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Summary
Summary
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.
Author Notes
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.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Choice Review
Nelson's slim and subtle book weaves the personal and sociological into an analysis of the use of DNA information in African American identity projects, including reparation and reconciliation initiatives. She clearly lays out the sometimes contradictory uses and meanings of genetic heritage information, as well as a rich historical description of the genetic science, legal precedents, and organizations engaged with traditional and genetic genealogical projects. Downplayed are some sociological and critical questions--how does genetic genealogy compare and contrast with other studies in the public understanding of science? What insights do we gain about the ambivalence that African Americans often have about science, besides its apparently paradoxical quality? How do feelings about genetic ancestry, or science, vary along what dimensions? How are commercial firms exploiting the uncertainty of genetic information and lack of public understanding of genetics? What sense could be made of the failure of genetics in establishing legal grounds for reparations from the government or private firms (e.g., the insurance industry, where still-operating firms made money by insuring slaves for owners)? Despite some weaknesses, a marvelous book. For science studies, Africana studies, and sociology. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Most levels/libraries. --Jennifer L. Croissant, University of Arizona
Library Journal Review
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 © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Preface | p. ix |
| Introduction | p. 1 |
| 1 Reconciliation Projects | p. 27 |
| 2 Ground Work | p. 43 |
| 3 Game Changer | p. 53 |
| 4 The Pursuit of African Ancestry | p. 69 |
| 5 Roots Revelations | p. 95 |
| 6 Acts of Reparation | p. 107 |
| 7 The Rosa Parks of the Reparations Litigation Movement | p. 121 |
| 8 DNA Diasporas | p. 141 |
| 9 Racial Politics After the Genome | p. 157 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 167 |
| Notes | p. 171 |
| Index | p. 193 |
