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Alondra Nelson: Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank
you, Dr. Moses, for that introduction. It's great to be here. Thank you to the organizers
for asking me to contribute to this conversation. And I wanted to particularly acknowledge before
I begin, because we're talking about ancestry, a few members of my family that are here.
My sister, and my brother, and my neice are here, and I'm glad that they can be here with
us this afternoon.
Okay, so as Dr. Moses suggested or said, I work on -- I've been working about the last
decade with African-American genetic geneologists, geneologists and genetic geneologists, doing
ethnographic field work, interviews, and also historical research on how genetic geneology
came to matter and be an important in black communities. And the talk of -- the title
of my talk to day is "The Social Life of DNA," which is the title of a book that I've just
finished that will be out next year, and I'll tell you a little bit about what that means.
So these are some of the people that I worked with; this is a slide from my field work.
This is from a meeting of the Afro-American Geneological and Historical Society, the national
meeting that took place in New England. This was about four years ago. And this is a presentation
of African-American geneologists, kind of in a DNA 101 presentation, learning how to
think about integrating, as we're talking about today, genetic geneology insights, and
the geneological work that they do. And this gives you sort of a sense of what geneologists
sort of looked like when I started my research a decade ago. It tended to be a pursuit of,
you know, older folks, older African-Americans among the population that I study. This is
from the same field work, so they're holding up the nucleotides that make up DNA here,
and understanding how it works with their conventional geneology.
So part of what the work that I've been doing for the last decade has been about, and it
set the graphic work, because it's -- so it's what the work came to mean, not necessarily
what I thought I was going to come out with when I started the research, was to think
in more complicated ways, actually, about the connections between genetics and identity.
So I know that many of you are probably familiar with lots of television shows that have been
on about genetic ancestry testing, including Skip Gates' series, and "Who Do You Think
You Are," these kinds of television shows, and they give us the impression that people
get genetic geneology results, and they sort of come out of the room or the experience
thinking in a wholesale new way about who they are and what their identities are.
And so as that can be, as I found in my research, part of the experience of using genetic ancestry
testing for African-Americans, but it's also a lot more complex. So for the population
of genetic geneologists that I worked with early on in my research, the research that
they -- the information that they retrieved -- that they recieved that's yielded from
genetic ancestry testing companies often has to make sense with the paper record that there's
been tracing, so they're hoping that there can be a match between the conventional geneology
and the genetic geneology. Sometimes there are instances like the case study of Roy that
Dr. Mountain shared with us, and sometimes, and more likely in my sample, that's not the
case. And so they're kind of having to adjudicate between two different stories, often, or negotiate
of who they are, what their identities are. And it's also the case that people are trying
to make sense of their results in the context of family oral histories and things that you
don't have paper trails for, the stories that we tell ourselves and each other about our
people. And I've wrote a little bit about this in a 2008 article.
More recently, I've been think-tanking and trying to make connections with younger geneologists,
and you find a lot of these in part on YouTube. And these are people who are not interested
in geneology in the same way that sort of senior citizens and black communities might
be, and they're more sort of public about, partly, I think, as a result of these television
shows, part of the genetic geneology experience for these younger African-Americans is about
the actual recording and performance, right, both of the test-taking and of the results.
So this is some data, this is just a quote from someone who had put a video on YouTube,
too, and wanted to share the experience, right? And this, again, is a way I'm going to get
to in a couple slides, how the process of identification is a lot more complex than
taking the test and saying, oh, you know, I'm now, we'll use the contested Bamileke
category for the rest of the afternoon. So this person says, "I just wanted to take you
all through the steps of me doing my paternal African roots. I'm going to send you all on
a trip with me." This is a person who had just received a test kit result from a company
and was going to share with the YouTube, the social media audience. "Give me questions,
give me comments, share this video with your friends and family because I want y'all to
do this, too."
So this is -- I call these "roots revelations videos" in a book chapter I did in the book
called "Race after the Internet" that came out about a year ago, and this is one example.
This is actually a customer of Rick's African Ancestry test, a woman who goes -- her moniker
is Jasmyne Cannick on Youtube, so she's holding here a certificate of Ancestry -- I don't
have a pointer, I don't know if you can see it on the left -- and she has here a map of
the continent of Africa, sort of giving her an indication. I believe she traced to Cameroon,
actually, if I'm recalling correctly. So this is just a screenshot of that experience, and,
as you can tell, this is kind of the image that we're used to, that kind of ecstatic
moment to finding out kind of who you are. But it's very interesting, I mean, I don't
have the video to show you, and I don't have time to show it to you, but part of the conversation
that she's having is a friend is filming her during the course of this kind of revelatory
ecstatic moment, she calls her grandmother in the South, and she says, "Grandmother,"
you know, "Grandma, we're from Cameroon," and her grandma says, "No, we're from South
Carolina."
