Performing blackness: a composite counterstory of direct-to-consumer genetic ancestry testing

Abstract

The industry of genetic ancestry testing (GAT) uses biotechnology to generate new performances of genetic, cultural, and ethnoracial identity. Based on interviews and focus groups with Black GAT customers, this composite counterstory narrates the familial, institutional, and political contexts of Black GAT identity negotiation. This article highlights how conceptions of Blackness are constrained and enabled by the everyday nature of racism, the omnipresence of anti-Black data surveillance, familial narratives, and the allure of institutional racial reconciliation attached to commercialized genomics. This counterstory illustrates the salience of narrative in the construction of the racial and genetic self.

Your DNA is my DNA

Kiara almost muted the TV when the ad came on.¹ However, she recognized Dr Henry Louis Gates Jr., so she let it play. Gates wore his usual well-fitting dark suit and glasses that she remembered from her mom’s fascination with the man. Before her mom had gotten sick and passed away three years ago, she had loved Dr Gates and his assorted TV shows.² During their weekly phone calls, Kiara often got updates on which celebrities appeared on Finding Your Roots, where Gates’ team used traditional and genetic genealogy to reveal celebrities’ ancestries. “They did Sterling K. Brown this week. You know that’s a fine man,” her mom had said. Kiara had been embarrassed at the time because who wants to hear about their mom’s crush? But now, she remembered her mom’s voice fondly, with the familiar ache of grief in her chest.

Settling against the couch, Kiara watched the ad, which featured Dr Gates talking with celebrities, including Spike Lee and Lee Daniels (PBS). Speaking over the montage of interviews, Dr Gates said, “We are walking family trees. And our ancestors are waiting for us to find them.” In an emotional scene, he revealed Brittany Packett Cunningham’s biological grandfather. The woman’s brown skin and shoulder-length twisted hair reminded Kiara of her own. Gates proclaimed, “We opened up a whole new world for her” and Brittany flipped open a book while holding back tears. The black and white picture showed her grandfather as a young man with a low haircut, smoking a pipe. Choked with emotion, she asked, “That’s him? Wow! It’s like finding yourself” (PBS).

Kiara watched the rest of the ad with more interest. Was it true? If she found her biological maternal grandfather, would it be like finding herself? Would she become a new person? She didn’t know where her African ancestors had come from before they had been enslaved in the United States, and she’d never known her grandfather because her mom hadn’t known her father. Her mom always said she came from a generation where family history was “grown folks’ business.” Perhaps her mother had been so drawn to Dr Gates’ shows because she was fascinated by the idea of discovering something that she didn’t have herself, a sense of genealogical identity.³

Her brother Morgan entered the living room just as the ad was ending, carrying a cold piece of pizza. He’d brought home an extra box from the Black Student Union meeting he led at Bunker Hill University (BHU), where he was a senior. After graduating from the same school 5 years ago, Kiara had started a job as a web developer in their hometown, Bunker Hill, Tennessee, and Morgan had moved in to cut down on his college expenses.

“That’s the show mom used to like, right?” he asked, mouth full of pizza.

“Yeah, it has a ton of celebrities this season,” she said. After a pause, she ventured, “I was thinking of doing one of those tests, you know. I could find out more.”

Morgan chuckled, as he sat beside her. “You want to give those people our DNA?”

“I want to find out who mom’s dad is, or was. Don’t you ever wonder?” Kiara asked. Their mother had expressed that she was curious about it, but she hadn’t the resources—time or energy or money—to follow through.

“You’re serious?” Morgan frowned. “You think that’s safe?”

“It can’t be that risky. Didn’t you see all those celebrities doing it?”

“I think your DNA is basically my DNA,”⁴ Morgan said. “You should be concerned, too. You give them my DNA and the next thing you know, I’m turning up in some police search.”

Kiara rolled her eyes at the exaggeration. He seemed serious, but she could tell there was a hint of playfulness in his tone. “You think they’re gonna do a nationwide manhunt for Morgan Leroy Reid sometime soon? What are you planning?” Kiara asked.

“You ever heard of the Golden State Killer? The FBI’s been all up in those companies, whether we know it or not.”⁵

“Maybe, but you’re not a mass murderer. You shouldn’t have anything to worry about.” Morgan rolled his eyes, so Kiara tried again, saying, “‘Okay, so, I have a phone that’s tracking my every move. I got two computers … They know exactly what I’m doing, where I’m at. They just can track us. No matter what we do. We’re going to get tracked regardless.’”⁶

“So, you think that means we should just hand it to them?”

