The legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination in almost every institution of our lives—you know, that casts a long shadow. And that’s still part of our DNA that’s passed on.
—President Barack Obama
In my discussions with genealogists, academics, and others about my research on genetic ancestry testing and the uses to which it has been put, I would inevitably be asked about my own experience. I would always answer honestly, stating that although I found genetic ancestry testing fascinating—which is why I had spent more than a decade studying it—engaging in the practice was not a priority for me in the way it was for many of the people I encountered. As a matter of fact, because of my close association with the traditional genealogists at the Jean Sampson Scott Greater New York Chapter of AAHGS in Harlem, who do archival work and make use of the growing availability of databases of digitized records, conventional family-history research had tended to hold more appeal for me.
As an ethnographer, I was also aware that the frequency with which I was asked, “Have you taken the test?” reflected impressions about my credibility as a researcher. The subtext of the question was: “How can I trust your analysis if you haven’t had the experience?” Scholars and reporters often write about social phenomena they have not experienced firsthand. Yet my growing understanding that genetic ancestry testing was not just personal but also societal and political—and my methodology of participant-observation—ultimately led me to embark upon my own genetic genealogy journey.
I had planned to attend the 2010 Leon H. Sullivan Summit, as this would have been the first summit since the passage of a resolution encouraging blacks in the United States to use African Ancestry’s testing to form diaspora networks. I hoped to take stock of what this declaration was beginning to yield. Yet owing to fiscal troubles, the 2010 summit did not take place. And the fate of the Leon Sullivan Foundation was becoming increasingly uncertain.
However, the organization announced a Global African Reunion in place of the biennial summit for four days in September 2010. Among the conference registration options was a “DNA Test” plus attendance package. Here was my chance to engage personally in genetic genealogy and to experience the public reveal of my results. In July I swabbed my cheek and sent my genetic data to Sorenson Genomics, a leading DNA testing laboratory based in Salt Lake City, which processes samples for African Ancestry as well as Ancestry.com. In two months, I would receive the results of my MatriClan test.
In August, I received an intriguing e-mail announcement about the Global African Reunion, with the subject heading “A Royal Reveal,” from the Sullivan Foundation:
Our Reveal Ceremony has just become Royal
Please join the Leon H. Sullivan Foundation and Martin Luther King III
As he learns his ancestral lineage, and that of his father,
The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.
. . . FOR THE VERY FIRST TIME THE AFRICAN COUNTRY WHICH CAN CLAIM THE GENETIC BLOODLINE OF REVEREND MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. WILL BE REVEALED.
As was evident at the 2011 National Urban League meeting that would kick off with an announcement of a 23andMe research project for African Americans—Roots into the Future—in which genetic ancestry testing would be provided for free in exchange for giving a DNA sample to be used in medical research, genetic analysis is being interwoven with the legacy of the twentieth-century civil rights movement. This unlikely conjunction was on full display at the Global African Reunion a year earlier. This was not the “royalty” that many genealogists hope to find in their family tree—some distant king or queen from a precolonial African empire like Benin or from early modern Europe like the House of Habsburg. This was African American royalty. This was royalty from the land of the long black freedom struggle. And I was to receive my genetic ancestry reveal on the same evening.
The Leon Sullivan Foundation’s Global African Reunion was held in Atlanta in September 2010. It was here, in a hotel ballroom, that I would learn in a public “reveal ceremony,” standing alongside two other African American women—one an employee of the Compound Foundation, launched by singer-songwriter Ne-Yo, and one an LSF affiliate—my genetic ancestry. Kittles presented my results to me along with his business partner Paige, with Isaiah Washington, the evening’s MC, beside him. Our three reveals were the opening act. The reveals of three prominent men would be the headlining act of the evening. There would be only kings at the royal reveal.
Paige announced the DNA results to the two women on stage with me. They were visibly moved by the news that “at long last,” as one of them said, concluded this stage of their pursuit of African ancestry. My reveal presentation was the last one of the opening act. Paige, who like Kittles was well aware of my ongoing study of their company, turned the microphone over to her partner, perhaps because in my research I had worked more closely with him. Waiting to hear my results, I was worried that my skepticism about genetic ancestry testing—its technical limits and its symbolic excess—would be apparent to the audience and would ruin the experience of genetic revelation and African reconciliation that they had come to enjoy. I had already witnessed the exhilaration of the two women before me and the emotional call-and-response they carried out with the enrapt and excited audience. Was I a fraud? Should a researcher who has scrutinized the ritualized nature of the reveal since the advent of genetic genealogy participate in this ceremony? Because I was well aware that the reveal was among other things a dialogue with an audience, I wondered if I could deliver the emotion that this revelation was expected to elicit.
