The Personal and Public Meaning of Biological Roots

THE SOCIAL LIFE OF DNA: RACE, REPARATIONS AND RECONCILIATION AFTER THE GENOME By Alondra Nelson

Boston, MA: Beacon Press 218 pp.; $27.95 ISBN: 978-080703301-2

In the past decade, human DNA has become central to discussions of both personal medicine and public health. At the individual level, your DNA might help your physician to recommend “the right drug at the right dose to the right patient.”^1(p795) At the public level, the analogue would be “providing the right intervention to the right population at the right time.”^2(p398) The overwhelming majority of research studies that attempt to relate DNA to individual or public health have used individuals of European ancestry; studies of US minority populations, African American, Hispanic, or Native American, for example, are far fewer in number and scope.³

The focus of Alondra Nelson’s The Social Life of DNA is not on the association between DNA and health. The book is about a second, nonmedical, use of DNA, namely the tracing of individual ancestry, and the focus is exclusively on African Americans. Nelson uses the results of ancestry testing received by African Americans, some famous and others not, as a scaffold on which to build social structures within which individuals’ relationships to Africa are central.

GENETICALLY ELUSIVE RACE

The subtitle of The Social Life of DNA is Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation After the Genome. The exclusive focus on African Americans, however, precludes any detailed analysis of how DNA relates to race. There is plenty of material on racism as well as slavery and segregation after death, including discussion of the African Burial Ground in Manhattan and the huge companies that profited by insuring the lives of their slaves for slave owners.

The material that speaks directly to the issue of DNA and race can be found on pages 73–76, 108–109, and 150–151. On pages 73–76, Nelson describes two types of genetic ancestry analysis, one on the basis of autosomal DNA polymorphisms and the other on uniparentally inherited DNA: mitochondrial DNA, which is maternally transmitted, and Y-chromosomal DNA, which is transmitted from father to son. The statistical analyses of these two kinds of data are different and are designed for different purposes.

Following the pioneering 2000 work of Pritchard et al., autosomal polymorphisms have been used to estimate fractions of ancestry that an individual shares with people in a preselected number of ancestral groups. For example, the Uyghur people of Xinjiang province in China share ancestry with East Asians, Pakistanis, and Europeans.⁴ Statistical methods that differ from those of Pritchard et al. have been developed over the past 15 years; the resulting ancestry profiles do not differ qualitatively. As part of their service, companies such as 23andMe, Ancestry.com, and African Ancestry provide customers with test results that comprise fractions of their ancestries that are shared with major regional, social, or ethnic groups. Nelson describes these analyses as “racial composite testing.”^(p75)

The Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) has enabled the analysis of autosomal DNA of people from five continents. Nelson claims, erroneously, that HGDP “was premised on the belief that there were genetically isolated and distinct racial and ethnic groups to which researchers should attend.”^(p109) However, in the first analysis of HGDP data, the word “race” does not appear, and it was later found that only 3.7% of the variance could be attributed to geographic regions, commonly called “races.” The conclusion from the analysis of HGDP data is important: “The primary goals for studies of genetic variation in humans are to make inference about human evolutionary history, human biology, and the genetic causes of disease.”^5(p669) In light of these analyses, the statement Nelson quotes of Michael Blakey, who was in charge of the African Burial Ground project at Howard University in the early 1990s, is remarkably prescient: “The study of specific population affinities is more important and accurate than gross racial classification.”^(p50)

MATERNAL AND PATERNAL ANCESTRIES

Autosomal DNA is not what this book is about. Nelson’s focus is on mitochondrial DNA, which consists of about 16 500 base pairs and is transmitted only from mother to child, and Y-chromosomal DNA, which contains some 59 million base pairs and is transmitted only from father to son. Many African Americans pay the company African Ancestry to provide information on their maternal and paternal ancestries in Africa. Nelson calls these “ethnic lineage testing,” and throughout the book she describes reactions of individuals to the results of the tests, namely which ethnic groups in Africa share the customer’s mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosomal DNA.

The founders of African Ancestry, Rick Kittles, now chief scientific officer and associate professor in the University of Arizona’s College of Medicine, and the chief executive officer, Gina Paige, are in some sense the heroes of the book. Kittles’s early career at Howard University, the formation of African Ancestry, and his role in spreading the word about historical injustice deriving from slavery are extensively documented. Nelson describes her own reaction to the results of her ancestry tests and how other African Americans whom she met at different venues reacted to their test results, some with excitement and others with caution and a desire for more information.