“All I’m saying is ‘if they want a DNA sample from you, they can get a DNA sample from you the easy way or the hard way.’⁷ ‘This country is so corrupt that they’re going to get you one way or the other.’⁸ At least this way, we’d be getting something out of it,” she said.

“I’m not arguing that they can’t get my DNA. I just don’t think I should do anything to make it easier to find me. ‘We’re the ones who have to worry about it the most. There are so many of us that’s already incarcerated unjustly.’ ⁹ You know, I was just learning in my ethnic studies class about anti-Blackness and systems of surveillance. The reading said that surveillance is always something Black people have experienced and that it’s been used to control and contain us since slavery (Browne). These tests seem like one way to create more surveillance for us.”

“Well even if it’s risky, it might be worth it. How else will we know who we are?” Kiara asked.

“Look, you can do it,” Morgan said. “You don’t need my permission. But if I get arrested because some cousin of some cousin committed a crime and they think it’s me, that’s on you.”

“Fine,” Kiara said. With an exasperated sigh, she turned the TV back on. “That’s on me.”

Decoding our past through DNA¹⁰

Two weeks later, Kiara retrieved the glossy white 23andMe box from her mailbox and sent a picture of it to Morgan. Inside, she placed the 23andMe kit on her kitchen table, where she sat and habitually turned to Twitter. She had been following the hashtag #BHU200 for the last couple of days, and some of her brother’s tweets were at the top. The BSU and other groups on campus were using the hashtag to gain public attention about the ongoing controversy at the school. They were protesting BHU’s use of slave labor during its earliest years. Recent controversies about Black history and critical race theory in the state (Allison; McMorris-Santoro and Edwards) had brought attention to the hidden history of the university.

Kiara was surprised to learn that BHU had sold 200 enslaved people to pay off its debts, which was ultimately the reason the school was standing today.¹¹ She never imagined that her alma mater would be among the many institutions that were reconciling their history with slavery, including Harvard and Yale (Wilder 63). Morgan had become somewhat of an activist on campus because of his role at the BSU and was meeting with the university administration as part of their negotiations. Meanwhile, the hashtag continued to gain traction.

Tweet: Over 40 universities across the world are part of the Universities Studying Slavery (USS) Consortium (University of Virginia). Why isn’t BHU part? #BHU200

Tweet: Our state still has 100 confederate monuments (Pfleger). The problem is bigger than #BHU200

The onslaught of media attention made her worried for her brother. It seemed like everyone had something to say about her small community and its college, even people who knew nothing about the place. Kiara looked for her brother’s face in each picture and video, just to see if he was there, if he was okay. She spotted his backpack in the corner of one photo and the top of his head and afro in another. Some of the tweets opposed acknowledging the university’s history.

Tweet: Cheers to all the people who aren’t falling for the divide and conquer agenda.¹² The past is the past. No one at BHU now owned any slaves. Everything is not racist! #BHU200

Pacing the kitchen, Kiara wondered how anyone could think that the university literally being built on slave labor was not racism. How could that history be unrelated to her experience as a Black student there, or her brother’s? Kiara closed Twitter and sat down, overwhelmed by the weight of the controversy that she was only tangentially connected to.

She returned her attention to the 23andMe box in her hand that said “Welcome to you” and considered Morgan’s concerns about surveillance. Was she really going to put herself and her brother at risk to get the answers she wanted? She thumbed over the colorful chromosomes that lined the box. Inside, a neon pink and green packet told her how to register her account on 23andMe’s website, give her saliva sample, and return the box with the attached postage. She read the book front to back and then followed the instructions for spitting into the plastic tube. Placing it in a bag with the biohazard symbol, she sealed it back into the package.

Kiara “conjure[d] a fantastic tale of laboratory elves inventing … [her] place of origin out of magical ancestral dust” (Huell 121). Somewhere in a distant lab, a scientist in white lab coat would be calculating who she was. She’d been texting her friend, Elijah about it, and he’d pointed out that knowing more about her ancestors might make her feel more grounded, more connected. “‘Maybe your family was a tribe of doctors. Maybe your family was the healers, maybe your ancestors were teachers and counselors within the tribe,’”¹³ he’d said. Maybe this test really could help her “reconcile home and past, belonging and longing, global community and corporeality” (Huell 124). She double-checked the seal on the bag and applied the postage. In a few weeks, they would get their results. She hoped the protests were over by then.