Because I had developed a professional relationship with Kittles as a fellow academic, the “handover” from Paige to Kittles quelled some of my anxiety. I knew he was aware that I studied the gray area, the nuance and complexity of genetic ancestry testing, and that my reaction would likely reflect that. “Alondra, you are related to the Bamileke people of Cameroon!” I looked at Kittles, smiled widely, and said “Thank you,” feeling a bit disoriented. I looked out into the crowd, seeking a theatrical cue. What else was expected of me? The response came when the room swelled with audience applause. My reveal had succeeded. Kittles handed me an envelope containing my Certificate of Ancestry and other details about Cameroon. As I descended the stage, I was patted on the back, squeezed on the shoulder, and hugged by many. The actor Rockmond Dunbar, dressed in an African tunic, offered words of congratulations and encouragement. It was a surreal experience. I experienced in the emotion of these encounters what I had been trying to convey conceptually. It was like the descendants of Venture Smith explained: genetic ancestry analysis provides results to an individual, but it is about so much and so many more.
The headliners—the reveals of not only a son of Martin Luther King Jr. but also the son of Marcus Garvey as well as Carlton Brown, the president of Clark Atlanta University—took place before the same expectant crowd that included Dunbar, as well as former Atlanta mayor and United Nations ambassador and civil rights icon Andrew Young, former president of Nigeria Olusegun Obasanjo, representatives from the administration of Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan, bureaucrats from across the continent of Africa who had just completed their work at the UN General Assembly, numerous African expatriates, and many African Americans. Although King’s legacy has been riven in internecine struggles amongst his children, King III was accompanied on this evening by his sister Bernice. Julius Garvey, a septuagenarian retired cardiac surgeon from Long Island, New York, wore an unassuming gray suit, his father’s politics evidenced in a small lapel pin with equal-sized bands of red, black, and green that, to the uninitiated, was as subtle as a Rothko painting. But all in this room knew it to be a symbol of Pan-African politics.
MC Isaiah Washington signaled for Kittles to announce the results. Kittles informed King that his Y-chromosome DNA analysis traced to Ireland and his mtDNA analysis associated him with the Mende people of Sierra Leone. The same tests inferred that Garvey was connected to Portugal and Spain on the patrilineal side and to Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, and Senegal on the matrilineal side. (I would learn later that King and Garvey had received their respective results long before this evening.)1 The reveal was for the audience, it was to complete the narrative arc of reconciliation, the ritual.
The headliners were asked to speak to the audience. Standing at the podium with Kittles, Paige, and Washington, and with Hope Masters, the daughter of the late Leon H. Sullivan, standing just behind him, Garvey focused on the patrilineage connection to Europe. Stepping up to the microphone, he reminded the audience of the brutal history of slavery that yielded this genetic result. King, for his part, standing at the podium with his sister, underscored the global family aspect of his particular results. He said:
For all the years that I traveled to the African continent, I always wanted to know now where exactly do I hail from. So now, we know. The question is what’s next. Dr. Garvey shared information that put things in perspective from the [patrilineal] side of our fathers. But it is all connected because our world is a very small place and getting smaller. And somehow we as people of color, not that anyone else doesn’t have a special role, [have a special role to play]. But I used to hear our father say that the historian Arnold Toynbee used to say that if there was to be any level of morality brought to the shores of our world, it may have to come from people of color. And so we stand on the brink of history, on the shoulders of so many tonight. And we must quickly, Bernice, my wife, Andrea, and other family members that are here tonight: we must quickly get to the shores of Sierra Leone, quickly connect with the Mende people. And then we ought to do a little more research on the Portuguese side. But from the bottom of my heart again I just say ‘thank you’ for this incredible connection. Bless you.