[laughter]
So, you know, we -- so it's true that we, you know, you buy genetic ancestry tests,
and we can, as Dr. Kittles was saying earlier, can do with that information what we want,
and we can assume and take on that information as we want to, but we also have a kind of
accountability and responsibility to people in our communities who might mirror back to
us other ways of thinking about our identities.
And here's another case in point, this is a gentleman, he uses the moniker Yinni [spelled
phonetically]. He used African Ancestry's testing, and was very kind of self-black-identified,
so those of you who know the kind of social media landscape and Youtube know that people
use tags often to kind of create smaller communities within Youtube, and so he was very much identified
in his tagging community as a kind of pan-Africanist, ery sort of Afro-centric person. So he finds
out here, and there are some conversations and meetings that we had earlier in the week,
Rick -- Dr. Kittles used the phrase, you know, the ways in which the kind of trauma, historical
trauma of slavery can be personalized, and this is the case with Yinni. I'm not surprised.
So Yimi shows both when he gets -- when he's making the decision -- there's three videos.
Him making the decision to get the test results, him actually swabbing his cheek and sending
the test results in, and then this is the -- one of his reactions.
"I'm not surprised, I'm not shocked getting the results, I pretty much know my makeup
already. I am very proud to know what I am." So he tested on the Y chromosome, the YDNA,
"I'm European and proud of it, so all the Europeans out there, and my Europeans in YouTube
Land, I'll check you out later," right, so we think he's happy with this, and then he
says "Peace, black power." So it doesn't take a kind of deep discourse analysis to understand
that there's some kind of discomfort with the identity that he thought he had and sort
of part of the identity that had been provided to him.
So -- but part of what the case for Yinni that's interesting, and part of how these
results get negotiated and navigated, is that in the social media landscape, we get to see
in a a very concentrated way, the way that social interactions and our accountability
and relationships with other people play a large part in how we interpret our genetic
ancestry results. So, in the case of Yinni, the results, the responses from the social
media community ranged from, "It's okay, you stilll look black, you're still a black person,"
to, "Lots of African-Americans have European ancestry," right, to, "I'm really sorry,"
like, expressions, sentiment of condolences. Like, I'm really sorry that you have a pan-African
identity, and you found out that you have European identity. And then moreover, it is
increasingly the case with these videos that I call "roots revelations," you have people
who claim to be citizens of the continent of Africa, or who are living in the United
States from the African diaspora, who say, "Well, you're not African," right? So, to
be Yoruba, to be Bamileke means that you live this way in the world, you do these things,
you have these food ways, these kinds of ways of being in the world. So there's a lot of
sort of interaction around the results that have bearing on peoples' results that are
more than just like, you know, oh, you have this result, and there you go in your world.
So, as I said, my work has been to complicate the sort of relationship of genetics and identity,
and I've been trying to do this conceptually in my book with a concept or an idea that
I call the social life of DNA, and, in short here, I'll say today that it's trying to look
at the way that DNA kind of moves, particularly ideas about ancestry, move through various
domains, right? So that genetic -- ideas about genetic ancestry testing, if not the precise
exact technologies, will find them, and familial searching, which is increasing and forensic
science circles, right? We find it similarly with linkages with health -- this is just
from a 23andMe website, so your health reports and your ancestry reports bundled together
and using sometimes some of the same data to make claims, right? So this is ancestry
DNA moving in different social domains that we might think about separately as the way
that we think about, you know, forensic DNA and medical DNA, ancestry DNA.
And as I'll talk a little bit later, and this will be the -- comprise most of the rest of
my conversation, it's also moving around in these interesting black political culture
-- black projects of political culture, and this -- the last slide, the slide here is
the front page of a reparations, slavery reparations case that started in the U.S. courts in 2002
that I'll say a little bit more about. So I think, increasingly, that if we want to
understand ancestry testing and its roles that it plays in identity, we need to understand
the sort of -- the full field in which it does its work, we need to understand, particularly
if we're thinking about African-Americans who, historically and in the contemporary,
are both more vulnerable to the sort of bad elements of medical research, and the history
of genetic research, and eugenics, and these sorts of things, and also have, potentially,
more to gain by the benefits of these new technologies, right, who are communities who
are both disproportionately incarcerated and disproportionately exonerated using sometimes
DNA technology, right, who stand to benefit from health disparities research, and who
potentially stand to benefit from finally recieving reparations for the unpaid labor
of our ancestors.
So part of how I came to, as I was doing my research, lots of the people I interviewed,
because I was interested in black geneologists, a prepondorance of them used, at least for
one of the tests they did, Rick Kittle's African Ancestry service, so a lot of my work over
the last 10 years has been popping up at lectures that Rick gives like this, like sort of being
in the back of the audience and sort of following him around, and also tracing his tests and
his consumers.