The stories we tell¹⁴

Three weeks later, the Reid siblings sat in their living room, hunched over a laptop, minutes after Kiara had received the email from 23andMe saying, “Your results ready! A world of exploration awaits!”¹⁵ She logged into the account to see the ancestry report. At first glance, it seemed to be what she was expecting (Table 1).

Table 1.

Kiara’s 23andMe results.

Reference groups	Percentage
Sub-Saharan African	72.2
West African	59.1
Nigerian	27.4
Ghanaian, Liberian, and Sierra Leonean	17.3
Senegambian & Guinean	6.3
Broadly West African	8.1
Congolese and Southern East African	13
Angolan and Congolese	12.5
Southern East African	0.2
Broadly Congolese and Southern East African	0.3
Broadly Sub-Saharan African	0.1
European	25.8
Northwestern European	25.8
British and Irish	25
Broadly Northwestern European	0.8
Western Asia and North African	0.5
Broadly Western Asia and North African	0.5
Trace Ancestry	1.0
Filipino and Austronesian	0.2
Broadly Central and South Asian	0.2
Southern Indian and Sri Lankan	0.2
Broadly Chinese and Southeast Asian	0.1
Indonesian, Thai, Khmer, and Myanma	0.1
Indigenous American	0.1
Levantine	0.1
Unassigned	0.5
	100

“Looks like a 70/30 African-European split. Not bad,” Morgan said. “I thought we’d be like 80 or 90, you know?”

“From what I’ve read it’s pretty normal. Most African Americans seem to have that much European (Bryc et al. 37). I heard a lot of the European ancestry is from slavery.”

“Dang, we almost mixed!”¹⁶ Morgan said with a chuckle. “That’s probably why you like The Office so much.”

“Shut up!” she said, slapping him playfully on the arm. “It’s probably why you date so many White girls!”

“Ohhhh,” he said, faking pain in his chest. “That hurt. It really hurt.”

She smiled. “It’s pretty cool though. Angola. Nigeria. Ghana. You always wanted to visit Accra.”

“Uh huh,” he said. “And it’s a lot of small numbers too. Filipino. Khmer? What’s that?” he asked.

Kiara hovered over the category. “It says, ‘Before its fall in the fifteenth century, the Khmer empire—encompassing modern-day Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia—was the largest land empire in the region’s history.’”¹⁷

“That’s pretty tight,” Morgan said, looking over the map. “Never heard of Khmer before.”

While waiting nervously for the results, Kiara had done some sleuthing to imagine what receiving her results might be like. She’d stumbled upon reveals and unboxings on YouTube, where customers shared their experiences publicly (Peters, 226). A lot of them seemed overjoyed about their result like she’d seen in Gates’ TV show, too. In one video, a woman had said,

‘Knowing where you’re from puts something different within you and it gives you a different perspective on life, it pushes you differently, it moved you a little differently, and so maybe if we all knew where we came from, that we would be just a little different in who we are today.’¹⁸

She felt unsure about those claims. Could these results change how moved or who she was? If anything, these results reinforced her sense of self. She was a Black woman from Bunker Hill, Tennessee, and she knew she was the descendant of enslaved people. That seemed to be written on her DNA. 70% African. 30% European. East Africa, Nigeria, Liberia, Sierra Leone—she may have been “from” there, in a strange sense of the word, but it was only because her ancestors had been stolen from those lands. There didn’t seem to be anything specific enough to latch onto though, no names or cities or villages. Everything else had been erased from her family’s reach, such as their cultures, languages, and histories. DNA was the only connection she had. She had been looking forward to feeling connected after watching so many positive reveals online, but now it felt underwhelming.

“You okay?” Morgan asked, noticing her frown.

“Yeah, I’m just not sure what it all means,” Kiara said.

“It can still help you find mom’s dad, right?” Morgan asked.

“Well, this part doesn’t really,” Kiara said, swiveling her mouse over the color-coded map. “What matters is connecting with DNA relatives to see how it says we’re related. I mean, if he took the test or someone else related to him, it should show up.”

“Is it showing?”

“I haven’t opted in yet. I wanted to check with you to see if you’re okay with it. We don’t know what we’ll find,” Kiara said, chewing her lip.

“Let’s do it,” Morgan said, patting a hand on her shoulder. “I know how much you want to find him. And I know I was going on earlier about all the police stuff. I still believe it. We can never be too careful, but I think it’s worth it too. For you and for mom, too.”

