Review of The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation after the Genome, by Alondra Nelson

Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2016, 200 pp., $27.95 (hardcover), ISBN-13: 978-080703301-2.

From what do we take our origin? From blood?
…
From what do we take our origin? From incised memories?
—Lauret Savoy[1]

In her most recent book, The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation after the Genome, Alondra Nelson examines how genetics has been brought to bear on American racial politics in the 21st century. She tracks various interconnected efforts from the 1990s to the present that seek to collectively mobilize individual genetic data for sociopolitical purposes. By drawing attention to the ways in which these efforts appropriate genetic analysis toward new ends beyond the biomedical laboratory, Nelson reveals that DNA serves as both a defining and dynamic marker of identity with transformative potential. In particular, she argues that “genetics has become a medium through which the unsettled past is reconciled” on multiple levels.[2] When emergent genetic technologies are applied to justice claims through what she calls “reconciliation projects,” DNA-based evidence evinces a contemporary racial discourse that centralizes historical injury. In doing so, reconciliation projects led by African American activists refuse to expunge slavery from national memory nor its ongoing legacy in today’s era of color-blind racism.

Nelson explains that reconciliation projects across the globe have turned to genetic analysis as a method of resolution. Founded in 1977, the Asociación Civil Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo uses genetic analysis to help reunite the living children of Argentina’s “disappeared” with their biological grandparents. The organization thus employs genetic technologies to resolve a human rights issue, which not only results in family reunification but also in sociopolitical repair. According to Nelson, reconciliation projects adopt the reparative aims of racial reconciliation initiatives modeled after those in post-apartheid South Africa—namely the 1999 Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Project in North Carolina—while relying on genetic data as a form of testimony. She consequently traces the origins of African Ancestry, the first direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic ancestry testing company to target persons of African decent, and how it came to play an essential role in reconciliation projects ranging from genetic genealogy searches or “root-seeking” to a reparations lawsuit.

In the early 1990s, a group of researchers at Howard University launched a hard won study of the African Burial Ground, a colonial-era cemetery for New York City’s African and African American population. The researchers advocated for a multidisciplinary rather than forensic approach to conducting research on the historic site, one that included genetic analysis as a tool for determining how the transatlantic slave trade affected the lives of those buried in Manhattan—North America’s second largest slave port. The African Burial Ground project “shifted from an epistemology of racial classification to an epistemology of ethnicity (and therefore, also ancestry),” fundamentally shaping how researchers leverage DNA to study the history of slavery.[3] Whether or not genetic analysis reproduces the scientific racism of earlier centuries depends on the “interpretive filter” through which it is employed, contends Nelson. In other words, an epistemic shift toward repairing past injustice creates the conditions of possibility for genetic analysis to prompt political action in the present. Rick Kittles (then a junior scientist) developed a method of genetic analysis that accordingly allowed the Howard researchers to uncover the cemetery population’s ancestral backgrounds. A few years later Kittles cofounded African Ancestry with entrepreneur Gina Paige, effectively converting his research method into a booming commercial enterprise.

Nelson succeeds in complicating the assumption that genetic analysis will inevitably perpetuate a biological understanding of race. The reconciliation projects she tracks throughout the book merge genetic data with black cultural politics against the grain of genetic determinism. Just as genetic ancestry testing holds the “future promise” of repairing family ties broken by slavery, Nelson convincingly demonstrates that genomics has the potential to disrupt structural inequality in the United States. In 2002, lawyer Deadria Farmer-Paellmann strategically turned to African Ancestry in an innovative attempt to sue private corporations—FleetBoston Financial, CSX, Aetna Inc.—that benefited (and continue to benefit) from the transatlantic slave trade. The plaintiffs not only lay claim to international human rights law but also, and for the first time, to genetic ancestry testing as evidentiary support in a groundbreaking class-action suit for reparations. Despite the Janus-faced nature of DNA, Farmer-Paellmann v. FleetBoston further paved the way for genetic technologies to advance social justice activism on a global scale.

