Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History

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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.

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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. She was previously on the faculty of Yale University and received its Poorvu Award for teaching excellence. On September 1, , she will become President of the Social Science Research Council, an independent nonprofit that for more than nine decades has been dedicated to advancing research for the public good.

She has contributed to national policy discussions on inequality and about the social implications of new technologies, including artificial intelligence, big data, and human gene-editing. Columbia Global Centers. The article in this Special Issue comparing the Mexican and the Brazilian scenarios — symbolized by the images of the genoma mexicano and Homo brasilis Kent et al.

But neither is it a case of the de-geneticization that the Black activists were seeking to accomplish. It was, again, a case of genomics providing another element in the toolkit of ways to think about race and nation. State multiculturalism had weighed more heavily than genomic data in deciding on the affirmative action policies that went against the grain of the image of Brazil as a mestizo nation; yet that image, so powerfully engrained in common-sense, had not by any means been erased and now genomic data re-affirmed it, with the genetic idiom resonating with already existing ideas about genealogy and heredity.

But it is still an important area in which to assess how genomic research shapes images of race and nation. The research represented the nation as divided into racialized regions, following — and geneticizing — widespread existing ideas about the nation and its internal diversity. Colombia has long been seen as a country of racialized regions and the authors of this article derived their four basic regions from existing historical sources before finding that their genetic data fit the regional pattern.

The tables became part of standard forensic practice, but the odd thing about them was that a regional differences in allelic frequencies were very small and did not indicate significant population differentiation, and b when technicians actually used the tables to generate probability ratios for a match, it made virtually no difference which table they used. The kinds of genetic markers used for forensic analysis are not good for differentiating in terms of biogeographical ancestry.

If the Colombian researchers had had the relevant racial identity data, perhaps they would have used these instead, but they had to make do with regions.

In Colombia, region and, indirectly, race were also being reified in genetic terms and then reproduced in everyday practice by forensic technicians. Again, then, a genetic language became available for thinking about race, region and nation, but its traction for producing real change was limited by the circularity of the relation between the familiar and the new. Traction was also reduced by the fact that when a forensic DNA identification entered the courtroom, although it was explicitly associated with one regional table in the expert report, the regional—racial link disappeared because the technology was able to produce extremely high levels of probability of matching, whichever table was used.

As with the forensic tables, however, it was hard to see recent genomic research on Colombian population diversity as having caused this: such views were already part of common-sense perceptions of the country.

If some students were happy to dabble in biologizing and geneticizing idioms when talking of regions, when it came to more personal ponderings on identity, ancestry and heredity, people in general adopted a more flexible approach, emphasizing — as did Mexican respondents — that many different factors could play a role.

They explained their own estimates of their racialized ancestry in terms of how they looked, what their surnames were and where they and their parents came from. They might see predilections and tastes as hereditary, as well as somatic features, and they might use a language of latency and manifestation or expression to account for discrepancies between the known ancestry and actual phenotype or behavioural tendencies of a person.

Like the Mexican respondents, these people were saying that the scientists might technically be right, but what mattered was how it made sense to them personally.

Genetics and the Unsettled Past

The authority of genetics does seem to make a big impact on people — it is seen as giving access to the truth — but as Nelson a : says, the truth of bios biological life is always mediated by truth of bios biographies. Our data show the very uneven and even contradictory impact of genetic knowledge on different publics. Widely seen as irrefutable and necessary — but only if operating in a transparent institutional environment, beyond the influences of political corruption and state malfeasance — genetic knowledge nonetheless lacks the power to transform or rewrite definitions of diversity, humanity, race and nation across a range of social contexts.

Instead it tends to reinforce existing definitions, sometimes lending them particular force — with scientific veracity or the revelation of the invisible — but not transfiguring them. But the way this discourse enters into broader realms of experience, outside the lab and the research paper, means transformative potentials are not fully realized and more familiar concepts of race and nation are often re-inscribed. Yet, genomic knowledge can also provide the tools for defining both nation and race in altered ways — without transfiguring the underlying concepts.

In short, genomic knowledge could unsettle and reinforce ideas of nation and race; it could be both banal and highly politicized. The end result is a great deal more complex than current ideas about the geneticization of society or the transformation and re-writing of identity and race. The ideas expressed here are indebted to the conversations with project team members, but do not necessarily represent their views.

He is a social anthropologist whose research has focused on the concept and history of blackness in Colombia, constructions of otherness, multiculturalism and post-colonial theory. See also Wade et al. Some of the relevant literature on this is cited in the articles in this Special Issue. See also Wade National Center for Biotechnology Information , U. Social Studies of Science.

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Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History by Keith Wailoo

Email: ku. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.

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Abstract The articles in this issue highlight contributions that studies of Latin America can make to wider debates about the effects of genomic science on public ideas about race and nation. Keywords: forensics, genomics, heredity, nation, public understanding of science, race. Nations In the first phase of our project, we found that genomic science tended to take for granted the nation as an obvious frame within which to conduct genomic projects that mapped genetic diversity, thus implicitly reproducing the nation as a diverse genetic community.

Publics In this Special Issue, we focus on how knowledge produced by genomic projects circulates beyond research laboratories. Mexico, Brazil, Colombia: The power of genomic knowledge? Conclusion Our data show the very uneven and even contradictory impact of genetic knowledge on different publics. Notes 1. References Abu El-Haj N. Annual Review of Anthropology 36 1 : — Abu El-Haj N.

Arias J, Restrepo E. Revista Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales 3 : 45— Balibar E. In: Balibar E, Wallerstein I, editors. London: Verso, 37— Benjamin R. Policy and Society 28 4 : — Bliss C. Evolutionary Anthropology 10 : 34— The New England Journal of Medicine 12 : — Campbell B. In: Wade P, editor. Oxford: Berghahn Books, — Condit CM. Public Understanding of Science 11 4 : — Public Understanding of Science 13 3 : — Darvasi A, Shifman S. Nature Genetics 37 2 : — De la Cadena M, editor. Duster T. Patterns of Prejudice 40 4—5 : — The British Journal of Sociology 66 1 : 1— Edwards J. New Genetics and Society 21 3 : — Fog L.

Fortun M. Genome Research 12 : — Franklin S. Anthropological Theory 3 1 : 65— Fujimura JH, Rajagopalan R. Social Studies of Science 41 1 : 5— Fullwiley D. Science as Culture 16 1 : 1— Social Studies of Science 38 5 : — Gannett L. Philosophy of Science 68 3 : S—S Social Studies of Science 45 6 : — Graham R, editor. In: Souza J, Sinder V, editors.

Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, — Hamilton JA.

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Hartigan J. North American Dialogue 16 1 : 29— In: Nugent D, Vincent J, editors. New York: Blackwell, — Hinterberger A. Htun M. Latin American Research Review 39 1 : 60— Irwin A. Public Understanding of Science 10 1 : 1— Irwin RM.

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Jacob MM. Jasanoff S. In: Jasanoff S, editor. London: Routledge, 13— Jenkins EW. International Journal of Science Education 21 7 : — Kahn J. New York: Columbia University Press.

Kent M. Social Studies of Science 43 4 : — Kent M, Wade P. Kohli-Laven N. Krimsky S, Sloan K. Latour B. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Lehrman S. Lewontin RC.

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