“Thanks,” Kiara said, giving him a short hug. “I just hope we can find him.”

Breaking silences¹⁹

Kiara stepped into BHU’s courtyard and found a spot at the edge of a small crowd. It was an open space lined with a low stone wall, and the center held a statue of the school mascot, an eagle. This was the same place Kiara had seen on her brother’s social media accounts, where people had rallied together against the university’s silence. Now the space was neatly arranged with a podium and lines of chairs. A few reporters stood at the ready with cameras and notepads, and Kiara wondered what they were writing about. This “listening session” was open to the community, so Kiara had come to see what the university was planning to do about BHU200.

A White woman with a short haircut stepped to the podium first. She introduced herself as the Dean of Students, and she assured those present that the university administration had been carefully listening to what students and community members had been saying. Then she went on to make a formal apology to the enslaved people and their descendants on behalf of the university. She concluded by saying, “We have much work to do to understand the pain and injury the college has caused as well as to appreciate fully the strength, gifts, and power of enslaved persons and our foundational indebtedness to them” (Davidson College).

A smattering of polite applause filled the silence before another person came up to field questions and comments from the audience. The first person to get in line was a Black man in a security uniform who asked what the university was doing to support Black students on campus currently, especially because they had been the ones pushing for the university to account for their participation in slavery. He said:

“It’s all good to apologize for the past, but what about now? Black students experience racism every day on this campus. Black students are still admitted at lower rates. Black faculty aren’t supported. Black staff aren’t respected. What are you doing about the racism here now?”²⁰

Nodding in agreement from the audience, Kiara thought of her experiences as an undergrad at BHU and her brother’s. The campus operated from a “frame of abstract liberalism” (Bonilla-Silva 56). Though they talked about equal opportunity and individual choice, they ignored any real attention to racism.²¹

Next, an older Black woman who reminded Kiara of her mother, in a way, came to the microphone. It was probably the neatly pressed hair under a baseball cap. The woman’s voice was a bit shaky, but she seemed firm when she introduced herself.

Hi, my name is Elizabeth Mahoney, and I’m a genealogist for my family. We are descendants of the BHU200, of a man named Robert who was enslaved on this property. He is my great-grandfather. I would like to know how the university will compensate the descendants. The university accumulated its property and its wealth from the labor of enslaved Black people, and then excluded us from the institution until the 1960s by giving exclusive property rights to education to White people (Harris 276). How is the university going to pay us back? And we should be included in whatever you how you all decide. Thank you.

Her statement invoked a more vigorous round of applause from the audience, Kiara included. So far, she had not heard from any descendants except for this previous speaker, Ms Mahoney. In fact, she hadn’t given much consideration to descendants before hearing her perspective. For the next 25 min, people came up one by one to ask more questions and make comments. They were a mix of students, alumni, donors, community members, and university employees. When it was announced that they only had time for one more question, a Black woman about Kiara’s age came to the mic. She talked about a similar case at Georgetown University, asking. “Does the university plan on using commercialized genomics in this process, given the way genetic ancestry testing ‘has its foundations in the very racial science it is used to overturn and … its claims to scientific credibility are thin?’” (Nelson, “The Social Life of DNA: Racial Reconciliation and Institutional Morality after the Genome” 18).

Were they that thin?, Kiara wondered. It seemed that her test was accurate, at least in the fact that she had been connected to a dozen DNA relatives on the site. That had been a shock, but it was also exciting. After sending a few messages, she was waiting to hear back to see if anyone knew something about who her grandfather could be. It seemed like the test was pretty accurate if it could tell her about these relatives she hadn’t even known about before. But the other stuff about having ancestry from China and Great Britain and Angola? There wasn’t any way to know if that stuff was true, was there? She didn’t think it was 100%, but she’d ‘rather have a clue on something than not knowing nothing at all.’²²

Kiara left the gathering wondering how the university would even be able to tell who the descendants were. So far, she’d been unable to track down her grandfather, and it seemed like she may never know. Perhaps the university would be doing other things, like tracking down birth records, because the testing seemed like it wasn’t enough.

Relatives we never had²³

Later that evening, Kiara returned home and followed the BHU200 hashtag as protests erupted again after the listening session. On her way out, she saw paper signs that read, “The University Must Pay!” and “Black Lives Matter Now!” She was worried because police presence at the protests was increasing, according to Twitter, and her brother was there. At 11:00 pm, just as she was turning on a show to distract herself, Morgan came in. He was sweaty and out of breath as if he had run home from the campus. It wasn’t that far away, but he also had a car, so it didn’t make sense.

