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The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation After the Genome by Alondra Nelson
archytas's review
4.75
This is one of those books whose impact feels more significant as I get further from the reading of it. Nelson delves into the multifaceted world of personal DNA testing by African-Americans, examining both how this intersects with personal identity, and legal truths needed to progress reparations processes.
Most discussions of race and DNA testing revolve around the potential damage that bad, or overly simplified, science in this area can do to people of colour. Nelson is one of the few publishing around the ways that people of colour engage actively with genetic testing., and how DNA might be used to combat, rather than exacerbate, racism. In Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History, Nelson looked at processes ranging from identifying victims of Apartheid, through to the mixed role of DNA in criminal justice processes. Here, she zeros in on the use of the DNA to re-establish links with an African past. This is, in many ways, a more nuanced topic, because while DNA testing for the above uses is scientifically straightforward, its use to understand ancestral connection is much more scientifically ambiguous.
Nelson's approach is grounded in the sociology of the community engaging with the tests. She balances explanations of the science, and the challenges, with exploration of the motivations and processes of those involved in this. The result may not always be a smooth read, but it is always an engaging one, and left me more unsettled than I expected.
In one of the clearest explanations of the limitations of matrilineal and Y-DNA testing, Nelson explains:
Most discussions of race and DNA testing revolve around the potential damage that bad, or overly simplified, science in this area can do to people of colour. Nelson is one of the few publishing around the ways that people of colour engage actively with genetic testing., and how DNA might be used to combat, rather than exacerbate, racism. In Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History, Nelson looked at processes ranging from identifying victims of Apartheid, through to the mixed role of DNA in criminal justice processes. Here, she zeros in on the use of the DNA to re-establish links with an African past. This is, in many ways, a more nuanced topic, because while DNA testing for the above uses is scientifically straightforward, its use to understand ancestral connection is much more scientifically ambiguous.
Nelson's approach is grounded in the sociology of the community engaging with the tests. She balances explanations of the science, and the challenges, with exploration of the motivations and processes of those involved in this. The result may not always be a smooth read, but it is always an engaging one, and left me more unsettled than I expected.
In one of the clearest explanations of the limitations of matrilineal and Y-DNA testing, Nelson explains:
"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."
Or another way to put this, some contemporary African-Americans are descended from more than 1000 enslaved people*, generally coming from diverse parts of the African continent. Efforts to re-establish a sense of where you are "from" is inherently complicated by the long history of slavery, and the havoc it wrought upon culture, and connection to country. Nelson doesn't regard her subjects as unknowing of this - she is at pains to point out how skilled at research family historians are - but rather examines how finding some connection to place, even in tenuous (limited sampling also results in a high error rate) and select ways. The persistence of this need, and the courage and determination in the face of it - has stayed with me, long after the book was finished.
Nelson looks at the ways that researchers choose between options to find a connection with meaning, and how this is chosen to change - or not - a sense of self. She touches delicately but firmly on the issue of how governments, such as Sierra Leone, are offering dual citizenship to "DNA Citizens" and the presence of philanthropy in these discussions.
Nelson also covers the ridiculous issue of how DNA testing can be used to further reparations cases brought by African Americans against companies which profited from slavery. (It is not the reparations which are ridiculous, but the need to establish a scientific basis for African-Americaness, and hence proof of connection to slavery).
You can at times feel Nelson's ambiguity in this space - the understanding of the role of connection, and the agency involved in pursuing technology, but also the dangers of reducing race to a genetic, rather than social, phenomenon. She sums this up the eminently quotable:
"... contemporary racial politics have begun to move into the terra nova—if not the terra firma—of genetic genealogy.
*Many will have European ancestors as well, and most will have cross-over in lineages, making the overall total less.
