The temperature climbed well into the eighties on the day in July 2006 when the cool, damp New England soil was brushed from the top and sides of the coffin of Venture Smith (1729–1805), a formerly enslaved man, under the glaring lights of British Broadcasting Corporation cameras. The BBC was filming a documentary about Smith, titled A Slave’s Story, in the leafy cemetery adjacent to the First Church of Christ, Congregational, in East Haddam, Connecticut. Joining the film crew at the site were archaeologists, geneticists, anthropologists, and historians. Many of these researchers—whose expertise ranged from African history and colonial America to human genetics and forensic science—were affiliated with two institutions leading the initiative, the University of Connecticut at Storrs, and the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation in Hull, England. Also present were two senior citizens, Coralynne Henry Jackson and Florence Warmsley, who were among Smith’s oldest living descendants. Smith’s remains would be examined, with their permission and that of other Smith relatives.1
Undisturbed for two centuries, Smith’s grave was being excavated because researchers hoped its analysis would illuminate how he lived and died. A team headed by Dr. Nicholas Bellantoni, Connecticut’s state archaeologist, was on hand to carry out the excavation. Any genetic samples that could be extracted from the remains would be taken to the laboratory of Warren Perry, a physical anthropologist at Central Connecticut State University, who runs the Archaeology Laboratory for African and African Diaspora Studies. Following this step, a research group led by Linda Strausbaugh, director of the Center for Applied Genetics and Technology at the University of Connecticut, and an expert of “historical genomics,” would carry out a genetic analysis of Smith’s mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which passes mostly unchanged from mothers to children, for clues into Smith’s ancestry.
At a juncture when DNA sleuthing into the past is commonplace and genetic ancestry testing is the stuff of primetime television, this research undertaking seems unexceptional. Yet Smith is a most curious subject for this exercise in excavation and genetic analysis, for the known details of his life rival that of some of our most prominent and well-documented historical figures. Smith recorded a “slave narrative,” a first-person account of his life. This narrative is part of a tragic and often heroic genre of American writing that has opened a small window of historical insight onto the experiences of enslaved women and men. Within the genre, Smith’s account is distinctive for its fullness. Most uniquely, his narrative goes back in time to his life before the Middle Passage, that perilous transatlantic journey that transported Africans into lives in bondage in Europe and the Americas. As historian James Brewer Stewart explains, Smith’s narrative “is the only extant account by an African American that links West African memories to a life completed within the United States.”2
Smith relayed his extraordinary journey from slavery to freedom to Elisha Niles, a local schoolteacher, in 1798, seven years before his death at the age of seventy-six. The account was subsequently published as A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa, but Resident Above Sixty Years in the United States of America, Related by Himself.3 In his narrative, Smith goes into fine detail about his life in Africa: he tells us the land of his birth (“Dukandarra, in Guinea”); the name of his father (“Saungm Furro”); his birth name (“Broteer Furro”); and of his experience of capture at the hands of a foreign army led by a man named Baukurre.
Smith recalls that it was Captain Collingwood who helmed the slave ship on which he was transmitted.4 He shares his story of enslavement from boyhood to adulthood, with his strength and abilities increasing as he grew to be a man more than six feet in stature. Smith also explains how his freedom was secured by his own hand. For, in addition to the duties he carried out as a condition of his enslavement, he did additional backbreaking labor to earn money, and purchased his liberty in 1765. As a free man, he continued to work and save his earnings. Between 1769 and 1775, he paid to liberate his wife, Margaret (Meg), their two sons, Solomon and Cuff, and Hannah, his daughter. Even accounting for the filter of Niles, who transcribed and edited Smith’s story utilizing the formulaic conventions of the genre, the former slave left behind a narrative brimming with detail and personal sentiment. According to Stewart, “most historians consider [the narrative to be] a source sufficient in and of itself to explain who Venture Smith was, where he came from, what circumstances he faced, what he believed in, and how he translated his beliefs into designs for living.”5
Augmenting this rich biographical material, Smith’s present-day relatives have extensive knowledge of their ancestry. Smith’s descendants have worked with Karl Stofko, the town historian for East Haddam, where Smith was laid to rest, to document ten generations of Venture and Meg’s offspring.6 Additionally, the descendants have a deep and inclusive understanding of family that comprises marriage, partnering, and both formal and informal (“people raised by ‘bloodline’ descendants”) adoption.7 Smith’s descendants have sketched out a tall and broad family tree that begins on the African continent and branches to the present. In fact, the Smith progeny hold the enviable position of having more information about their ancestors than most of us could ever hope to know about our own.
Given that Smith left behind a first-person account of his origins and that we know a great deal about him through historical research and genealogy, what do we make of the scientists, social scientists, and documentary producers who came together in a quest to corroborate his personal narrative with scientific evidence? Why is there a need for scientific support of Smith’s life story if historians declare his account a sufficient source in and of itself? Why is DNA analysis deemed to proffer more valuable or reliable information about a man’s familial history than his own words?
There are two answers to these questions. One concerns the social power of DNA. A second, related explanation has to do with the social life of DNA. The Smith example illuminates DNA’s social power. The quest for genetic evidence suggests a belief that the former slave’s true origins are not to be found in his own words or in details provided by his distinctive narrative voice, but lie ultimately in his biological remains. The special status afforded to DNA as the final arbiter of truth of identity is vividly apparent in the language we use to describe it.8 In a capacity similar to how DNA’s bases—adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine—combine and recombine in myriad ways to create biological matter, the language of DNA pervades our cultural imagination. Hyperbolic phrases such as “code of codes,” “the holy grail,” “the blueprint,” the human “instruction book,” and “the secret of life” suggest a core assumption about the perceived omnipotence of genetics.
