The Social Life Of DNA: Race, Reparations, And Reconciliation After The Genome, by Alondra Nelson

It would not be hard to think of ways for this book to be appealing to someone like me, nor to think of audiences (not made up of people like me) for whom this book would be pleasant or even insightful or enjoyable. The title of this book is highly misleading, though the subtitle makes more sense in light of the author’s intents. The author has written a book called “The” social life of DNA in which the author examines this matter solely from the point of view of African Americans. This narrow and parochial base of concerns is viewed as the center of the book’s universe, and for those who think that race is a peripheral matter in humanity and that the African American perspective is a peripheral perspective in light of the United States and the world as a whole will find this book and its tone to be somewhat puzzling, in that the author considers that the world of black celebrities and scientists is the entire world that she is interested in, more or less, and that she is interested in genetics and the popularization of genetic genealogy only to the extent that it intersects with the desire for legitimacy for activist aims or addresses the concerns of American black audiences, and to a lesser extent the audience of Africans abroad who have to deal with the desire of African Americans to reconnect with their roots (pun intended, if you know you know).

This book is between 150 and 200 pages long and is divided into nine chapters. The author begins with a preface and a somewhat lengthy introduction that describe the author’s approach to her material. First the author talks about reconciliation projects (1). Then the author talks about the ground work that went into an African-American cemetery (2) and what resulted from it. The author talks about the game changer of the understanding of genes tied directly to Africa (3) as well as the pursuit of African ancestry (4), and roots revelations that have been found through the understanding of DNA markers (5). At this point, the author then turns her attention to acts of reparation (6) as well as lawsuits seeking reparation that were properly and inevitably rejected by the courts (7). The author then discusses DNA diasporas (8) as well as racial politics after the genome (9) before ending the book with acknowledgements, notes, and an index.

When you read this book, what you get is a very strident book that presents the genuine problems that blacks have had with genetic research and scientific research in general that does not consider their own dignity or their own perspectives. The book also expresses the variety of what people within the black community want from genetic research, which ranges from a way to help them to find aspects of a past identity that are pleasing to them and help them to imagine a past that has often seemed unrecoverable. With time, and greater testing, it is possible that better answers may be found from genes, as this book was written before numerous advances in understanding the striking qualities of African DNA (including a heavy degree of admixture with a ghost hominem population that skew it away from the DNA of out-of-Africa populations), as well as the widespread understanding of autosomal DNA, as the author focuses on the earlier-explored Y-DNA and mtDNA that were easy to isolate first. In terms of its science, this book is largely obsolete, and in terms of its perspective, the book’s main faults are a title that would lead one to think its concerns are broader than they are and are somewhat misleading as a result and the book’s cynical exploitation of desires for justice as a means for extorting money from businesses as part of the corrupt grifting that is so typical of DEI efforts in the contemporary United States.