers’ awareness of this paradox is indicated by their use of ostensibly redundant phrases such as “DNA cousins” and “genetic kin.”28 These composite descriptors, of course, acknowledge DNA analysis as the medium of affiliation. However, because the words “cousin” and “kin” are already commonly understood to connote “biogenetic ties,” the placement of the adjectives “DNA” and “genetic” before these words should be unnecessary.29 Thus the circulation of these phrases seems to suggest that the associations supplied through genetic genealogy are qualified and, therefore, must be rhetorically set apart from “natural” kinship; or, in other words, that the results of genetic genealogy testing are categorical but imprecise.
What was more certain was that there was something that linked Beaula to Juan and, moreover, made her feel obligated to assist him with his own familial search. Sponsorship of an orphanage and school on Bioko Island and the cultivation of a growing number of Equatoguinean acquaintances, in both Africa and Europe, also indicated Beaula’s chosen affinity and showed DNA kinship to be ties that can bind—no matter their imprecision. Her assertion of a familial and ethnic tie to Juan confirmed that, whatever her feelings about the genetic link to Mozambique, she was committed to the ancestry designation she received as a participant in the Motherland study. Similar to Pat’s experience, Beaula’s genetic genealogy result gained traction through social ties.
For half a century, Roots has been an enduring parable of racial slavery and its aftermath: our public memory of a past many do not wish to acknowledge and a touchstone for present-day matters concerning identity, belonging, and community. Haley’s model heralded the democratization of genealogy—once an elite pursuit—to broader segments of society. The introduction of genetic ancestry testing pushed this diffusion further, outsourcing genealogy to DNA analysts, but leaving the root-seeker in place as the agent of her genealogical aspirations. In this process, genetic ancestry testing has extended the influence of the Roots narrative and its power to inspire forms of reconciliation—personal and familial, diasporic and interracial, transnational and political. At base, the pursuit of African ancestry is an exploration into one’s specific family history. Yet root-seeking may also be a journey of orienting satisfaction, disorienting discovery, or historical reckoning. The beginning of a process of reconciliation rather than its culmination, the genetic pursuit of African ancestry begets other pursuits, including the creation of alternative social worlds with reimagined kinship arrangements and affiliations, and hopes for what all of this might become.