**2019 Reading Challenge #8. A book about a hobby
tonstantweader's review against another edition
3.0
I was very eager to read The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations and Reconciliation After the Genome. I requested it from the library several months ago and have waited impatiently for my hold request to rise to the top. I am interested in genetics and the socio-political implications of DNA research and testing. I also endeavor to be an ally in the struggle against racism. I am aware of the troublesome history of science being exploited and misused to further racist agendas from Charles Murray’s infamous The Bell Curve to the 2014 publication of A Troublesome Inheritance by Nicholas Wade, a piece of work so egregious it was denounced by the very geneticists he uses to support his assertion that natural selection has led to worldwide racial difference in IQ, political stability, and economic advancements.
Alondra Nelson has a very disciplined framework for The Social Life of DNA. She writes about the history of ethnic genotyping through research mitochondrial DNA (maternal) and Y-chromosome DNA *paternal” and some of the ambiguities that arise. For example, the African DNA samples come from where people are living today in Africa, not where they may have lived in the 17th,18th, and 19th centuries. The entire database of African DNA identifies about 250 tribal groups in total, but one country may have that many tribal groups, so it is more general than precise. There are often bitter discoveries, too, since many find significant European ancestry, a genetic witness to the frequent rape of black women by their slaveowners.
Nelson also looks at how DNA has been used around the world in reconciliation projects such as restoring the stolen children of Argentina to their grandparents and their biological families. DNA has also been used in seeking reparations. Some of the most interesting chapters of the book detail the history, the research and legal strategies of more than 100 years of seeking reparations for the crimes of slavery. The suits against the insurance and banking companies that profited as supporting industries of slavery by insuring slave ships and slaves and lending money for loan purchases are fascinating even though stymied by sovereign immunity and the ridiculous requirement that plaintiffs prove a direct descent from individual slaves insured by these companies knowing full well that censuses did not names slaves in the census records.
Another interesting section looked at the current movement of reconciliation through DNA testing to find one’s ethnic affiliation in Africa, to travel and connect with “kin” and form bonds. Some people, like the actor Isaiah Washington, have even applied for and been granted dual citizenship as many countries will award dual citizenship based on DNA evidence that African Americans are children of this most consequential involuntary diaspora. Nelson suggests it is possible that this growing interest in returning to the motherland may arise out of disappointment with the retrenchment of civil rights advancements and the frustration of the reparations movement.
The rest of the review can be read on my blog
Alondra Nelson has a very disciplined framework for The Social Life of DNA. She writes about the history of ethnic genotyping through research mitochondrial DNA (maternal) and Y-chromosome DNA *paternal” and some of the ambiguities that arise. For example, the African DNA samples come from where people are living today in Africa, not where they may have lived in the 17th,18th, and 19th centuries. The entire database of African DNA identifies about 250 tribal groups in total, but one country may have that many tribal groups, so it is more general than precise. There are often bitter discoveries, too, since many find significant European ancestry, a genetic witness to the frequent rape of black women by their slaveowners.
Nelson also looks at how DNA has been used around the world in reconciliation projects such as restoring the stolen children of Argentina to their grandparents and their biological families. DNA has also been used in seeking reparations. Some of the most interesting chapters of the book detail the history, the research and legal strategies of more than 100 years of seeking reparations for the crimes of slavery. The suits against the insurance and banking companies that profited as supporting industries of slavery by insuring slave ships and slaves and lending money for loan purchases are fascinating even though stymied by sovereign immunity and the ridiculous requirement that plaintiffs prove a direct descent from individual slaves insured by these companies knowing full well that censuses did not names slaves in the census records.
Another interesting section looked at the current movement of reconciliation through DNA testing to find one’s ethnic affiliation in Africa, to travel and connect with “kin” and form bonds. Some people, like the actor Isaiah Washington, have even applied for and been granted dual citizenship as many countries will award dual citizenship based on DNA evidence that African Americans are children of this most consequential involuntary diaspora. Nelson suggests it is possible that this growing interest in returning to the motherland may arise out of disappointment with the retrenchment of civil rights advancements and the frustration of the reparations movement.
The rest of the review can be read on my blog