In their influential 1994 book, sociologist Dorothy Nelkin and historian M. Susan Lindee discuss these metaphors as part of what they term “the DNA mystique.” Drawing on a comprehensive analysis of scholarly and popular evidence, the authors reveal how elements of contemporary culture carry the message that the ultimate source of power and knowledge lies “in our genes.” They observe that DNA is seen as a phenomenally malleable symbol, imbued with seemingly magical powers to access the truth.
The gene, they contend, is an icon suffused with “cultural meaning independent of its precise biological properties.”9 While claims that genes tell us who we are or how we will behave are no more true today than they were two decades ago, they are now augmented by the democratization of DNA analysis. In the twenty years since Nelkin and Lindee drew our attention to DNA’s authority in the public mind, the gulf between the gene’s cultural meaning and its biological properties has narrowed. This is in part the result of direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing kits that now give scientific shape to human yearnings.
The DTC genetic-ancestry-testing industry emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century, growing from a handful of companies to scores of them in the past decade. Reliable figures are hard to come by, but by 2015 the industry was estimated to have served close to two million customers. Half this number came from one company, 23andMe, alone.10 The explosion of interest in DNA root-seeking in the United States stems from our history as a nation of immigrants and migrants—both voluntary and shackled travelers—arriving from elsewhere and fraying family ties along the way. Tracing one’s origins has thus become something of a national pastime.
Genealogy is a pursuit that dates back to biblical times, with the tracing of priestly lines or royal kinship. Beginning in the twentieth century the tracing of ancestry gained widespread appeal in the United States. What sociologist Herbert Gans defined as “symbolic ethnicity”—the ability to hark back to County Cork, Ireland, while jubilating on St. Patrick’s Day in Boston, to recall ancestors in Sicily while parading in the Feast of San Gennaro in Manhattan’s Little Italy, or to hang an English coat of arms in one’s home—became an important component of American identity.11
For African Americans, this search is both more elusive and more fraught. A profound loss of social ties was an immediate outcome of the Middle Passage and racial slavery. The ravages of the Civil War left vital records and slave-plantation paperwork degraded or destroyed. Information about black families was also lost intergenerationally—an understandable impulse to forget traumas of the past. But today African Americans use genetic ancestry testing with the hopes of shedding light on precisely the kind of familial and historical information supplied by Venture Smith’s slave narrative and family tree.
Thus, the turn to genetic evidence in the Smith case, the endeavor to excavate his remains despite knowing more about him than we do about most Americans of this time period, is revealing. As Smith’s descendants have expressed, genetic ancestry testing is about more than the unearthing of facts. They hold, and we hold also, more intangible aspirations for DNA.
Since 1997, the community of East Haddam has celebrated Venture Smith Day, an occasion that typically includes scholars like the historians John Wood Sweet, an expert on the life of the former slave; Robert Hall, who both studies Smith and has performed as him in period dress; and Chandler Saint, president of the Beecher House Center for the Study of Equal Rights; and local politicians such as Connecticut state representative Melissa Ziobron. This day also marks the annual Smith family reunion, when descendants flock to Connecticut to lay a wreath on their patriarch’s gravesite, take a group photograph, and commune with one another.
When I encountered Florence Warmsley, an eighth-generation descendant, at the tenth annual Venture Smith Day in September 2006, she told me she hoped that the genetic testing of her forefather would help to “educate the American public.” Her elder cousin Coralynne Henry Jackson, also an eighth-generation descendant, felt similarly about the educational importance of DNA analysis of Smith’s remains. In A Slave’s Story—which premiered in the spring of 2007 on the bicentennial anniversary of the abolition of the British slave trade—Jackson declares her hope that the results of the investigation into Smith’s remains would “help schoolchildren . . . [and] let us know where in Africa he came from.”12 To be sure, Jackson and Warmsley want to uncover details about their ancestral past. Yet notably, both also express a desire for the education of others (schoolchildren, the American public, and so forth). They hope that this excavation work, in unearthing scientific data that might teach us something more about Smith’s personal history, will also yield information about the history of slavery and racism in the United States.
As A Slave’s Story closes, the camera fixes on Warmsley, who poignantly proclaims her hope that the revelation of her ancestor’s genetic ancestry will “bring healing.”13 The desire expressed by this distant descendant of an enslaved man and woman gets to the very heart of what some African Americans hope can be accomplished with genetic genealogy testing: racial reconciliation.
Genetic analysis is indeed increasingly being used as a catalyst for reconciliation—to restore lineages, families, and knowledge of the past and to make political claims in the present. We now turn regularly to genetic testing to unravel mysteries and resolve questions. As I describe in this book, the social power of DNA is being similarly leveraged to raise awareness of blacks’ past experiences and, in so doing, contribute to today’s racial politics, which are too often marked by historical amnesia.
