How DNA and 'recreational genealogy' is making a case for reparations for slavery
By Steven W. Thrasher,
The Guardian
| 02. 03. 2016
Untitled Document
More than a decade in the writing, scholar Alondra Nelson’s new book The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations and Reconciliation After the Genome has been published at an appropriate moment. Through DNA, the book examines the construction of race in the contemporary United States and offers new ways to think about it, from the kind of “post-racial” social construction of blackness in Rachel Dolezal to the essentialist, biologically determined (and intellectually inferior) notion of blackness promulgated by Justice Antonin Scalia of the supreme court.
In an interview at Columbia University, where she’s dean of social science, Nelson described DNA as containing a social power as well as a biological one.
“We think it offers a lot of answers on things that ail us,” Nelson said. She wanted to expand the kinds of problems DNA could answer beyond those of individual health or biology to include “social and political problems, which have their historical roots in slavery”.
That may seem like a broad statement, and Nelson understands that some may doubt her. She herself admits that she only...
Related Articles
By Yelena Biberman and Jonathan D. Moreno, Bioethics Forum | 04.16.2024
A quiet biological revolution in warfare is underway. The genome is emerging as a new domain of conflict. The level of destruction that only nuclear weapons could previously achieve is fast becoming as accessible as a cyberattack.
Now for the...
By Jorge Barrera and Rachel Houlihan, CBC | 04.09.2024
A Canadian DNA laboratory knowingly delivered prenatal paternity test results that routinely identified the wrong biological fathers — ruling out the real dads — and left a trail of shattered lives around the globe, a CBC News investigation has found...
By Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres, First Monday | 04.14.2024
The stated goal of many organizations in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) is to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), an imagined system with more intelligence than anything we have ever seen. Without seriously questioning whether such a system can...
By Carey Gillan, UnSpun | 03.18.2024
A Mexican standoff with the United States turned into a Mexican smack-down this month with the release of Mexico’s formal rebuttal to US efforts to overturn limits Mexico has ordered on the use of genetically modified (GM) corn and the...