[laughter]
So one of the things that the consumers would say to me when I -- when -- root seekers would
say to me when I would say, "Well, how did you hear about this testing," it became the
case increasingly that people would talke to me about social and political projects.
So people would say -- they wouldn't say -- you know, I think increasingly now they might
say they saw one of Skip Gates' shows, for example. But, you know, six or seven years
ago, they would say "Well, you know, I heard that Kittles was doing this work with Dr.
Blakey at the African Burial Ground, and that some of this research came out of that research
project," or, "I heard that, you know, a friend of mine who is an activist in reparations
politics told me that these tests popped up in this reparations class actions suit, and
so then I went to look into doing my ancestry testing." So that one of -- for African-Americans,
there's a kind of political avenue or threshold into thinking about these tests as well.
So I'm just going to give you two examples of how I've been tracing this social life
of DNA beyond the ways that we think of identity and genetics together. So -- and I have to
just go through this fairly quickly -- so in 2002, a Brooklyn-based activist named Diedre
Farmer-Paleman [spelled phonetically] starts a class action suit, she files a class action
suit against Fleet Boston and other multinational corporations that were known or suggested
to have ties to the transatlantic slave trade and still existed today. And to continue on
this generation's old pursuit in black communities to get reparations for slavery that go from,
you know, the 40 acres and a mule that were promised to freed people after the end of
the Civil War to more recent attempts by representative John Conyers, who, almost every year, introduces
a bill for reparations to the House of Representatives that doesn't really go anywhere. So that's
her with one of her attorneys; notably, one of the attorneys on her team was an attorney
who was able to get reparations for the Holocaust from Swiss Banks, so she was using that kind
of legal strategy to think about reparations.
So moving quickly ahead, so the court -- there's a couple of dismissals. A January 2004 dismissal
basically says to Farmer-Paleman and the seven other people who are part of this class action
suit that they don't have standing, they're not the injured parties, they can't show that
they are the specific people who have specific ancestors that were, you know, either insured
by Lloyd's of London, or were, you know, that were -- you know, brought to -- made to travel
across the United States on CSX trains and these sorts of things. So -- and in response
to this, so the judge Norgle, the appellate court judge, says that they can't just merely
allege that they have some geneological relationship, and this is in the appellate finding.
So Farmer-Paleman and the other plaintiffs in the class go to Dr. Kittles, and he provides
them with ancestry -- genetic ancestry tests from his company, and they enter this as evidence,
and as far as I can tell, it's the first time that genetic ancestry testing has been introduced
as evidence in a civil tort case, right, not like a paternity case or something like that,
but a civil tort case. So, in the end -- and there's a 2005 dismissal that swiftly comes
less than a year later that says that DNA testing alone is insufficient to provide a
decisive link to a homeland. So, you know, so on the one hand, and the court -- the case
has kind of been stalled since then because they don't have another strategy, or they
haven't tried to bring forward another strategy.
But what's interesting, I think, for our conversation today is the ways in which these ancestry
tests travel far beyond our personal or individual, or even narcissistic concerns with individual
or even family ancestry or family identification, and link to these larger kind of world historical/political
problems or unresolved political issues around the history of racial slavery. So, another
quick example.
So, moving on, these tests have also come to play an important new role in pan-African
or trans-African politics in the U.S. This is from some fieldwork I did, actually, I
popped up in Rick's life again, at an event in Atlanta about four years ago that was held
by the Leon Sullivan Foundation. So this is Leon Sullivan, who was a Philadelphia-based
Civil Rights era, a little bit older than Dr. King and the like, and he was a leader,
and -- but part of the work that he imagined himself doing -- he's holding a passport here
-- was always trying to link African-Americans and continental Africans, typically elites,
African elites, African-American elites. So this is a quote at the bottom from -- he writes
two autobiographies or two memoirs, so he said -- and he has a kind of prothetic calling,
he says, to make a link to build a bridge between people of African heritage in the
Americas and in the continent of Africa. So you'll see here -- I don't have a pointer
-- but you'll see the part of the logo here for the Leon Sullivan summit, which are these
trans -- the pan-African conversations, is they're kind of just two landmasses in the
world, right? There's the United States and Africa, and a bridge between the two. So there's
all sorts of critical things we can say about that, but I think it's very symbolic of the
work that I think that they're trying to do.
So, typically, these kinds of politics that goes back to, you know, the -- when Africans
were first brought to the U.S., right, this kind of politics and a kind of affiliation
and feeling of kinship with Africa and African heritage was accomplished through politics,
through religion, through just a shared sense of heritage. But in this 2008 summit, the
delegates to the summit pass a resolution that says they want to encourage African-Americans
to get genetic ancestry testing, and then based on the nation-states or the ethnic groups
to which they're matched, to do targeted sort of philanthropy and socio and economic development
projects on the continent of Africa, right? So the bridge, the link, the dream that Sullivan
has is manifest after his death in his organization through a kind of genetic linkage, right,
the bridge becomes a double helix, or a kind of stair linking Africa and the -- and its
diaspora. And you can see here that African ancestry is the partner in this work.