I came to this conclusion reservedly. I believe that the ultimate account of Venture Smith’s origins is not to be found in his genes, the most essentialist and socially anemic conception of human identity. I am wary when genetic inference is given trump power over historical archives and autobiography. Moreover, the excavation of Smith’s grave for DNA analysis is more telling of how our ideas about race are unfolding in the genomics era than it is about Smith’s authentic self. At the same time, the Smith case is invaluable in showing that part of the appeal of genetic ancestry testing lies in providing a lexicon with which to continue to speak about the unfinished business of slavery and its lasting shadows: racial discrimination and economic inequality. DNA-based techniques allow us to try—or try again—to contemplate, respond to, and resolve enduring social wounds. Today, genetic science “can play a role in many different stories,” as Nelkin and Lindee put it, as it moves beyond the hospital, the clinical laboratory, and the courtroom to the work of reconciliation, swinging like a pendulum between our hopes and fears.14
The summer of 2010 marked the tenth anniversary of the decoding of the “first draft” of the human genome. This scientific milestone was met with cautious appraisal from usually enthusiastic quarters. Leading science reporter Nicholas Wade bemoaned in the New York Times that “after 10 years of effort” the therapeutic promise of genomics “remains largely elusive.” J. Craig Venter, the maverick geneticist who was a major force behind the Human Genome Project, declared more emphatically in Der Spiegel that “we have learned nothing from the genome.” These sober assessments were surprising given how profoundly our social world has been changed by genetic science and its applications in the last decade.15
While concrete health benefits stemming from the Human Genome Project may indeed be “elusive,” its broader impacts are clear. Genetic analysis has become widespread. There is no question that genetics research is prevalent in biomedicine, even if its ability to predict or remedy ills remains to be fully demonstrated. In criminal justice settings, DNA is becoming ubiquitous and is double-edged, playing a role in both conviction and exoneration. And commercially available genetic tests that claim to specify genealogy, ancestral affiliation, or racial and ethnic identity are among the most conspicuous signposts of our genome age. In these different institutional settings, we have zealously (and often uncritically) seized upon DNA as a master key that unlocks many secrets.
DNA is the ultimate big data. Genetic data is multivocal and contains information that can be used in varied facets of society regardless of its source or its original intent of use. And genes are omnibus; they confer many types of information simultaneously. DNA analysis therefore moves across and between the expected medical, forensic, and genealogical domains, and also beyond them into a wider set of arenas, with expanded purpose. Diverse ends and aspirations are now sought with and through the use of genetics. This diffusion comprises the social life of DNA.
This social-life approach to genetics follows the methodology of the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, who, in The Social Life of Things, argues that to understand what objects mean and why they are important we must trace their circulation in society (“things-in-motion”), illuminating “their human and social context” and revealing “the human transactions and calculations that enliven things.”16 By similarly tracking DNA analysis, we gain insight into where and why genetics is called upon to answer fundamental questions about human existence, often through extensions of its popular genealogical uses. Genetics is today engaged in practices of identity formation, in philanthropy and socioeconomic development projects, as corroborating evidence in civil litigation and historical debates, and elsewhere. Thus, although the therapeutic utility of the genome may be arguable, the social life of DNA is unmistakable: the double helix now lies at the center of some of the most significant issues of our time.17
Reconciliation projects employing genetics are illustrative of the social utility of DNA.18 In these endeavors, genetic analysis is used to contribute to community cohesion, collective memory, or social transformation. This is the very same “healing” that the Smith descendants sought for themselves and for American society. With reconciliation projects, DNA analysis is incorporated into attempts to reunite formerly opposed parties or formerly unified ones (rejoining broken ties within a family, a community, a nation-state, or a diaspora); to uncover biographical or historical information that has been lost to the march of time; or to adjudicate contentious issues. Reconciliation projects are forms of social practice that happen across the globe. In post-conflict Argentina, in the well-known case of the Asociación Civil Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo), for example, genetic analysis has been used for more than two decades to help reunite children—who lost their parents to political violence and were unlawfully placed with adoptive families—with their biological grandparents. In post-apartheid South Africa, DNA analysis has helped to identify the bodies of former members of the African National Congress who were “disappeared” in the fight against state-sanctioned racial discrimination. What these efforts share is the use of forensic evidence to elicit information about the past, often after conflict or trauma.
This book considers one such project in depth: efforts aimed at repairing the social ruptures produced by transatlantic slavery. I examine a constellation of activities initiated by black Americans and other persons of African descent, who embark upon genetic journeys of discovery about their ancestral origins and who, in turn, propel this information into a variety of sociopolitical purposes. With reconciliation projects, DNA analysis has been annexed onto unresolved and, therefore, persistent debates about national belonging. Beginning with the emergence of “humanitarian genetics” in Latin America and moving forward to the “founding family” controversies in the United States, developments in the 1990s combined to make possible a new course for molecular biology—one set toward reconciliation.
I began my research for this book in 2003, when genetic ancestry testing was in its infancy. Attending genealogical conferences and events throughout the United States, I encountered the early adopters of these techniques, amateur researchers who had been targeted by purveyors of genetic-testing services because of their demonstrated interest in reconstructing family history. These gatherings attracted a rich community of African American genealogists.
The Social Life of DNA draws upon my encounters with persons of African descent who have used genetic genealogy testing. For more than a decade, I have observed and participated in occasions during which genetic genealogy testing was discussed or offered, including meetings at churches, community centers, libraries, museums, and universities in both the United States and the United Kingdom. I conducted fieldwork and interviews in a wide variety of settings including at local and national gatherings of genealogists, at African American heritage tourism sites, and in living rooms and at kitchen tables.
The practice of genealogy now involves a wide array of technical tools alongside traditional archival research: Ancestry.com’s Family Tree Maker and other computer software programs assist genealogists in constructing pedigree charts; there are e-mail listservs dedicated to the technical aspects of genetic genealogy testing; and there are websites at which test-takers can compare DNA results in order to establish degrees of relation. Because of the technological innovations in genealogical practice, my research necessarily involved “virtual” ethnography via the Internet.19 Specifically, I observed and participated in virtual communities of people who shared an interest in tracing their African ancestry.