That African Ancestry emerges from the remains of a burial ground simultaneously speaks to the promise of reconciliation projects and to their paradoxical limits when it comes to reconstructing the present through the past. As Nelson herself concludes, DNA alone cannot stand in for reconciliation, particularly because genetic analysis still runs the risk of reifying racial difference in the very process of problematizing race; to carry out structural transformation we must hold fast to social movement strategies that predate the genome. For root-seekers, however, DTC genetic ancestry testing contributes to the creation of novel identities. In this way, genetic analysis sheds light on how the slave economy severed generational ties and at the same time, sutures them within a “diasporic social network” of newfound relations. Root-seekers use genetic analysis to reconstruct transnational webs of kin undefined by the nuclear family; one can, for example, gain a chosen DNA sibling. Such alternative, geneticized forms of kinship have even inspired heritage tourism trips to African countries that are organized around customers’ test results.

An intersectional point of view that privileges the nexus of race, gender, and sexuality would have enhanced Nelson’s discussion of DNA’s ever-expanding social life and in particular, DNA kin. As a spin off biosociality, diasporic social networks assert familial relations outside family structures that privilege heredity and heterosexuality. In other words, diasporic social networks based on ties forged through test results not only subvert the primacy of biology in family formation but also the primacy of heterosexual norms. Herein lies a significant disruption to the racialized project of nation-building (and imperialism), which hinges, in part, on guaranteeing the integrity of white heterosexual nuclear families. I wonder too about the capacity of “genealogical disorientation”—whereby root-seekers must negotiate unfulfilled genetic aspirations—to further decenter heteronormativity in relation to diasporic social networks. It is the pursuit of reconciliation projects that gives rise to “the creation of alternative social worlds with reimagined kinship arrangements and affiliations, and hopes for what all of this might become,” emphasizes Nelson.[4] Instead of fixing identity, reconciliation projects generate other, transgressive forms of (dis)identification and belonging that, I would add, are necessarily queer. In fact, nothing signals the transformative potential for “queer futurity” more than the creation of alternative social worlds across boundaries. What then, are the otherwise obscured reparative possibilities in queering reimagined kinship arrangements and affiliations? And if “queerness is an ideality,” as José Esteban Muñoz declares in the opening pages of Cruising Utopia, what else can we hope for all of this to become in the future?[5] How can David L. Eng’s “queer diasporas” methodology further highlight the ways in which diasporic social networks break from origins in favor of ties that foreground feelings of kinship?[6] An intersectional point of view reframes family history research as gendered labor while remaining attentive to the sexualized dimensions of genetic genealogy and its future promise.[7]

Moreover, it strikes me that there is a larger issue at stake: whether or not the use of genetic analysis runs the risk of reifying the epistemic authority of science. Nelson questions the underlying assumption that scientific claims are more valid than other types of knowledge production (i.e., oral history) from the outset. In stark contrast to the televised reveal of genetic ancestry test results, the book begins with the public excavation of Venture Smith’s grave filmed by the BBC. Although Smith recorded a detailed narrative of his life before and after surviving the transatlantic slave trade, researchers nevertheless sought genetic evidence of Smith’s ancestry. According to Nelson, part of DNA’s social power is precisely the fact that it constitutes absolute truth. While reconciliation projects do present a competing epistemology that revalues genetic markers in the service of social justice, her consideration of narrative compels one to deliberate over the making of ideas about genetics and, especially, the role of storytelling in the scientific imaginary.

Whereas genetic analysis fails to fully reconstruct the present past, storytelling offers another way to reconcile historical amnesia. “From what do we take our origin?” asks geologist Lauret Savoy in her recently published book, Trace, a fragmented account of how racial violence has shaped the American landscape as well as Savoy’s sense of self within it.[8] The gap between “blood” and “incised memories” shrinks throughout her journey across the United States for, as we come to realize, both— like the land itself—are inscribed by loss. It is therefore indeterminate traces that embody the palimpsestic truth of identity and from which we, as agents of self-making, can take our origin. I can’t help but remember Saidiya Hartman’s seminal work, Lose Your Mother, in which she too follows traces amid the continued absence of genealogical evidence.[9] Like Savoy, Hartman dwells with loss in order to conceive of an identity premised on the impossibility of recovering an origin story. And then there’s Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel about two half sisters—one sold into slavery, one the slave trader’s wife—and six generations of their descendants.[10] Here, literature is the method of resolution that affirms kinship in spite of systematic erasure. Genetic technologies are certainly not the only thing that activists have retooled “to right the nation’s founding narrative,” placing the history of slavery at the center of 21st-century American racial politics.[11] Perhaps the most illuminating engagement with Nelson’s book is alongside a variety of storied genealogies.