Abstract
In the third season of the critically acclaimed surrealist TV drama series Atlanta, which offers social commentary on African American life in the eponymous city, a White-passing teen called Aaron, with an African American father, decides to audition for a scholarship to gain entry into his dream university, Arizona State. The catch? The scholarship is only available to Black people, so Aaron must perform his Blackness to a panel who judge its authenticity through a series of tests: he’s demanded to dance, make a beat with a pencil and table, and name suitable mixers for Hennessy. Ultimately, with his fair skin and floppy hair, and his inability to persuade the gatekeepers of his Blackness, Aaron is handed down the verdict of ‘White’ and is denied the opportunity of further education.
Whilst this scene may seem farcical, it is not so far from reality. In the opening chapter of her book, Abel traces the history of affirmative action in Brazil, which she presents as the fruit of sociologist-turned-president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who became the first head of state to officially acknowledge persistent racial discrimination in the country and the need for policy reform and creation in the 1990s. Affirmative action initiatives took off in the noughties, especially within the realm of higher education where public universities adopted racial quotas to reserve places for people of African descent. Much like in Atlanta, universities’ strategies to define the eligibility criteria have been confounded as they grapple with the complexities of separating those of African descent from White people in a country where White and Black people have ‘mixed’ ever since the arrival of enslaved people in the sixteenth century. Abel describes the peculiarity of the University of Brasilia’s chosen method – a panel consisting of a student, a sociologist, an anthropologist and three Black movement activists decided whether applicants qualified as Black based on photos taken in a controlled environment. The results were fitting: the panel determined that of a set of identical twins, one was Black and the other was White.
Could the burgeoning DNA ancestry testing industry provide a remedy to the enduring under-representation of people of African descent in university? Abel not only contends with the layered anti-racist potentialities of this evolving technology in the realm of education, but also in relation to reparations for slavery and Black consciousness in her debut book Permanent Markers. Abel’s research is situated in Brazil and the United States; two countries indelibly marked by the masses of slaves transported to them, yet distinguished in their racial trajectories. Whilst persistent miscegenation in Brazil birthed generations of multiracial individuals and a complete spectrum of racial classifications, in turn producing a myth of racial democracy, in the United States, despite White slave-owners forcing themselves upon Black women slaves producing multitudes of mixed-race ‘children of the plantation’, from the colonial era till the late twentieth century, miscegenation was largely discouraged, criminalised and legally prohibited. As such, ostensibly in opposition to Brazil, the United States devised the ‘one-drop’ rule which established a binary of White/Black. Nevertheless, in the contemporary context, the sands are shifting, as Brazil’s growing Black consciousness movement strives for the reclamation of Black identity, and, in the United States, ever more people are identifying as biracial or multiracial. It is into this mutable terrain that Abel enters, determined to understand the extent to which DNA ancestry can reconstruct racial politics and identities of the past, and shape those of the present and future.
Abel starts from the premise that neither race nor ethnicity are, or ever have been, scientifically hardwired into the body. Rather, she holds that whilst race is a social construct, the material consequences of structural racism over time can manifest corporeally for racialised populations. Abel’s social constructionist approach informs the central argument of her research: that ‘DNA ancestry testing should be viewed not as presenting universal truths about race and identity, but as situated information that gains different meanings through the lens of various myths of identity, and in the light of local power struggles that revolve around genealogies of violence and inequality’.
Abel makes clear that, despite the embeddedness of hermeneutics to DNA ancestry testing, it is particularly alluring to African Americans as it promises to unearth familial and ethnic histories purposefully erased in the Middle Passage by the transatlantic slave trade. Slavery marked a watershed moment in which Black people were conceived of as property, and Abel details the methods of dehumanisation inflicted upon the Black population, such as the branding of the slave company on the skin upon embarkation on slave ships; the registering of enslaved people as numbers or ‘heads’; and the imposition of Christian names on arrival to the New World. Despite the resistance of enslaved people to maintain their identities, including inscribing their ethnic affiliations corporeally, over generations these were lost. And so, African Americans today are typically unknowing of their familial and ethnic identities and where in Africa their family lineages can be traced back to, cultivating a sense of alienation and unease. The neatly packaged product of DNA ancestry testing is sold as a panacea for the fragmentation of family lines caused by slavery.
Developing on her analysis of the particular ways in which DNA ancestry testing is marketed to African Americans, Abel describes how many DNA ancestry testing companies capitalise on the desires of African Americans to know their ethnic affiliations and country of origin. Many companies have cleverly accessorised the test results with lucrative endeavours that encourage test-takers to invest in their newfound ethnic identity. She illustrates how many companies have engaged in the commodification of identities, most notably by pairing with West African travel companies to promote ‘genetic heritage travel’, an initiative endorsed by some West African governments. Other commercial partnerships encourage test-takers to follow specially curated Spotify playlists or to support their new ‘home nation’ in international competitions, underscoring how companies persuade test-takers to participate in the performance of imagined communities, in order to gain additional streams of financial revenue.