Online community discussions encompass varied topics related to the practice of genealogy. For instance, one forum is dedicated to discussions of DNA testing. In these settings, members dialogue about the science behind genetic ancestry tracing; display expertise through their command of jargon and recent genetics research, or developed through prior experience with one or more testing companies; circulate topical scientific papers and newspaper articles; and share genetic genealogy test results and their feelings about them. In more recent years, I followed the emergence of videos by genetic genealogists that broadcast their desire for roots and their genetic ancestry test results to a social media audience. My involvement in these online communities consisted of discussions with genealogists, both on the public listserv and “off channel”—that is, in private online conversations. In most cases, there were points of overlap and continuity between the online and offline communities I inhabited and, as I describe, I came to know members of this virtual community personally through interviews and at genealogical gatherings.
A preponderance of the black root-seekers I encountered early in my exploration of genetic genealogy used the services of the pioneering African Ancestry company (either exclusively or in combination with other companies’ tests). So, in addition to gleaning insights from genealogists, I began to track the evolution of this particular DTC genetic-testing enterprise. Founded in 2003 by Rick A. Kittles, an African American geneticist now based at the University of Arizona, and Gina M. Paige, a black businesswoman who holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Stanford University and completed an MBA at the University of Michigan, African Ancestry traces maternal and paternal lineages, determining an individual’s affiliation with nation-states and ethnic groups on the African continent.20 (Although, by necessity, the company also provides genetic-ancestry-testing matches to sites outside the continent of Africa.)
In the course of completing my research, I became a member of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society (AAHGS), frequenting a local AAHGS chapter in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City. I also interacted with genetic genealogists and eventually became one, purchasing a genetic genealogy test from African Ancestry and participating in a live “reveal” of my test results.
The transformative role that Kittles and Paige’s genetic genealogy testing can play has been powerfully depicted in Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s popular television series Finding Your Roots, several segments of which relied upon African Ancestry’s products and dramatic on-camera “reveals.” In this book, I uncover some of the even larger-scale transformations that are taking place as genetic analysis moves beyond the bounds of clinical research laboratories and criminal justice courtrooms and genetic genealogy takes on more than solely personal significance.
Back in 2000, rumors that DNA testing might soon be available to aid black root-seekers were confirmed in the Los Angeles Times. Kittles, then a codirector of the molecular genetics unit of the National Human Genome Center at historically black Howard University, was quoted as saying that “hundreds of African Americans” had sought him out based on the mere suggestion that he was months away from releasing a genetic test that “could link them to their long-lost lineage.”21 These were heady, millennial days, and as a sociologist of science and of race, I was brimming with curiosity about what brave new world might be ushered in with technologies that the Times’ reporter said “sound[ed] like something out of an episode of ‘Star Trek.’ ”22
At first, I wondered if these innovations, such as the genetic genealogy test then in development by Kittles, would spur changes in our conceptions of racial identity. How might the notions of race and ethnicity be transformed after the decoding of the genome? Did these tests spell the end of entrenched racial ideologies of difference and the beginning of new possibilities for human identity?
At the time I began my research, the literature on genetics and society was small, but there was concurrence on this point: developments in contemporary DNA analysis, especially genetic ancestry testing, threatened to retread the tragic path of scientific racism. By the late 1990s, scholars, including the previously mentioned Nelkin and Lindee, Barbara Katz Rothman, and Troy Duster, warned that without a course correction, we were in danger of becoming a society ruled by genetic determinism—a dystopian future world in which one’s biological inheritance was believed to indelibly shape one’s health, behavior, and other attributes.23
Several explanations have been offered for this prediction. Rothman lamented the creation of a “gene for everything” society in which DNA was understood to be the alpha and omega of human life. She also pointed to the eugenics of the twentieth century as a cautionary tale. Duster contended that eugenics emerged from, bolstered, and justified racist ideologies that had never really gone away and were reentering American society through the “back door,” disguised as concern for greater knowledge or better health for all. As we crossed the threshold into the genome age, distant and more recent histories of scientific racism elicited words of caution from social analysts.
In the media and throughout the public sphere, although some reservations were aired, the “new genetics” was mostly framed as a silver bullet. This framing was at its zenith during the announcement of the decoding of the preliminary draft of the human genome at the White House in June 2000. A central conceit of the Human Genome Project was that we could derive a great deal of information—indeed, life’s ultimate data—by deciphering the genetic signatures of a select, unidentified and multicultural group of five persons, three women and two men. (This group included Celera Genomics founder Venter, who spearheaded the private arm of the ambitious research endeavor.)24 Because, with “the goal of achieving diversity,” the human genome is a composite of different individuals, the logic went, it promised an end to the ideologies and hierarchies of human difference that had once justified bondage and continue to stoke interracial conflict and inequality.25
Under the flashing glare of the international press corps’ cameras, President Bill Clinton—flanked by Venter and National Human Genome Research Institute director Francis Collins, and with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain joining in via remote video—breathlessly declared that “one of the great truths to emerge from this triumphant expedition inside the human genome is that in genetic terms, all human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9 percent the same . . . modern science has confirmed what we first learned from ancient fates. The most important fact of life on this Earth is our common humanity.”26 In effect, several of the world’s leading political and scientific figures bore witness to our fundamental human sameness. The message: composed of an amalgam of individuals’ genes, the human genome represents us all. The bilateral press conference featuring heads of state Clinton and Blair revealed moreover that this scientific project was also a political one: from e pluribus unum to e unum pluribus.
