The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation After the Genome

by Alondra Nelson

Overview

The unexpected story of how genetic testing is affecting race in America

We know DNA is a master key that unlocks medical and forensic secrets, but its genealogical life is both revelatory and endlessly fascinating. Tracing genealogy is now the second-most popular hobby amongst Americans, as well as the second-most visited online category. This billion-dollar industry has spawned popular television shows, websites, and Internet communities, and a booming heritage tourism circuit.

The tsunami of interest in genetic ancestry tracing from the African American community has been especially overwhelming. In The Social Life of DNA, Alondra Nelson takes us on an unprecedented journey into how the double helix has wound its way into the heart of the most urgent contemporary social issues around race.

For over a decade, Nelson has deeply studied this phenomenon. Artfully weaving together keenly observed interactions with root-seekers alongside illuminating historical details and revealing personal narrative, she shows that genetic genealogy is a new tool for addressing old and enduring issues. In The Social Life of DNA, she explains how these cutting-edge DNA-based techniques are being used in myriad ways, including grappling with the unfinished business of slavery: to foster reconciliation, to establish ties with African ancestral homelands, to rethink and sometimes alter citizenship, and to make legal claims for slavery reparations specifically based on ancestry.

Nelson incisively shows that DNA is a portal to the past that yields insight for the present and future, shining a light on social traumas and historical injustices that still resonate today. Science can be a crucial ally to activism to spur social change and transform twenty-first-century racial politics. But Nelson warns her readers to be discerning: for the social repair we seek can’t be found in even the most sophisticated science. Engrossing and highly original, The Social Life of DNA is a must-read for anyone interested in race, science, history and how our reckoning with the past may help us to chart a more just course for tomorrow.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807033029
Publisher:	Beacon Press
Publication date:	01/12/2016
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	216
Sales rank:	429,288
File size:	387 KB

About the Author

Alondra Nelson is Dean of Social Science and professor of sociology and gender studies at Columbia University. She is author of the award-winning book Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination and her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Science, Boston Globe, and the Guardian. She lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Introduction 1

1 Reconciliation Projects 27

2 Ground Work 43

3 Game Changer 53

4 The Pursuit of African Ancestry 69

5 Roots Revelations 95

6 Acts of Reparation 107

7 The Rosa Parks of the Reparations Litigation Movement 121

8 DNA Diasporas 141

9 Racial Politics After the Genome 157

Acknowledgments 167

Notes 171

Index 193

Editorial Reviews

10/26/2015
Sociologist Nelson probes the “perceived omnipotence” and “growing utility” of genetic testing in the modern United States in this study of African-American interest in the technology for ancestry research. While focusing on one particular company, African Ancestry, she also attends to the African Burial Ground National Monument in New York City, the slavery-reparations lawsuit Farmer-Paellmann v. Fleet Boston, and the Leon Sullivan Foundation’s Global African Reunion, aimed at strengthening links throughout the black diaspora. Venturing abroad, Nelson covers the work by Mary-Claire King, an American geneticist, with the Argentinian organization Las Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo), which traces the children of people murdered by the government during the 1970s Dirty War. The language involved in discussing the human genome is, of necessity, often technical, but Nelson’s work is supplemented and enlivened by interactions with “root-seekers” at a variety of gatherings. An early stimulus to much of this work, the 1977 blockbuster miniseries Roots, is acknowledged, as is its modern-day offspring, genealogy-themed reality TV shows. Nelson’s conclusions are primarily of academic interest, but the current fascination with genetics testing may also attract general readers. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

Meticulously detailed. Nelson adds another chapter to the somber history of injustice toward African-Americans, but it is one in which science is enriching lives by forging new identities and connections to ancestral homelands.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“The Social Life of DNA is an important contribution to many literatures and will undoubtedly serve as a catalyst for academic and public discussion of the intertwined relationships among race, science, and policy in the coming years.”
—Sociology of Race and Ethnicity

“One of this generation’s most gifted scholars examines the unfolding mysteries of DNA sequencing and the limits and promises of genetic genealogy at the intersection of race, politics and identity. Alondra Nelson brilliantly guides us on a journey of discovery in this cautionary tale of the high-stakes efforts to reconcile our racial origins and to find redemption as a country. Eye-opening, provocative and deeply humane.”
—Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns

“Alondra Nelson takes us into a complex and endlessly fascinating space where genetic ancestry testing meets racial politics. With her unique and wonderful gifts for research and insight into genetic science, ethnography and history, The Social Life of DNA comes at a moment when the questions it raises about race and social justice couldn’t be more pressing and urgent.”
—Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

