In her fascinating and brilliantly written new book, Alondra Nelson offers a detailed ethnographic study of the social and political uses of genetic genealogy today in the United States and, to a lesser degree, in the United Kingdom, tracing the contours and new developments of “genetic politics” or “politics of race after the genome” [15]. DNA has long been considered as holding the “secret of life” [Lindee and Nelkin 1994, quoted p. 4] and, even more specifically, the secret of our individual and collective identities: deciphering our specific combination of dna bases (A, T, C, G) is supposed to tell us who we are and, in the booming genetic-ancestry-testing industry, where we come from. Both questions are intimately connected: tracing one’s origins seems essential to knowing oneself. By 2015, close to two million persons in the United States had used the services of genetic genealogy testing companies and the tracing of ancestry has gained even wider appeal among African Americans than among other groups of population. This success could prima facie be considered paradoxical, considering the long infamous history of scientific racism and the well-known potential dangers of racial politics; this puzzle is precisely one of the incentives that led Nelson to conduct her study, started in 2003, among “root-seekers [of African descent] and their use of genetics in practice” [17]. Her focus in not on the science or technology of dna testing, but on the political uses of the ancestry tests—on their “social life” (Nelson explicitly borrows the phrase, and the methodology, from Arjun Appadurai, quoted p. 8). What are the socio-political causes, and effects, of genetic root-seeking? How did it come to impose itself as the most valuable source of information about one’s familial history, and what is such knowledge expected to achieve at a personal or collective level? Nelson’s inquiry, conducted both through interviews with genealogists and through participant observation while she became a “root-seeker” herself, as a member of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society, allows her to reveal how African Americans have found some unexpected resources in genetic politics in order to push forward a specific “reconciliation” agenda. Her book tells the powerful history of how genetic ancestry testing has become an indispensable instrument for social transformation, reparation and reconciliation projects, implementing “efforts aimed at repairing the social ruptures produced by transatlantic slavery” [9].
The first three chapters of the book introduce three important milestone events that took place in the 1990s and paved the way, both politically and scientifically, for the proliferation of genetic genealogical pursuits and their use in racial reconciliation politics. The first chapter presents, on one hand, how Las Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo started using, and de facto promoting the development of, genetic analysis in order to obtain evidence of familial relation with their abducted grandchildren—a mission that was soon “transformed by the Argentinean state into a project of national reconciliation” (p. 31); on the other hand, Nelson mentions a lesser known event, the first Truth and Reconciliation process that took place in the United States, initiated by citizens of Greensboro, South Carolina, in 1999: responding to the “Greensboro massacre” that had taken place in 1979 and had resulted in the acquittal of the Ku Klux Klan members who were accused of killing five people, the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Project was the first explicit endeavor to acknowledge that “unresolved issues of racial discrimination” [39] would not simply fade away with time and needed to be explicitly addressed if reconciliation was to be achieved. Both events exemplify the distinctiveness of reconciliation projects, and its growing significance by the end of the 20th century: the importance of dealing with the past in order to shape a different future. The second and third chapters focus on a decisive event that would become a “game changer” for reconciliation projects in the United States: the rediscovery of the colonial-era African Burial Ground in Manhattan in 1991. The excavation and forensic analysis of the skeletal remains triggered numerous political and scientific debates. The will to better identify the ethnic origins of the bodies, in order to shed light on the pre-enslavement identity of the individuals buried at the African cemetery, and to gain better knowledge of their life and death conditions, led to the development of new methods of genetic analysis. Richard Kittles, who participated in the African Burial Ground study from 1995 to 1999, and Gina Paige, a business strategist, decided to extend the obvious social potential of genetic analysis to commercial application. Together they launched in 2003 the first genetic ancestry testing company targeted specifically at persons of African descent: African Ancestry, Inc. This, says Nelson, “laid the groundwork for the reconciliation projects” she explores in the rest of the book [67].