But the powerful supercomputing technologies that enabled the unraveling of the genome were swiftly put to the task of parsing that sliver of difference—one-tenth of a percent or less—between humans. And the difference that was deemed to matter was race. As sociologist Dorothy Roberts put it in a recent Human Genome Project postmortem, “reports of the demise of race as a biological category were premature.”27 Moreover, she harked back to the warnings of social scientists like Rothman and Duster, writing that “biological theories of race” are being resuscitated through the use of “cutting-edge genomic research” that “modernize[s] old racial typologies.”28 Indeed, soon after the genome was mapped, both science and industry quickly turned their attention to the mining of that thin vein of genetic variation between individuals and groups, in the process presenting the possibility of resurrecting dangerous racial hierarchies, and not through the back door, as Duster augured, but through a sideways proxy discourse of ancestry, genealogy, geography, and population.
Within months of the completion of the draft of the human genome, leading genetic scientists published controversial papers concluding that humans can be classified into groupings that confirm the biological reality of race. These claims in turn opened the door to the reanimation of discredited typologies that have existed since the time of Carl Linnaeus. Linnaeus, the eighteenth-century Swedish taxonomist, extended his classification of plants and animals to human beings. He contended that our human community, Homo sapiens, is composed of four racial subcategories, or taxa, in this order: Europeanus, Americanus, Asiaticus, and Africanus.29 But unlike in his cataloging of flora and fauna, with humans Linnaeus linked appearance and social behavior, noting, for instance, that those in the category Europeanus are “white . . . very sharp, inventive,” while those under the banner Americanus were characterized as “red, ill tempered, subjugated.” DNA-age racial claims rely on techniques that allow researchers to locate genetic variants shared across human groups but differently distributed among them. Extending from a Linnaean taxonomy that linked skin color and behavior and arranged these hierarchically, some then attribute racial and ethnic distinctions to this statistical spectrum. Some of these researchers argue that it is the nation’s pressing healthcare needs that oblige them to use racial and ethnic categories as “starting points” for their research.30 Invoking scientific objectivity, others deny any responsibility for how their research findings might be used to bolster racist claims.
For his part, the former New York Times science reporter Nicholas Wade did not hew to scientific objectivity when he published an incendiary book—A Troublesome Inheritance—that threw into question any uncritical celebration of the socially transformative possibilities of DNA analysis.31 Wade misread and then misused genetics research—including the research mentioned above—to argue that there are three biologically distinct human races (African, East Asian, and Caucasian) that in turn have similarly distinct, inviolable social behaviors. According to Wade, these alleged differences account for disparities in human societies. Wade attributes the “rise of the West” to Caucasians’ superior genes, which yielded trustworthy, entrepreneurial societies, while African genes bred cultures of violence and distrust, and East Asian genes yielded practices of rigid discipline and stratification. The genetic inheritance of these latter groups, he argues, left them incapable of the social cohesion and advances of “Western civilization.” Wade’s book was roundly discredited as obtuse on the science and dead-wrong with respect to its implications in a letter to the New York Times signed by over a hundred scholars with expertise in genetics, human biology, biological anthropology, and evolution. But its welcome reception in other, less-expert quarters showed how quickly new life could be breathed into long-disproven racial stereotypes.
However, the obvious risks posed by willfully speculative and ideological work such as this should not hinder necessary conversations about the politics of race after the genome. Discussions of race and ethnicity in the genomics era need to be pursued from many perspectives, and these inquiries must take into account the racial dynamics surrounding the human genome. The genome emerged at a specific political moment, at a time when a form of racial ideology that sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has termed “color-blind racism” was coming into strength.32 Thus an odd paradox seemed to be at hand: race was “becoming more significant at the molecular level” at the precise time it was being declared “less significant in society.”33
Genetic politics is not a politics like any other. There are properties unique to DNA that deem it suitable for making political claims. DNA can be used to embody the past, and because DNA is shared it can represent both individuals and groups. DNA can be used to highlight a history of oppression that has been rendered invisible. Black Americans are using DNA analysis to advance issues important to them in a political climate that is increasingly indifferent to demands for social and racial justice. As sociologist Stephanie Greenlea contends, today’s racial justice movements “must now attend to these tasks in a context where erasures and silences on racism threaten to render the very basis of complaint invisible.”34 In short, combating color-blind racism requires the restoration of color-vision—that is, the return to visibility of historic and continued racial inequalities. Genetic ancestry testing is being used to make this case.
In this “post-racial,” post-genomic moment, therefore, DNA further offers the unique and somewhat paradoxical possibility of magnifying issues of inequality in order to bring them into view, both literally and figuratively. Social inequities may then be challenged using other strategies such as the courts and social movements.35
Greenlea demonstrates this phenomenon by analyzing the experience of the Jena Six—six African American youth in Jena, Louisiana, who, in 2006, were excessively charged, tried as adults, and convicted for assaulting a white classmate. Initially, the public framing of the case had the six teenagers attacking their peer without cause. But activist efforts highlighted the racist harassment the boys had been subjected to: they were responding to the hanging of a noose from a tree on campus. The incident was transformed into an activist cause célèbre when the history of this symbol was brought into view by Jena Six supporters in mainstream and social media (not unlike the debates over the meaning of the Confederate flag after the tragic June 2015 murders of nine black church members by a white supremacist in Charleston, South Carolina). Genetic ancestry testing can similarly effect a reckoning with history. Like the rope with a slipknot, genes do not have inherent meaning outside a social and political context. But both signify so much.
At the same time, owing to the transitive property of DNA, political claims made via genetics are always simultaneously about the individual and a collective. An individual’s DNA contains genetic information about their biological parents and extended biological family. Native American communities are keenly aware that one person’s DNA overlaps with that of many others, and also that their interests are not always served by science. In an episode of Gates’s PBS series Faces of America airing in the spring of 2010, indigenous author Louise Erdrich consults her tribal elders about her invitation to undergo genetic ancestry testing. Erdrich ultimately refuses to participate in the testing because she and her community understand her DNA to be communal property. As bioethicist Dena S. Davis writes, DNA “extend[s] beyond individual subjects. Genetic research can also affect the communities to which the subjects belong, by rewriting the narratives and reconfiguring the identities that members of the community share and live by.”36 Accordingly, reconciliation projects that appear to deal with one individual’s family history practically and symbolically always concern a larger body politic.