These responses highlighted the narrative and contextual framing that is so crucial to the social life of DNA. Genetic markers in and of themselves have no meaning or value; they are like letters on the page of a book for someone who has not been taught to read. But we learn to read the significance of DNA in science labs and at genealogical gatherings. Garvey and King similarly received ancestral inferences to both the continent of Europe and the continent of Africa. Their interpretations gave different tonal emphases, but neither timbre was wrong.
As the scions of historic “race leaders,” the participation of King III and Garvey made patent the social justice and social repair motivation of reconciliation projects. Yet, on this evening, there were no exultations of “Up, up, you mighty race!” as Garvey famously encouraged his followers. There was no overt expression of a renewed vision of equality as articulated by Martin Luther King Jr. in his “I Have a Dream” speech. The DNA test revelations played out as the twenty-first-century legacy of the civil rights tradition, and were implied to carry forward this work of transformation and imagination. These reveals nevertheless lacked Garvey’s organizational structure and King’s prophetic egalitarianism. Indeed, the prevailing social vision on offer this night—through a large projection of the Reverend Leon Sullivan brandishing an African passport that loomed over the ballroom’s stage and Washington’s wielding that night of his own recently acquired Sierra Leonean passport—was one of escape.
The Global African Reunion encapsulated the vexed nature of reconciliation projects, which are simultaneously atavistic and futuristic. On the one hand, this event conveyed that the racial reconciliation, recompense for past injustice, and diasporic reunion—the resolution of past yet persistent matters—had been reimagined as a technical issue of the highest order. These were cutting-edge solutions to age-old injustices and yearnings; new tactics for new times.
It was vividly evident as well that most sitting with me in this Atlanta ballroom shared the conviction that we were living—and performing—an urgent, different kind of racial politics. In this new time, genetic science can be friend or foe. It can exonerate or convict. It can be a bridge to Africa or underscore the bittersweet European ancestry of many blacks in the United States. What ultimately did I as an individual, and this transnational audience, gain from these six public roots revelations?
As I was poignantly congratulated by countless strangers that evening for having recovered my African ethnic identity, but felt no differently, I was keenly aware of how deeply symbolic this experience was. At the same time, I was very conscious of the fact that DNA holds not only the molecular building blocks of life, but also some of our highest aspirations, for ourselves, our families, and our social communities.
With reconciliation projects, the insights of genetic science are applied to the discovery or confirmation of ancestry in the hopes of securing social inclusion, including rights and reparation. But to what extent can DNA identification be efficacious for African diasporic and/or racial reconciliation? What might be the consequences of the genetic mediation of African diasporic cultural politics that have historically involved social movement tactics and civil rights organizations?
In this book, I have explored the interconnection of genetics, racial politics, and aspirations for social repair at several interconnected sites. Knowledge derived from genetic science has increasingly been used to explain ever-growing aspects of the social world, as demonstrated by the proliferation of genetic genealogy testing. In the face of our growing faith in DNA, caution is warranted. The reconciliation projects described here suggest that it may not be possible to settle political controversies and correct historical misdeeds on strictly technical grounds. Genetic genealogy tests may lack strong enough precision to be efficacious in the courts, or to rule out the possibility of other ethnic or racial affiliations with certainty.
A troubling reality of these reconciliation projects is the fact that the purposes to which DNA is put may be, in the words of Alvin Weinberg, “trans-scientific.”2 A nuclear physicist, Weinberg deployed the idea of trans-science to forestall criticism of potentially dangerous research and to draw a line between politics and “pure science,” as he put it. Contra Weinberg, I take it as a given that science and its applications are inherently social (and thus also political) phenomena. But I nevertheless find Weinberg’s insight to be of use at a time when genetic science is being asked to solve and resolve myriad issues.
For Weinberg, some questions posed to science—typically metaphysical or moral ones—cannot be answered or resolved by science itself. The inadmissibility of genetic genealogy as proof of ancestry in civil suits—despite its use in other courts and for other operations of state power, such as the reunification of immigrant families in immigration policy, and the expansion of “familial searching” in the criminal justice system, for example—suggests that reconciliation projects may be trans-scientific. In other words, while the practice of scientific inquiry emerges from social and political conditions, it may nevertheless prove incapable of grappling with issues that are essentially ethical, metaphysical, or moral in nature. Some of the questions posed to genetic science may be fundamentally irresolvable through DNA analysis, such as centuries-old and deeply entrenched disputes and debates about racial slavery in the United States. Clearly, the issues, controversies, and questions we pose to science about race and the unsettled past can never find resolution in the science itself.