“Nelson explores this large, sprawling, fascinating subject with clarity, passion, rigor, and a keen eye for revealing detail. The Social Life of DNA will appeal to a broad readership interested in history, race, and science. Geneticists, sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and jurists will be stimulated by reading this book. It is a brilliant work.”
—Randall Kennedy, Michael R. Klein Professor at Harvard Law School and author of The Persistence of the Color Line 

“Alondra Nelson tells a story for anyone interested in their own family, even their own memory. Using fresh genetics research and writing like an investigative reporter, Nelson clears up the mystery about our society’s rush to DNA.”
—Edward Ball, author of Slaves in the Family

“The Social Life of DNA is a brilliant ethnography of the recreational uses of DNA...Timely and original, this book offers a nuanced and engrossing negotiation between genetic truth and ‘truthiness.’”
—Patricia J. Williams, James L. Dohr Professor of Law at Columbia University and columnist for The Nation

“‘The double helix now lies at the center of some of the most significant issues of our time,’ Alondra Nelson writes in this valuable and illuminating book. Since 2003, she has been following the ways that DNA intertwines with race, and The Social Life of DNA is her clear-eyed, sharp, and closely observed account of the phenomenon. It couldn’t be more timely.”
—Jonathan Weiner, Maxwell M. Geffen Professor of Medical and Scientific Journalism at Columbia Journalism School

“Alondra Nelson’s account of how genetic data was transformed into contested political culture is a lucid as it is path-breaking. This exhilarating survey of how DNA became an agent in the politics of reparation and reconciliation has not only extended analysis of race and racism but created a new field of comparative research.”
—Paul Gilroy, professor of American and English literature, King’s College, London

From the Publisher

03/01/2016
Nelson (dean, social sciences, Columbia Univ.; Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination) describes her participant-observation research on black American genetic ancestry testing. For some African Americans, these DNA tests promise authoritative, scientifically based insight into lineages formerly obscured by written records containing minimal information, the fragmentation of families, disruption of orally transmitted history, and the dehumanizing conflation, caused by the slave trade, of hundreds of distinct African ethnicities into a single American race. Activists have even attempted to use genetic testing data as evidence of ancestry in class-action lawsuits seeking reparations for the harms of slavery. Yet, as Nelson cautions, DNA tests are tools, not solutions. They do not constitute either absolute or comprehensive proof of ancestry; their results cannot make African Americans full members of their ancestral communities; and on their own, they will not lead America to reexamine and reinterpret history. VERDICT Although occasionally repetitive, this book raises significant issues worth consideration by genealogists of all ethnicities (and the librarians who assist them), and provides intriguing descriptions of the use of science in pursuit of social justice.—Nancy R. Curtis, Univ. of Maine Lib., Orono

Library Journal

2015-11-03
Genealogical studies by black Americans have grown in popularity once companies were able to provide DNA analyses "direct to consumers." Has it helped civil rights? Social justice? Legal claims? Yes and no, writes Nelson (Sociology and Gender Studies/Columbia Univ.; Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination, 2011, etc.) in this meticulously detailed study. Fascination with African origins took off in the 1970s with the publication, and subsequent TV adaptation, of Roots. It got a further boost in 1991 when excavations in New York City unearthed a slave graveyard dating to the late 1600s and one of the first-ever DNA analyses was conducted. The research was controversial, but it led to the realization that DNA could establish ethnic linkages to the West African countries that were the sources of the slave trade. These "reconciliations" have been immensely important and satisfying to black genealogy tracers, creating an identity linked to centuries-old cultures and kin, even leading to dual citizenship in some countries. Most of these analyses have used the commercial firm African Ancestry, founded by a geneticist, Rick Kittles, who had worked on the New York burial site and whose fame and occasional controversy are woven into the text. As for social justice, the story is not so sanguine. Social activists have argued for financial reparations for the unpaid slave labor of their ancestors. Class action suits against the government have failed due to statutes of limitation and sovereign immunity. So, interestingly, activists have sued corporations, such as the banks that lent money to slaveholders and the insurance companies that covered the lives of slaves. These, too, have legally lacked "standing" primarily because the DNA of descendants is linked to tribes and ethnicities rather than to distinct individuals. Nelson adds another chapter to the somber history of injustice toward African-Americans, but it is one in which science is enriching lives by forging new identities and connections to ancestral homelands.

Kirkus Reviews