“Someone got arrested,” he said as a greeting, jogging to the kitchen to get a bottle of water. He threw his backpack on the ground by the door.

“What?” Kiara said, shooting to her feet, her heart suddenly pounding. “What were you doing out there?”

“Police were everywhere and it got ugly,” he said.

“You could have been arrested! You think the police are going to care that you’re the BSU president when they’re looking at a tall Black man threatening them at night?”

“I wasn’t threatening—”

“I know that! They don’t.”

“Look, I’m Black, I’m an easy target.²⁴ I get it, but I played it safe. I’m home,” he said, taking a moment to catch his breath. “And don’t act like you’re so concerned about the police now when you went and did that test and practically gave me to them.”

“Really? This again?”

“Hey, it’s just another way for the police to track me. ‘Black people have to worry about this, you know. Black people have been set up before and can be set up again.’²⁵”

“I doubt the police need to hack 23andMe to find you when you’re making it so easy by running around campus at night in all black,” she said, gesturing at his clothes. “If you keep doing this that test won’t be the reason you’re in jail!” She hadn’t realized she was close to crying until she saw him relax, give her an easy smile, and pull her into a hug. She grimaced at how sweaty he was but hugged back anyway. She felt his heart pound through his back.

“Don’t worry” he said, pulling away. “I’ll probably stop. I’m tired of going out there all the time, and I never thought I’d have to be doing all of this.” He sat with her on the couch, while they both took a moment to calm down. “Oh, I almost forgot to tell you, they were talking today about using 23andMe, you know to track down descendants.”

“Yeah, someone mentioned that at the listening session, too. It made me think how people don’t really have a choice in being found, just like we don’t have a choice in being tracked all the time. ‘Every time you get a blood test, every time you go to the hospital, they have your DNA. They have it [and] they can do what they want.’²⁶ ‘Every drop of blood, every x-ray you take, it goes somewhere that we are not sure where it goes.’”²⁷

“It’s just inescapable, I guess,” Morgan said. “‘If the government wants it or anyone else wants it, I’m sure they already have it … I don’t have this false sense of security. I just think it’s the kind of world that we live in,’”²⁸

Kiara grabbed a blanket from behind her and bundled up. She wasn’t cold, but the thought made her shiver. Anyone could find them at any time.

“For the record, ‘I don’t trust any of the spokespeople … They can do anything they want to do with our DNA once they get it,’”²⁹ she said. “‘I know for 23andMe, I did select for them to dispose of it, but I mean, who’s there to know if they dispose of it or not? I think … I’m risking something by doing this but … the knowledge that I’m going to get is worth it.”³⁰

“It is probably worth it. I mean finding out we’re from Nigeria was pretty cool. We can finally say who we are. And we’re still waiting to hear back from those people to see if anyone has information,” Morgan said. “Look, I know I was giving you a hard time, but security-wise, we probably don’t have anything to worry about. At least not now.”

“Now?” She asked. She got an alert on her phone and opened it while he talked.

“I definitely think in the future that could change, because … the ability to make genetically specific bio-weapons and stuff like that is coming. So, if your information is out there, then they can use that to do whatever in the future. But right now, the technology isn’t there yet.”³¹ “It’s just building blocks to what’s going to change. If there’s something that will target Black people, period, it may not be my generation or my kids or their kids, but … it could be after that.”³²

“Well let’s hope this doesn’t end in bioweapons,” Kiara said, holding up her phone. “Especially because I think it worked.”

“What?”

She checked the phone again as if to reassure herself.

I just got a message from a DNA relative named Deborah, and she had some information. You remember how it said we’re probably cousins? Well, it looks like her mom and our mom were possibly half-sisters. I think they had the same dad. I think we found him.

Unfamiliar kin³³

Weeks later Kiara and her brother sat in the university courtyard in a neat row of chairs among a well-dressed crowd. Unlike the last time, Kiara was now here with her brother and there were more people in attendance. Following his near arrest, protests had tapered off when the university made stronger statements against its participation in slavery and implemented more concrete steps toward what everyone was calling “reconciliation.” The Working Group on Slavery at Bunker Hill University was presenting some of its preliminary findings at the First Meeting on Reconciliation, the gathering today. She did not recognize many of the other faces around them, not even the Black people who wore yellow lanyards stating “proud descendant of BHU200.”

