Genetic Racialization: Ancestry Tests and the Reification of Race

Abstract

While there has been a significant increase in the availability of DNA testing to identify one’s ancestry, we know little about the implications of these services for everyday social meanings of race and ethnicity. Scholarship about ancestry testing generally focuses on the significance of DNA testing for individual consumers who lack access to genealogical history, often due to systemic racism and inequality. Drawing on an analysis of over 400 videos uploaded by people who have utilized DNA testing kits to uncover their ancestry, this article focuses on how ancestry testing is mediated in the public sphere and its implications for social understandings of race and ethnicity. We find that consumers of DNA-based ancestry testing engage in what we term “genetic racialization,” in which they emphasize the primacy of science to uncover their ancestral connections, and, by extension, biologize notions of race and ethnicity and omit histories of colonialism and conquest in the social construction of race. The vocabulary of “blood” provides a key framework from which individuals interpret their ancestry results and implicitly draw on colonial frameworks of blood quantum and purity to define what it means to belong to particular racial and ethnic groups.