Many are attuned to the historical danger of genetics and to the scientific flattening of human society such as the issues that Erdrich and her community weighed. So why turn to DNA for leverage in racial politics, given the fraught history of scientific racism from Linnaeus to the present? Political actors engaging genetics in their political claims-making are not necessarily guilty of self-delusion. Rather, it is precisely because they have a deep appreciation for the complexity of race as a political category that they are mobilizing it as such.
Although I initially set out to understand the extent to which race was being reconfigured from a social and political category to a biological one, almost immediately my research turned to root-seekers and their use of genetics in practice. This focus established that concerns about racial reification and genetic determinism, while well warranted, did not begin to address the myriad purposes to which genetic ancestry is being put. The call for an exercise of caution with respect to political claims based on DNA does not translate into opposition to the use of genetics for the purposes of reconciliation. Indeed, I believe we must remain open to the techniques of the digital and genomic age as they are being applied to political and social efforts.
By the early 1990s, reconciliation projects utilizing DNA were becoming prominent. The effort in Argentina to reunite families in the wake of political violence was internationally known.37 In eastern Europe, an analysis that established the identity of several members of the Romanov family of czarist Russia gave a boost to the use of DNA in historical inquiry.38 In the United States, some efforts ignited controversy stemming from the country’s history of imperialism, slavery, and dispossession. DNA analysis was initiated on the nine-thousand-year-old remains of a Native American man (the “Ancient One”) uncovered near Kennewick, Washington, in 1996, for example, despite vehement resistance from indigenous groups in the Pacific Northwest who demanded that the remains be returned and reburied under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA).39 The benefit of the research was hotly debated, raising the question of whether it would serve only to compound historical exploitation. Many Native Americans, who held no uncertainty about the Ancient One’s origins, surely believed so. (In 2015, a study of the Ancient One’s genome undertaken with the permission and cooperation of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation corroborated the indigenous community’s claims.)40
Around the same time, genetic answers were beginning to be pursued to questions surrounding the American founding founders. Was Thomas Jefferson father to the children of Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman owned by him? Widely acclaimed research by the legal historian Annette Gordon-Reed contends that both the norms of plantation society and a preponderance of archival evidence—the scholarly gold standard—substantiate Jefferson’s paternity of at least one of the Hemings children.41 Nonetheless, scholars furiously debated this question and resistance to Gordon-Reed’s findings remains stubborn in some camps. In the late 1990s, researchers embarked upon a genetic investigation to settle the matter. It is important to note that DNA analysis in the Hemings-Jefferson case was one of the earliest instances of these techniques being used in the United States. Not only was the effort controversial and technically pathbreaking, it opened the door to a new strategy for trying to come to terms with the history of slavery and its contemporary effects, in the face of resistance to a full airing of America’s racial history.
In the investigation, genes of Jefferson’s avowed descendants were compared to those of his purported ones. This analysis drew on the distinctive features of Y-chromosome DNA (or Y-DNA) to determine whether there were familial links. Y-DNA is passed mostly unchanged from fathers to sons—women do not have a Y chromosome—and can be used to trace a direct line of male ancestors, including uncles and nephews. In this case, the Y-DNA of male descendants of Jefferson’s paternal uncle was compared to that of two of Hemings’s sons, her first and her last. The resulting paper, published in 1998 in the leading science journal Nature, declared in its very title that “Jefferson fathered [the] slave’s last child.”42 This finding was based on comparison of male-line genetic markers. Male descendants of Hemings’s youngest son, Euston, were revealed to share a Y-chromosomal haplotype with the male relatives of Jefferson. (Haplotypes are sets of DNA variations that are typically inherited together.) The report noted that this genetic marker was so rare that “it has never been observed outside of the Jefferson family.”43 Despite geneticists’ claim—and historians’ concurrence—that Jefferson’s paternity of his slave’s youngest son is the “simplest and most probable explanation,” some of the late president’s living descendants, who argue that it was Jefferson’s brother who fathered the Hemings child, continue to vehemently refute this claim.44
The Jefferson-Hemings case was the first time that DNA evidence would be called upon to confirm a slave descendant’s shared ancestry with a founding father. But it would not be the last. A few years later, alleged descendants of James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution,” who followed Jefferson into the US presidency, endeavored to use a similar strategy to prove their place in the Madison clan and in the nation’s history. In 2004, Bettye Kearse, an African American physician, joined forces with geneticists at the University of Massachusetts, a team led by black geneticist Bruce A. Jackson, in the hopes of establishing her family’s place in the Madison lineage.45
Madison and his wife, Dolley, had no children together. But generations of oral history in Kearse’s family held that Madison did have a son. As an article in the Washington Post elaborated, this history “begins with a kidnapped African slave, Mandy, who Kearse says was impregnated . . . by Madison’s father. The child, Coreen, later gave birth to Madison’s child.” Madison’s purported child was Kearse’s great-great-great-grandfather.