The fourth and fifth chapters delve into the specificities of genealogical practices. Nelson shows how genealogists, as “kinkeepers,” see it as their duty to maintain family ties, which “involves the work of connecting past and present kin with purposeful narrative” [71]. The quest for personal identity is hence deeply connected to the quest for familial origins; but African Americans can rarely establish such a narrative by conventional genealogical methods, due to the lack of records from the era of racial slavery, and to the Middle Passage before enslavement on the American soil. This is why direct-to-consumer genetic testing, both easily available and “seemingly more authoritative” [73] gained such tremendous success: “genetic ancestry testing is, in an elemental sense, always as much about the reconstruction and reunion of the family and community as it is about the individual” [77]. Root-seekers are animated by a yearning for pre-slavery identity (in terms of ancestry and ethnicity), and they put the results to use via travels and civic engagement, forming new kinships arrangements and affiliations. Nelson shows in chapter 5, notably by retracing actor Isaiah Washington’s root-seeking journey, how much “the reveal” is an important aspect of the reconciliation dimension of the practice of root-seeking: the reveal, this moment when the subject receives his or her results in front of a camera or an audience and publicly expresses his or her feelings (astonishment, happiness, pride, and so on) aims at reminding us “that the work of reconciliation and repair that genetic ancestry is used to accomplishing is always also about a larger group, be it an audience or a community” [95]. However, one cannot help but wonder whether the staging of the reveal is not, beyond the reconciliation agenda, also a marketing device, designed to ensure the visibility and economic success of the genealogy testing industry combined with reality television. Nelson is very careful not to take sides on the matter. She narrates her own “reveal” moment in the 9th and last chapter of the book, and admits experiencing a mixture of “skepticism about genetic ancestry testing—its technical limits and its symbolic excess” [159], disorientation, and some unexpected complex emotion. She describes the latter as a combination of an almost physical response to the emotion of the “enrapt and excited audience” and the deep realization, at an affective rather than cognitive level, that “genetic ancestry analysis provides results to an individual, but it is about so much and so many more” [161]. Herein lies the main, and powerful, thesis of the book: despite the well-known scientific limits of the way dna ancestry data are constructed and interpreted Footnote 1 , despite the fact that they reflect specific private economic interests, the significance of genetic ancestry testing may also, and perhaps above all, lie in the “hopes of securing social inclusion, including rights and reparation” that it carries [163]. Nelson’s endeavor in the book is to take these hopes seriously and track down how they have found new avenues in genetic genealogy.
But the book is only cautiously optimistic, and explicitly addresses the limits of the social uses of dna: chapters 6 to 8 explore two domains in which genetic ancestry analyses have been directly put to use in order to serve reparation and reconciliation projects but failed to provide the definitive answers they were expected to provide. In chapters 6 and 7, Nelson considers their role in a historic class-action suit led by activist-attorney Deadria Farmer-Paellman, where the plaintiffs used their genetic genealogy results in order to prove their ancestors’ enslavement, and subsequently ask for reparation, in the form of financial restitution for unpaid slave labor. The suit originated in 2002 in a Brooklyn federal court; by 2004, it had been dismissed. Among other arguments, the court notably asserted that the plaintiffs “lacked standing” to bring the case because they “merely alleged” their “genealogical relationship to enslaved men and women” [130]. The plaintiffs hence submitted their dna ancestry data as evidence of their genealogical connection to enslaved Africans and, therefore, of their legitimacy to receive compensation from the corporate entities they were suing that profited from slavery, FleetBoston, Lloyd’s of London, and R.J. Reynolds. In March 2005, Judge Norgle dismissed their case again, and “maintained that the genetic genealogy tests did not sufficiently establish a relationship between deceased slaves and the signatories to the class-action suit” [134]. The conclusion Nelson draws from this legal failure is double-edged. On one hand, genetic genealogy testing is, and probably will be in the foreseeable future, of little legal value for securing reparations; on the other hand, the suit was an important act of strategic legalism that helped fuel the conversation about reparations: “in this task, Farmer-Paellman and her allies surely succeeded in keeping the drumbeat for reparations alive” [139]. In chapter 8, Nelson considers what she calls “dna diasporas”: the various forms of networking initiated on the basis of dna results between continental Africans and African Americans. These initiatives (heritage tourism, dual citizenship applications, activism, philanthropy, and so on) can be considered as a form of “global racial politics” or “transnational reconciliation” [24]. Yet these relationships are also considered as the source of “diasporic resources,” involving “diasporic obligations” from African Americans in the name of global redistribution of material and symbolic resources, and economic equality; and they can result in political misunderstanding, for to discover dna kinship does not suffice, per se, to establish mutual understanding and knowledge about the institutional, cultural and social functioning of different political communities.
Hence, while Nelson invites us to appreciate the socio-political novelty of reconciliation projects based on the strategic use of genetic genealogy testing, and to consider the possibly new forms of African American activism that such genetic technologies may elicit, she also warns us against the false hope that dna could, alone, solve issues of racial and social justice. “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” [25]. Neither praising nor blaming genetic ancestry testing as a socio-political practice, Nelson rather calls on us, social scientists, geneticists and activists, to turn a lucid attention to the extraordinary social power of dna and carefully consider what we want it to do for us.