Although there is no detailed analysis of the statistical validity of the analyses sold by African Ancestry, Nelson does report claims that the reference set of African ethnic groups is far too limited to do a reliable assessment of ethnicity using either Matriclan or Patriclan (African Ancestry’s names for the mitochondrial and Y-chromosomal tests, respectively). Nevertheless, Nelson accepts that “by linking Blacks to inferred ethnic communities and nation-states of Africa, African Ancestry’s service offers root-seekers the possibility of constituting new forms of identification and affiliation.”^(p76)

ROOTS

Ethnic lineage testing is juxtaposed with the kind of anecdotal, biographical information on individual African origins that Alex Haley’s book and the TV program Roots popularized among African Americans. Nelson ably describes the way that DNA testing appears to provide a firmer, more scientific basis to the search for African ancestry than can be possible for genealogies that were lost or destroyed as a consequence of the barbarity of slavery. She writes, “Genetic genealogy testing, which is now broadly available and also less taxing—and, owing to the social power of DNA, seemingly more authoritative—than conventional Haley-esque genealogical research, holds considerable appeal for many root seekers.”^(p73)

Nelson goes further by ascribing grand social motives behind individual’s ancestry testing: “The popularity of DNA testing is a symptom of ‘Roots’ unfulfilled promise, and it should therefore come as no surprise that it is sought to balance the ledger of a racial economy of inequality.”^(p73)

RECONCILIATION

Nelson’s style, although conversational, in the style of book-writing journalists, is also scientifically educational in its description of genetic genealogy testing. Genomics of the African diaspora, although neglected in the scientific literature to date, is beginning to receive the attention it deserves,^6,7 This book should encourage more scientists and more African Americans to become interested in the genetic legacy of slavery.

Among the most interesting passages in the book are the detailed descriptions of public and private reactions of African Ancestry’s customers to their test results. For example, the actor Isaiah Washington received his results on stage at the Magic Johnson Theater in Los Angeles, where he was told that his mitochondrial DNA shared common ancestry with people in today’s Sierra Leone. (Indeed, many of African Ancestry’s customers’ mitochondrial DNAs are reported as sharing ancestry in Sierra Leone.)

This is where an important aspect of the DNA’s social life emerges in Nelson’s account. Washington chose to identify with Sierra Leone, even though much more of his DNA, namely his Y chromosome, was reported to share ancestry with people in today’s Angola. As a result of his chosen identification he began philanthropic work for the benefit of the people of Sierra Leone. Such responses to information about origins constitute part of what Nelson calls “reconciliation.” Reconciliation is the process of reconstructing family or community, primarily through identification with a more specific group than Africans. In addition, it can refer to consolidation of knowledge about the past or to participation in contemporary political movements, such as the slavery reparations movement. Nelson writes, “DNA analysis is today imagined as a medium through which societies can move toward truth and healing.”^(p38)

As an example of DNA’s place in the process of reconciliation, Nelson provides an excellent description of Mary-Claire King’s work with Las Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, grandmothers of children whose mothers (and fathers) disappeared or were killed during the Argentine military government’s dirty war (1976–1983) against suspected dissidents and subversives. King used mitochondrial DNA to link the grandmothers with their stolen grandchildren. Nelson writes, “Genetic ancestry testing is, in an elemental sense, always as much about the reconstruction and reunion of the family and community as it is about the individual.”^(p77)

In the case of reconciliation with Africa, mitochondrial DNA and the Y chromosome may often produce a conflict. Most of the cases described by Nelson have relied on mitochondrial DNA, even though the Y chromosome carries much more DNA. The internal history of Africa may play a role here; very often Africans of one ethnic group were enslaved by another African ethnic group before being sold to Arab or Portuguese slave merchants. This was apparently the case among the Mende and Temne people of today’s Sierra Leone; in such cases, whose Y chromosome is informative about ancestry? After all, in Australian Aborigines and many indigenous Latin American groups, the Y chromosomes are very often European, a legacy of colonization, warfare, and the murder of indigenous males.

REPARATIONS

Among the most gripping sections of Nelson’s book is that on the fight for reparations and the work of the lawyer and activist Deadria Farmer-Paellmann. Chapter 6 documents her fight for reparations on behalf of the descendants of slaves. First she attempted a class action lawsuit against slave insurance companies, which was heard in 2003 and denied 18 months later. For Nelson’s story of DNA, however, the attempt to use African Ancestry’s tests showing African ancestry in the plaintiffs is more central. The case was dismissed at the district court level because the DNA tests did not distinguish between descendants of US slaves and those of other nationalities with African heritage. The appeals court also rejected the claim for reparation, but on more technically legal grounds rather than on the value of the DNA test results.

The reparations movement, to my mind, comes closest to the book’s title. It was an attempt to use DNA for more than recreational genetics. The goal was both sociopolitical, in seeking legal acknowledgment of a historical injustice, and economic, in attempting to place a value on slave labor, a case that had been made successfully against German companies who used slave labor during World War II.

PERSONAL AND PUBLIC MEANING OF BIOLOGICAL ROOTS

The social life in the title refers to the sense of an African homeland and community engendered by shared ancestry. It refers to the public shows during which an audience can become part of an individual’s excitement on hearing about his or her African ancestry.

Finally, the shared ancestry with Africans exposes the brutal crime that slavery was, whose legacy remains in the social life of many African Americans today. Although there is no new science in this book, it provides a valuable and perhaps unique perspective on how African Americans pursue, receive, and use information on their genetics.