Those instances in which genetic science fails to fully resolve these concerns suggests that what is sought are not genetic facts as proof of injury or vectors of repair, but rather reconciliation in its fullest sense. The repair that is sought cannot necessarily be found in genetic science solely. DNA can offer an avenue toward recognition, but cannot stand in for reconciliation: voice, acknowledgment, mourning, forgiveness, and healing. These reconciliation efforts also raise interesting and fraught contradictions: they threaten to reify race in the pursuit of repair for injury; they suggest how the pursuit of justice can be easily intertwined with commercial enterprises; they may substitute genetic data for the just outcomes that are sought; and, indeed, they demonstrate well that facts may not, in and of themselves, secure justice.
We also ask DNA to embody some of our loftiest goals for social betterment. Tied to our genealogical aspirations are ambitions for ourselves, our communities, and our world. The initiatives described in this book are taking place at a time when other avenues for social justice and racial repair, such as affirmative action, have been curtailed or lost popular support. Reconciliation projects are one form of response to both the retrenchment following major civil rights strides of the 1950s and 1960s, and also the narrowness of our electoral politics. At the risk of mixing metaphors, in reconciliation projects the double helix works as a spyglass that telescopes back in time, allowing us to see the healing that remains to be achieved in American society. While attention on genetics is today understandably focused on the potential for its medical application, it is by attending to the social life of DNA that we can appreciate—and truly assess—our collective condition. Reconciliation projects spurred by DNA testing may be starting points for such dialogues, but we cannot rely on science to propel social change.
When I began my research into genetic genealogy over a decade ago, I could not have imagined that I would end up writing a book about racial politics in the United States. These were small stories, personal accounts that, while often deeply felt, did not rise to the level of large-scale social issues. But what I found, of course, ran the gamut from the performance of identity to the seeking of justice.
In this journey, there were so many people along the way who helped me to both see and do the work of telling the bittersweet story of how the long struggle of racial equality propelled tactical ingenuity—the use of cutting-edge technologies immediately put to unintended purposes following their release—but had strategic constraints, as new technologies often hold for black communities.
In looking at the uses and abuses of genetic claims, one can only conclude that DNA is Janus-faced. Yet with genetic ancestry testing, these two ways of looking are also sankofa. The sankofa is an Adinkra symbol from the Akan community of Ghana. When the burials were uncovered at the African Burial Ground, one of the coffins had a heart-shaped symbol made of iron nails tacked into its top. This symbol, which some scholars believe to be the sankofa, was incorporated into the African Burial Ground Monument as the most prominent of a set of symbols. A rendering of the design found on the coffin lid is prominently carved into a large black granite memorial at the center of the site and serves as a symbol for the African Burial Ground as a whole. The meaning of the sankofa symbol has been differently interpreted, but those interpretations aptly converge around going back or looking back to something or some time forgotten.
The boom in genetic ancestry testing over the last decade has been extraordinary. It’s ever-rising and decade-plus of staying power confirms that this pursuit is neither a fad nor a trend. For good and for naught, we use DNA as a portal to the past that yields insights for the present and the future. We use DNA to shine a light on social trauma and to show how historic injustices continue to resonate today.
Under social conditions in which discrimination and injustice experienced by African Americans both in the past and in the present are discounted or denied, the turn to forensic evidence as a way to compel recognition is understandable. Just as we hope that body cameras might serve as a check on law enforcement abuses, we seek genetic genealogy to expose and substantiate the legacies of racial slavery. Given black communities’ accumulated mistrust of science, the use of genetic analysis for liberatory ends is perhaps paradoxical. But the transformative aspirations for DNA are consistent with the long-standing use of empirical data in racial justice struggles, from the “doll studies” conducted by psychologists Kenneth Clark and Mamie Phipps Clark that would serve as “exhibit A” in the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954 to the Mapping Police Violence project that collects aggregate data about men and women killed by law enforcement.3 But as the field of agnotology—the study of culturally induced ignorance—shows us, evidence may be no match for ideology. Genetic ancestry testing is but one implement in an entire tool kit of tactics that, marshaled together, must be brought to the project of building racial reconcilation and social justice.