Kiara felt the tag around her neck that matched theirs and her brother’s: Proud descendant of BHU200. Never had she imagined that they would be here, especially not from a 23andMe test. A month ago, they hadn’t even known who their grandfather was, let alone that his great-great-grandfather had been enslaved at the university. Now, she knew their names. Her grandfather was Percy Reid, and his great-great-grandfather, Amos Joseph, had been born into slavery and sold to the president of the university at the time. Amos Joseph had Moses Joseph who had Moses Joseph, Jr. who had Cassandra (Joseph) Smith who had Percy Smith who had their mother, Rebecca Reid. It was a new genealogy for her, with branches of a family tree she had only previously imagined. It was thrilling and terrifying to step into their new familial identity.

Somehow, she had walked the same property as Amos Joseph without ever knowing his name. She was now in the company of many families: the Josephs (the line she descended from) and the Johnsons, the Mahoneys, the Queens, the Sanders, the Roberts, and more. All of these families were scattered about, but many of the family members remained close by, like she and her brother, as if they had been tied to the area by an invisible force.

When she had set out to find her grandfather to fulfill her mom’s wishes, she couldn’t have imagined any of this would happen. Nothing prepared her for the way 23andMe would unlock an entire heritage or lock her into the controversy of her hometown and, it seemed, the nation at large. The company had promised her discovery, and she had believed that their science would fulfill her sense of identity. Yet, the company had nothing to say to her about founding out about the BHU200 or her connection to this haunted past.

She was still mourning her mother, still afraid that her data would be leaked or be used to catch a Black person who wasn’t at fault, and yet also grateful that she now had something to place her within broader history, something that connected her to her hometown in even more concrete ways. Finding her grandfather and this new family had come at a cost. She had only paid $99 for the 23andMe kit. Yet, she had also paid by facing the truth of her anti-Black country and the racist institutions it had produced. Kiara was left wondering if it was worth the price.

Long after the ceremony ended and Kiara and Morgan mingled with the other descendants and traded contact information, long after the university announced that it was granting legacy status to descendants which was commensurate with children of alumni, long after Kiara and Morgan met their cousins and half-aunt and a host of new family members, Kiara would remember the poem that a descendant had read that day. It made her thankful to be Black despite knowing what she and her family had been through. ‘If I had to die and come back,’ she thought, ‘I would still want to come back as a dark-skinned Black woman,’³⁴ because being Black meant survival, persistence, connection, and joy.

What does Black Mean?³⁵

Carrying names thru the centuries that many times don’t belong to us or our families

Considered guilty without a fair hearing

Being brainwashed into not believing in ourselves as a valuable people worthy of respect

Being looked upon as the negative standard rather than the higher standards

Constantly checking to see if “the rules” have changed

Being a people looked upon as unworthy of the best that medicine/medical care offers

Knowing you have African blood, but having no idea from where/whom

Teaching your kids that they deserve to “have it all” while gently reminding them they can lose it all in a flash!

Having a violent and racially brutal past that we didn’t choose for ourselves

Seemingly being tied to slavery standards in one or more ways thru our eternal lifetimes

Being part of a remarkable group of beings with the most loving & forgiving hearts imaginable

Having the strength & fortitude to survive the unthinkable with an attitude of grace

A people with a rich history that’s been purposefully hidden, manipulated or destroyed

Discussion

Composite counterstorytelling

This composite counterstory deconstructs GATs’ social function, illustrates how Black customers use GATs, and contextualizes GATs within micro, meso, and macro systems of racial power. Composite counterstories have roots within Critical Race Theory (CRT), a theoretical field that deconstructs racisms (Bridges 1). Although CRT began in the context of law, it has since expanded to many disciplines, including Communication. As a methodology, composite counterstorytelling involves creating characters and storylines from multiple sources of data (e.g. lived experience, participant data, and current events) to critique White supremacy. (Bell, And We Are Not Saved 13; Delgado 46). Composite characters represent broader political phenomena, such as racism and sexism (Griffin et al. 1355; Solórzano and Yosso 474). In this case, Kiara, Morgan, and other characters offer divergent perspectives about GATs and Blackness. Most prominently, the Reid siblings give voice to the participants who embrace dynamic ways of viewing Black GAT identity negotiation.