Ironically, whilst African Americans turn to DNA ancestry testing in order to uncover the complexities entangled within their histories and identities, Abel explains how the technology itself contributes to a reductionist reading of both. The genetic data held within the companies’ databases, which serves as a reference point against which to measure test-takers’ results, can range from a hundred to a thousand years old. However, this vast timescale is not communicated to the test-takers on receiving their results. Often, they are simply told their country of origin – despite the fact that the drawing of boundaries of many African nation states occurred in very recent history during the ‘Scramble for Africa’. Further, the genetic data stored within the databases is typically limited, with comparatively less reference data representative of West African populations. In these ways, DNA ancestry testing also gives rise to the erroneous idea that people of African descent, and more generally, have fixed and discrete familial, ethnic and geographic roots. Through discarding the history of human migrations and privileging the notion of roots as opposed to routes, DNA ancestry testing intentionally reifies racial essentialism.
The most engaging section of the book is without a doubt the experiment documented in Chapter four, in which the majority of test-takers were students from Brazil and the United States who react to their results and cultivate and strategise new identities. Many mixed-race Brazilians, whose results revealed a higher African ancestry than expected, experience a reckoning of their self-perception and a confrontation of their fears about identifying as Black, though eventually they often reclaim their Blackness. Meanwhile, others contemplate how to mobilise their test results in favour of affirmative action policies in higher education. In the United States, following receipt of their results, several mixed-race African Americans continued to identify as Black on account of their personal experiences, family ancestry and identity politics, subverting the popular idea that DNA ancestry testing alone can bring about a monumental shift in racial identifications.
Whilst the book purports to examine the potential of DNA ancestry testing to contribute towards anti-racism, this is ultimately an underdeveloped line of inquiry. One of the principal ways the book envisages DNA ancestry testing furthering anti-racist struggles is through the idea that the test results, in unearthing forgotten and buried Black and racialised ancestries, can force individuals to grapple with their identity in its totality and recognise that they, too, have a stake in anti-racism. However, anti-racism cannot and never will be an individual act of looking at oneself in the mirror. As Abel herself concedes, ‘Most forms of present-day racism cannot merely be “unthought”, for they are perpetuated by material inequalities with complex structural and institutional roots.’ Anti-racism must therefore address and attack the architecture of society that upholds and reproduces racism. This understanding of anti-racism naturally leads to the question: in what way, if any, can DNA ancestry testing make a dent in the structures of racism? From the analysis presented, it is unclear whether DNA ancestry testing, through ensuring affirmative action policies benefit Brazilians of African descent, could chip away at institutional racism in higher education given the inherent complications of both the tests and what constitutes as Black in Brazil. For the same reasons, we are also left in the dark about the relationship between DNA ancestry testing and reparations for slavery. Furthermore, though Abel references how individuals – no matter how they may choose to identify – are fundamentally subject to the process of racialisation on behalf of the state and its institutions, which in Brazil and the United States is directly linked to the criminalisation, intensified policing, increased incarceration and disproportionate deaths in custody of people of African descent, she does not fully elucidate the ineptitude of DNA ancestry testing to mitigate the impact of the criminal justice system on the lives of those of African descent. This could be considered a serious omission, taking into account the scale of the criminal justice system in both countries (the United States has the highest prison population in the world, with Brazil coming in third place and ranking as the country with the second highest numbers of police killings) which ensnares the lives of millions of people of African descent.
It is a shame that amongst the sea of voices of scientists, geneticists, test-takers, employees of DNA ancestry testing companies, and researchers featured throughout the book, Abel’s own voice, and thread of argument, can be difficult to locate and decipher. Likewise, the habitual use of scientific terminology such as haplotypes, Y-DNA, mtDNA, uniparental, admixture, often without definitions or an explanation of their significance, could be somewhat impenetrable for the average reader. Nevertheless, if you are primarily interested in the wide continuum of interpretations, opinions and anecdotes of the many facets of the DNA ancestry industry, this is the book for you. And if you are already versed in the relevant scientific fields, it will no doubt be a more enjoyable read. Equally, this book would be a perfectly suitable introductory read for those uninitiated in the subject of DNA ancestry testing to dip their toes into the possibilities of this nascent technology, including increased political consciousness of Black and African identity, as well as its dangers, such as its potential to reinforce scientific racism, biological citizenship and the surveillance of racialised communities.