As with the Jefferson case, Y-chromosome analysis was to be used to compare the DNA of one of Kearse’s male relatives to that of Madison’s descendants. But because this known male progeny of Madison denied her request for a DNA sample, Kearse’s kinship claim remains unconfirmed by science, even if it has been long cemented in her family’s oral history.46
The chosen method of resolution—DNA analysis—places these examples firmly within that category of social initiatives termed reconciliation projects. Information gleaned from DNA is used to establish social inclusion or exclusion, mediate social justice claims, or resolve sociohistorical and political controversies. At stake as much as the genetic truth of the matter is what such DNA histories would reveal about the hypocrisy in play at the time of the nation’s creation. Founding fathers who wrote passionately about freedom both held slaves and likely bore children with women who were deemed biologically inferior (Jefferson) and not worthy of personal liberty (Madison). A fuller appreciation for and verification of this history could reshape the foundational mythologies of American society and reshuffle our collective memory of our first families. These efforts to right the nation’s founding narrative heralded the incorporation of genetic identification techniques into American racial politics and, more specifically, into considerations of the history of slavery.
Today genetic analysis is being used as well in an array of less widely publicized efforts that seek to document the transatlantic slave trade and address its devastating social consequences. More specifically, the tests proffered by the African Ancestry company, MatriClan and PatriClan, are promoted as a means to uncover details about the experiences of enslaved blacks; to redeem and restore today’s stigmatized African American family by reuniting it with an ancient, idyllic “African” one; to cement affiliations among members of a transnational network of blacks; and to resolve the social injury inflicted by the “peculiar institution.” In all of these enterprises, cofounder Rick Kittles’s role as a scientific entrepreneur cum cultural advocate is as crucial as the genetic tests he developed. The Social Life of DNA follows Kittles and his company’s DTC genetic tests as they traverse the landscape of our so-called “postracial” society.
The next chapter of this book discusses the global emergence of reconciliation projects incorporating DNA analysis. A broad set of practices, reconciliation projects involve the use of a forensic or truth-telling mechanism—be it human testimony or scientific data—to probe the past. I introduce two milestone events that prefigured this possibility. First is the landmark use of “genetic technologies as tools for human rights” by Las Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo) in order to locate the grandchildren of their sons and daughters who were “disappeared” by the junta state during the Argentinean “Dirty War” that spanned from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. Second, I describe a more topically related development, the United States’ first-ever truth and reconciliation process, which was inaugurated in South Carolina in 1999, on the twentieth anniversary of brutal, race-based murders in the city of Greensboro. Here the testimony of both victims and perpetrators facilitated the collective airing of festering tensions. The ways that African Ancestry’s genetic genealogy tests are taken up borrow elements from both of these earlier efforts at social healing: innovative uses of DNA analysis on the one hand, and confronting and drawing lessons from past transgressions, on the other. The confluence of enduring social harms and new technologies brought us to a historical moment at which genetic ancestry testing would take on a broader than intended purpose.
We look at a research study initiated around the African Burial Ground in New York City in the early 1990s in chapter 2. Here important technical cornerstones were laid for future genealogical pursuits via genetics. The rediscovery of this colonial-era burial ground, with its promise of rare insight into the life and death of bondspersons in New York, was an occurrence of great historical import. It would also become a signal event in the evolution of direct-to-consumer DNA testing, as discussed in chapter 3. The political and scientific debates that arose around the issue of the disposition of this landmark cemetery—now a property of the National Park Service and renamed the African Burial Ground National Monument—was foundational to the proliferation of genetic analysis and its uses in black cultural politics.
Rick Kittles began his career as a junior scientist working on the study of this historic site, and the idea for African Ancestry—the company he would cofound several years later—was conceived as a result of this work. Equally important, black community activists laid a symbolic foundation for the reconciliation projects described herein. An activist group that called itself Descendants of the African Burial Ground steered the course of the genetic research at the cemetery in such a way as to restore African “ethnicity” to the unknown blacks buried in it. In so doing, they also anticipated how DNA analysis would be marshaled for the collective betterment of persons of African descent, above and beyond the intimate, personal quests that we have now come to most closely associate with genetic ancestry testing.
How individual genetic data is transformed into collective cultural politics is the centerpiece of this book. Exploring how genetic genealogists of African descent put their test results into action, transforming their individual roots pursuits into reconciliation projects, is the subject of chapter 4. I describe ethnographic encounters with Kittles, his business partner Paige, and their customers. For Kittles, African Ancestry is not simply a business enterprise. Following him across the United States, we observe how he links his work to a broader racial justice vision that imagines the liberation of black communities through ancestral knowledge. While many of Kittles’s customers come to African Ancestry seeking basic genealogical information, in my conversations with them, they spoke of the desire to feel complete, of craving a stronger sense of belonging in the United States and on the continent of Africa, and of wanting in their own way to reckon with the history of slavery—all of this in addition to the inferences they receive about the ethnic groups in Africa to which they have been linked.
Inspired by Alex Haley’s roots journey of decades ago and by more recent television depictions of root-seeking, black genealogists seek out genetic testing to cultivate their family trees. Unlike the African Burial Ground study, however, this genetic analysis is carried out on the DNA samples of living persons. These genealogists can therefore actively fashion new identities from the genetic cloth supplied by African Ancestry. They then strategically shape their genetic results into “usable” pasts that open new avenues of social interaction, including travel and civic engagement. Although this root-seeking is often animated by blacks’ yearnings for pre-slavery identity, given the always communal nature of genetic information, these results may also be scaled up and used to make claims to and for DNA kin. The myriad ways that genetic ancestry tests travel is the subject of chapters 4 and 5.
In chapter 5, we explore the role of the genetic genealogy “reveal.” For African Ancestry, the public reveals of black celebrities’ test results began in 2003 as a marketing strategy. Within a few years, the practice became a narrative element in genetic genealogy reality television. The reveal is now an accepted stage in the genetic ancestry-testing journey, so much so that root-seekers today use social media to reproduce and perform this key moment in the arc of their experience. The reveal also reminds us that the work of reconciliation for which genetic genealogy may be used includes a larger audience to bear witness to it. As such, the reveal can be a political occasion that asks viewers to take note of the historical circumstances that make genetic ancestry testing important to the root-seeker.