I presented the story of the Reid siblings before my methodological grounding to represent how many people encounter discourse about GATs in their daily lives—through narrative. People often hear about GATs through anecdotes in mediated and non-mediated settings. Indeed, stories play a central role in the GAT industry, which narrativizes DNA and sells stories of descent to its millions of customers. Customers then make sense of their genetic identities via intrapersonal, interpersonal, and family communication—disregarding genetic reports or weaving them into existing narratives about themselves and their families (Foeman 22; Peters 228). The dominant story within the GAT industry is that GATs are colorblind, post-racial, and non-racist products that enhance identity performance by allowing customers to know “who they are” (Putman and Cole 217). This counterstory explores how GATs do not provide conclusive answers about identity; rather, they often complicate it. At the end of the story, Kiara is left with both answers and questions about who she is.

Composite counterstorytelling functions well as a medium for this research because oral and written stories play a large role in Black cultures worldwide. Narratives—including song, storytelling, and signifying practices—remain an important vehicle for Black meaning-making, community-building, and cultural transmission, even as technologies enable new forms of communication (Gates 685; Lu and Steele 825; Madison 213). Using storytelling, scholars enrich our understanding of Black cultures, oppression, and resistance (Boylorn 1; Durham 21; Johnson 81). Based in that tradition, this counterstory narrativizes CRT and honors the diverse storied traditions of people of color by resisting White supremacy in content and form. It illustrates the everyday nature of racism that Black people experience and critiques the colorblind ideologies of biotechnology companies. In doing so, the narrative reveals how the Reid siblings—and everyday Black GAT customers—struggle for self-determination. This is vital, given that our current media and technology landscapes make it “rare” that “Blackness is represented on its own terms in its own space and by its own people” (Meyerend, 642). Here, we see how a GAT company, an educational institution, and a broader community of descendants attempt to define who the siblings are. Many forces, including technology companies, continue to vie for the power to determine Blackness and Black people.

Performing Black identity (Negotiation)

Performance illustrates the tensions inherent to the GAT industry and its claims to identity. Sikes argued that “the genome is a ‘performative’ code, one that produces the body in the very act of articulation” (164). In this view, genomic articulations produce human subjectivities. Because of this, humans can re-articulate themselves into alternate possibilities—not just genetically deterministic ones. This spectrum of identity performances is a kind of “affiliative self-fashioning” (Nelson, Bio Science 771), whereby Black GAT customers make sense of results based on several factors (e.g. race, ethnicity). Some choose total acceptance of GAT results, while others more tentatively accept results or outright reject them (Roth and Ivemark 152). In this narrative, the siblings performatively construct their sense of familial, racial, and ancestral identity. 23andMe articulates who the Reid siblings are with quantitative measures, and they construct complementary and opposing subjectivities for themselves. The genome may be an overarching performative code, but individuals have agency to perform themselves, alternatively. This has important political implications. 23andMe may present a colorblind view of genetic ancestry, but the Reid siblings understand themselves as Black racial subjects within an anti-Black world. By aligning themselves with the slavery reconciliation protests and with the descendants of enslaved people, they re-articulate their genetic selves as anti-racist selves.

The performative nature of identity is key to Black GAT negotiation. Participants in this study understood themselves as grounded by genetics but genetically determined. Genetics did shape their self-concept, but not at the expense of their existing, complex identities (e.g. ethnic ties, community belonging, family history, personal aspirations). Participants performed their identities within and around their GAT reports in a variety of ways. Some chose to dig further into their histories by beginning or extending traditional genealogical work. Some adopted new ethnic group identities, learned more about their “home” cultures, or intentionally sought out relationships with people who belonged to their “home” cultures. Others shared information with friends and family in passing or kept the information to themselves. In perhaps the most unique performance, one participant became a citizen of Sierra Leone with his AfricanAncestry test. Participants did not choose a single way to perform their identities via GATs. This tells us that although GAT companies promise to reveal identity, they do not so much give Black people identities as offer them new possibilities of articulating themselves.

Despite taking on different performances of identity, the common thread of Black GAT identity negotiation was the intentional and sustained attention to Blackness and anti-Blackness. Significantly, Black people can use GATs to engage in political activism, align themselves with anti-racist causes, and invest in Black communities. This is contradictory to the ideological underpinnings of GAT companies, which remain largely color-evasive (Annamma et al. 153). Participants frequently articulated their understanding of their genetic and familial identities by naming and critiquing racism, reckoning with the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and resisting colonization. The Reid siblings embody this approach by grappling with their lived experience, their family’s history of racist trauma, and their contemporary anti-Black landscape. They illustrate how Black GAT customers do not necessarily adopt the ideological groundings of biotechnology companies. On the contrary, they use GATs as tools to further their ideas of Black liberation.