So part of what they hope to -- how am I doing for time, Dr. Moses? Okay, a few more minutes.
What they're trying to partly manifest in this work is, and it's happening also in some
African embassies, and I don't know if Carlos is, Dr. Bustamante is here, but he was talking
about the state of Gabon, who Rick's company, I think, has worked with that embassy as well,
are interested in sort of drawing these linkages, partly for just, you know, very commercial
interests, right, to increase the traffic of African-American tourists who travel to
these places. But there's also a continuation of a larger political legacy and a larger
political struggle around returning people of the diaspora to their African home, the
home that we lost, that we know -- don't know as much as we should about our homes there.
And so this work has been what we might think about as a kind of new DNA citizenship, or
kind of new pan-Africanism based on genetic ancestry testing. So if we think about the
Leon Sullivan image I showed you, where there are people like W.B. Du Bois, it had been
sort of figures in black arts and letters who had both titular and sort of, you know,
the various ties to African countries, so we can think about Du Bois in Ghana. But more
recently, the DNA tie -- and celebrity, this is Isaiah Washington -- can allow a closer
link. So, Sierra Leone -- so, Isaiah Washington was also a customer of African ancestry, and
was traced on his maternal lineage to the mitochondrial DNA to Sierra Leone, and, you
know, I think it's always been the case that prominent people could sort of be more cosmopolitan
with regards to their citizenship and their mobility, but I think we need to understand
that the DNA had some role and some bearing on Isaiah Washington being, as far as I know,
the first person to get joint -- dual citizenship based on genetic ancestry testing.
And so this is taken in Atlanta in about 2008, and Isaiah pulled out his passport and showed
it to me. So he carries it in his breast pocket. There's no reason why someone would need a
Sierra Leonian passport in Atlanta --
[laughter]
-- but, you know, I think for him, it's kind of like carrying, you know, his freedom papers,
right? The sort of sense that he has another place that he's from, and, you know, Isaiah
obviously has had a very complicated public relations legacy over the last few years,
so part of what this accompishes for him is also to redirect attention and kind of assuage
some of the accusations of homophobia that he's had to face.
So, just to wrap up, I just want to suggest to you that, again, that the relationship
between genetics and identity is more complicated in that even when we're thinking about just
individual identity, that the ways that people render their identity, drawing on genetic
ancestry test results are far more complicated, and have to do what other people think about
the results, the accountability to people and their families, other test results, other
companies they might have used, and what they know through maybe conventional testing sources.
In the case of African-Americans, I think it has everything to do as well with the ways
in which our communities are still trying to come to terms with and find answers for
some of the -- our questions around ancestry and the slave trade. And so that the social
life of DNA, and the way that DNA kind of circulates in these various fields from forensics,
which is, you know, complicated and shows the problems for some African-Americans to
genetic ancestry testing is one way of thinking about this.
So lastly, this is just again, the reparation side. This is -- the bottom slide is from
a geneology convention with a genetic geneologist in colonial costume talking to young African-American
geneologist Jamie Wilson from the University of Massachusetts who's involved in the Roots
for Real project, which, I don't know if it's still really running, but it was a project
that, for a time, tested, without a fee, African-Americans and tried to find their roots to Africa.
And this last project is from some of my field work in South Carolina. I think it's a poignant
kind of instantiation of the politics around identity that's happening after genetic ancestry
testing. So I don't have a pointer here, but the three people whose hands are meeting in
the middle, there is Isaiah Washington, who was at a -- it was a ceremony that was meant
to commemorate people who -- Carolina lowlands people who had come from the African continent
and who had lost their lives, either on the journey, or who had become -- who were enslaved
in the Carolinas. And this is on the banks of the Ashley River, so Isaiah Washington
is here representing a category of people he calls DNA Sierra Leonians. The woman in
the purple sweater is from the Polite [spelled phonetically] family, which is an African-American
family that's been able to trace their history through slave manifest directly from the Carolinas
to Sierra Leone, right, that's that actual link that doesn't need rice cultivation, that's
a paper trail from the U.S. to Africa. And the third gentleman in the purple is a gentleman
named Amadu Massali [spelled phonetically] who is a Sierra Leonian immigrant who lives
in Dallas, Texas, and who had come to the bank of the Ashley River on that afternoon
just sort of officiate the sort of coming home of the souls of the ancestors, both to
the shore of the Carolinas on that day. Thank you.
[applause]