We meet a multifaceted group of Sierra Leoneans that includes the actor Isaiah Washington. He learned of his genetic association with Sierra Leone during one of African Ancestry’s early reveal ceremonies. The test results inspired his involvement with a series of activities that drew him closer to the country and its diaspora. Washington was on hand on a winter morning in 2009 when I arrived in Charleston, South Carolina, to attend “a ceremony of remembrance” of ancestors dispersed or lost by the slave trade. The majority of the people gathered that day laid claim to Sierra Leone in some manner, as did Washington, a self-described “DNA Sierra Leonean.” The ceremony was organized by participants of “homecoming” trips from the United States to Sierra Leone that had taken place beginning in 1989. During these three pilgrimages, Sierra Leonean elders performed ceremonial rites in which they summoned the “common ancestors” of the Americans and the Africans to “bless their homecomings and bring their broken family back together.” Genetic identity was a vehicle to a wider territory—the terrain of reconciliation.
Chapters 6 and 7 consider the role of Kittles’s genetic ancestry analysis in a historic class-action suit for financial restitution for unpaid slave labor, a case that originated in a Brooklyn federal court in 2002. Led by activist-attorney Deadria Farmer-Paellmann—a founder and executive director of the New York–based reparations rights organizations the Restitution Study Group and the Organization of Tribal Unity—the plaintiffs availed themselves of genetic genealogy testing carried out by African Ancestry to advance their case. In this effort, DNA test results were submitted as evidence of their forbearers’ enslavement and subsequent loss of both ancestral identity and wealth. Here reconciliation took the form of restoring inheritances of community and capital.
The formation of “DNA diasporas” or “DNA networks” is elaborated in chapter 8. Spearheaded by organizations such as the Leon H. Sullivan Foundation, an organization with deep roots in the civil rights movement, as well as by entrepreneurial individuals such as Isaiah Washington, DNA diaspora networks are efforts to foster “reunion” and collaboration among a transnational group of blacks through philanthropy, economic development ventures, dual-citizenship schemes, and heritage tourism. African Ancestry’s DNA testing service is being employed as a basis of affiliation for networks forged between continental Africans and blacks abroad. These initiatives resemble the historical “back to Africa” and Pan-Africanist enterprises of Marcus Garvey and others but, importantly, they point as well in a new direction, toward a possible future of genetically derived global racial politics.
However, there are also complications that accompany this dream of transnational reconciliation, as a controversy involving Washington made clear during the 2014 Ebola outbreak. Washington has dual citizenship with Sierra Leone, one of the countries worst hit by the epidemic. Sierra Express Media, a local newspaper, criticized Washington for carrying a passport for the country without sharing its burdens during this health emergency. He responded “as a citizen of Sierra Leone,” establishing a fundraising effort to support the eradication of the disease through his philanthropy, the Gondobay Manga Foundation, and by lobbying at the United Nations in 2014 for intergovernmental support to help combat the epidemic. As this example suggests, DNA diasporas create networks of privilege and obligation.47 The Sullivan Foundation had a “grand vision” for bridge building between the African continent and its diaspora. Yet this proposal also raised the issue of what kinds of relationships, including kinship arrangements and citizenship, were warranted based on genetic ancestry testing results.
This book follows a collection of interrelated reconciliation projects from their beginnings in the United States in the 1990s to their transnational expansion today as they have evolved from individual pursuits to a wide array of sociopolitical undertakings. Tracking these reconciliation projects allows us to perceive how desires for reunion and recompense—alongside the expansion of direct-to-consumer DNA testing—have pushed genetics beyond the small social world of the biomedical laboratory into larger society.
In light of African Ancestry’s burgeoning business, what does the use of genetics in the context of long-standing cultural aspirations and political struggles suggest about the prospects for racial reconciliation in the United States? Activist groups and NGOs—including some, like the Leon Sullivan Foundation, with direct ties to the late-twentieth-century civil rights movement, and others, like the Descendants of the African Burial Ground, that carry the march toward racial justice forward into the twenty-first century—are turning to genetics to accomplish goals formerly pursued through grassroots organizing, electoral politics, and moral suasion. Laments about the decline of the civil rights activist tradition may thus be misplaced. Activism is simply taking new forms, in line with the scientific and technological innovations of the last decade, as the social media campaigns that sparked national protests against police brutality in Jena, Louisiana; Ferguson, Missouri; Baltimore, Maryland; and at other sites in recent years make clear. And given cautionary observations about the lack of participation of minorities in science and technology and these same communities’ traditional (and well-founded) mistrust of these and related fields, the embrace of genetics for liberatory ends is particularly striking.
However, efforts to reclaim original identity through genetic technologies, while psychically beneficial, fail to materially address persistent structural inequality. In the same way that the scientific and therapeutic applications of DNA research may not yet have fully lived up to expectations, the application of genetic technologies to reconciliation initiatives brings their technical, institutional, and political limits into stark relief. The trajectory of the reconciliation projects discussed in this book suggests that ultimately, equality, justice, and ethics are not easily tethered to or readily settled with DNA evidence.
We should worry that, with their reliance on commercial products, well-intentioned, innovative uses of genetic genealogy might contribute to a world in which claims for citizenship are tied to practices of consumption. And we should worry mightily about the transposition of the principles of justice into scientific techniques. But we should also appreciate that these endeavors are an innovative strategy on the part of some who find other avenues to historical awareness and social justice blocked, and who pursue the road to racial reconciliation nevertheless.