The racialized risks and benefits of biotechnology

GATs are just one iteration of the fraught relationship between Blackness and technology. Technologies are described as “intrinsically human extension[s] of the self” (Coleman 177), or the tools that we create and apply for varying purposes (e.g. survival, entertainment, pleasure). Technologies have historically been used in ways that paradoxically re-entrench racial hierarchy and contribute to racial liberation. Cars, for example, increased the mobility of Black people in the U.S. and exposed them to the dangers of anti-Black police violence (Carbado 125). Medical technologies can save lives but also treat Black people’s bodies as divergent from the White norm (Benjamin 49). Because Black people were historically considered to be property (Harris 276), Black people were made into tools to further White, Western empires. In this way, we can conceptualize race as a technology, itself—one that is used to manage, hierarchize, and oppress humans (Coleman 177). Yet, as Wendy Chun argues, race might be a technology that can engender “new modes of agency and causality” For participants, these connections were clear. Unprompted, many discussed GATs in relation to the surveillance risk of other everyday technologies (e.g. computers, cameras, robots, artificial intelligence). Despite these connections, they viewed GATs as potentially liberatory tools that could help them reconcile with their pasts.

GATs make visible the existing tensions between race and technology. And as biotechnology, they also exacerbate the enduring relationship between science and race. Via CRT’s assertion that racism is endemic to every facet of social life (Bridges 37), I argue that GATs are not simply neutral tools. They are entangled within the racist institutions in which they are made and circulate (e.g. education, medicine, law enforcement). GATs discursively reinforce Blackness as a biological concept (Peters 225), which has historically been used to construct racism and justify Black oppression. Biotechnologies are also used within law, to apprehend suspects, implicating them within the anti-Black systems that disproportionately punish and psychologically harm Black people (Hawkins 1116). When biotechnologies are used in medicine, they become implicated within the systems that already devalue Black life. In this way, GATs are proliferated within and by the very systems that oppress Black people. And in doing so, they can contribute to racist harm. Overall, participants exhibited a keen awareness of these risks when taking GATs. They wondered how their biogenetic data might be used in nefarious ways (e.g. unconsented medical use and police investigations). The Reid siblings exemplify how Black GAT customers often engage in interpersonal and family communication to consider the risks of being Black GAT customers.

Morgan and Kiara’s divergent perspectives represent the participants’ spectrum of belief concerning anti-Black surveillance in commercialized genomics. Kiara felt that the powers-that-be could track her anyway with a combination of media and technology. She concluded that 23andMe increased risk but offered something valuable in return. Morgan similarly believed that law enforcement and other institutions might misuse his data. But he desired to keep his DNA away from the GAT company. A limitation of this study is that all participants had already taken a GAT, so they ultimately decided that the benefits outweighed the risks. Yet, they still worried about GATs’ potential to harm them and Black people in the future. As participant Hope200 said—voiced by Morgan’s character—GATs are “building blocks” that could lead to future technologies that specifically target Black people. These fears are well-founded amid histories of racist technologies and uneasy futures in which anti-Blackness is re-coded and perpetuated through artificial intelligence, algorithmic discrimination, and other technological innovations (Benjamin 5; Noble 15). Ultimately, GATs exposed participants and their biological relatives to increased racist surveillance. In return, they received new ways of performing themselves and relating to the Black diaspora.

Conclusion

The experience of Black GAT customers contradicts the GAT industry’s dominant ideology of colorblindness (Chow-White 81). Black GAT identity negotiation is often a color-conscious struggle to articulate identity via multiple, simultaneous channels (e.g. genetic reports, lived experience, familial and ancestral knowledge) that may contradict or complement one another. And each of these channels requires reckoning with how Black identities—both individual and collective—are shaped by White supremacy and anti-Blackness. Although GATs expose Black people to increased racialized surveillance, they also create new opportunities for performing the racialized self. This counterstory has shown that Black people can create new narratives of themselves and their families in ways that converge with and diverge from GAT companies’ articulations of them.

It remains worth questioning how Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color can not only use biotechnology but also relate to biotechnology in ways that generate new performances of being. As Indigenous scholars have argued, it is necessary to re-shape our orientation toward technologies to create respect and reciprocity within human and nonhuman relationships (Lewis, et al.). We must continue interrogating how we relate to biotechnologies, how commercialized genomics industries shape us, and how we shape them.