 Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you, Dr. Moses, for that introduction. It's great to be here. Thank you to the organizers for asking me to contribute to this conversation. And I wanted to particularly acknowledge before I begin, because we're talking about Ancestry, a few members of my family that are here, my sister and my brother and my niece are here. And I'm glad that they can be here with us this afternoon. Okay. So, as Dr. Moses suggested or said, I work on, I've been working about the last decade with African-American genetic genealogists, genealogists and genetic genealogists doing ethnographic fieldwork interviews and also historical research on how genetic genealogy came to matter and be an important in black communities. And the talk of, title of my talk today is the social life of DNA, which is the title of a book that I've just finished that'll be out next year. And I'll tell you a little bit about what that means. So these are some of the people that I worked with. This is a slide from my fieldwork. This is from a meeting of the Afro-American Genealogical and Historical Society of the National Meeting that took place in New England. This was about four years ago. And this is a presentation of African-American genealogists kind of in a DNA 101 presentation, learning how to think about integrating, as we're talking about today, genetic genealogy insights and the genealogical work that they do. And this gives you sort of a sense of what genealogists sort of looked like when I started my research a decade ago, tended to be a pursuit of, you know, older folks, older African-Americans among the population that I study. This is from the same fieldwork. So they're holding up nucleotides that make up DNA here and understanding how it works with their conventional genealogy. So part of what the work that I've been doing for the last decade has been about, and it's ethnographic work because it's what the work came to me, not necessarily what I thought I was going to come out with when I started the research, was to think in more complicated ways actually about the connections between genetics and identity. So I know that many of you are probably familiar with lots of television shows that have been on about genetic ancestry testing, including SkipGate series and Who Do You Think You Are, these kinds of television shows. And they give us the impression that people get genetic genealogy results, and they sort of come out of the room or the experience having thinking in a wholesale new way about who they are and what their identities are. And so that can be, as I found in my research, part of the experience of using genetic ancestry testing for African-Americans. But it's also a lot more complex. So for the population of genetic genealogists that I work with early on in my research, the research that they, the information that they retrieve, that they receive that's yielded from genetic ancestry testing companies often has to make sense with the paper record that there's been tracing. So they're hoping that there can be a match between the conventional genealogy and the genetic genealogy. Sometimes there are instances like the case study of Roy that Dr. Mountain shared with us. And sometimes, and more likely in my sample, that's not the case. And so they're kind of having to adjudicate between two different stories often or negotiate of who they are, what their identities are. And it's also the case that people are trying to make sense of their results in the context of family oral histories and things that you don't have paper trails for. The stories that we tell ourselves in each other about our people. And I've wrote a little bit about this in a 2008 article. More recently, I've been thinking and trying to make connections with younger genealogists. And you find a lot of these in part on YouTube. And these are people who are not interested in genealogy in the same way that sort of senior citizens in black communities might be. And they're more sort of public about, partly I think as a result of these television shows, part of the genetic genealogy experience for these younger African-Americans is about the actual recording and performance, both of the test taking and of the results. So this is some data, this is just a quote from someone who had put a video on YouTube and wanted to share the experience. And this again is a way I'm going to get to in a couple of slides, how the process of identification is a lot more complex than taking the test and saying, oh, I'm now, we'll use the contested Bama Lake A category for the rest of the afternoon. So this person says, I just wanted to take you all through the steps of me doing my paternal African roots. I'm going to send you all on a trip with me. This is a person who had just received a test kit result from a company and was going to share this with the YouTube, the social media audience. Give me questions, give me comments, share this video with your friends and family because I want y'all to do this too. So this is, I call these roots revelations videos and a book chapter I did in a book called Race After the Internet that came out about a year ago. And this is one example. This is actually a customer of Rick's African ancestry test, a woman who goes for moniker's jasmine canik on YouTube. So she's holding here a certificate of ancestry. You don't have a point. I don't know if you can see on the left. And she has here a map of the continent of Africa sort of giving her an indication. I believe she traced to Cameroon, actually, if I'm recalling correctly. So this is just a screenshot of that experience. And as you can tell, this is the kind of image that we're used to, that kind of a static moment of finding out kind of who you are. But it's very interesting. I mean, I don't have the video to show you, and I don't have time to show it to you, but part of the conversation that she's having as a friend is filming her during the course of this kind of revelatory ecstatic moment. She calls her grandmother and the south and she says, grandmother, you know, grandma, we're from Cameroon. Her grandma says no, we're from South Carolina. So it's true that you buy genetic ancestry tests and we can, as Dr. Kittles was saying earlier, can do with that information that we want and we can assume and take on that information as we want to. But we also have a kind of an accountability and responsibility to people in our communities who might mirror back to us other ways of thinking about our identities. And here's another case in point. This is a gentleman who uses the moniker Yini. He used African Ancestries testing and was very kind of self black identified. So those of you who know the kind of social media landscape in YouTube know that people will use tags often to create kind of smaller communities within YouTube. And so he was very much identified in his tagging community as a kind of pan-Africanist very sort of afro-centric person. So he finds out here and there's some conversations and meetings that we had earlier in the week. Rick Dr. Kittles used the phrase, you know, the ways in which the kind of trauma, historical trauma of slavery can be personalized. And this is a case with Yemi. I'm not surprised. So Yemi shows both when he gets, when he's making the decision and there's three videos. Him making the decision to get the test results, him actually swabbing his cheek and sending the test results in. And then this is the one of his reactions. I'm not surprised. I'm not shocked to get any results. I pretty much know my makeup already. I'm very proud to know what I am. So he tested on the YD chromosome, YDNA. I'm European and proud of it. So all the Europeans out there and my Europeans in YouTube land, I'll check you out later, right? So we think he's happy with this and then he says peace black power. So it doesn't take a kind of deep discourse analysis to understand that there's some kind of discomfort with the identity that he thought he had and sort of part of the identity that had been provided to him. So part of what the case for Yemi that's interesting and part of how these results get negotiated and navigated is that in the social media landscape we get to see in a very concentrated way the way that social interactions and our accountability and relationships with other people play a large part and how we interpret our genetic ancestry results. So in the case of Yemi, the results, the responses from the social media community ranged from it's okay, you still look black, you're still a black person, to lots of African-Americans have European ancestry, right? To I'm really sorry, like expression sentiment of condolences. Like I'm really sorry that you have a pan-African identity and that you found out that you have European identity and then moreover and increasingly the case with these videos that I call Roots Revelations, you have people who claim to be citizens of the continent of Africa or who are living in the United States from the African diaspora who say well you're not African, right? So to be Yoruba to be Bama Lake means that you live this way in the world, you do these things, you have these food ways, these kinds of ways of being in the world. So there's a lot of sort of interaction around the results that have been going on people's results that are more than just like oh you have this result and there you go in your world. So as I said my work has been to complicate this sort of relationship of genetics and identity and I've been trying to do this conceptually in my book with a concept or an idea that I call the social life of DNA and short here I'll say today that it's trying to look at the way that DNA kind of moves particularly ideas about ancestry move through various domains, right? So that genetic ideas about genetic ancestry testing if not the precise exact technologies we'll find them in familial searching which is increasing in forensic science circles, right? We find it similarly with linkages with health, this is just from 23andMe website so your health reports and your ancestry reports bundled together and using sometimes some of the same data to make claims, right? So this is ancestry DNA moving in different social domains that we might think about separately as the way that we think about forensic DNA medical DNA, ancestry DNA. And as I'll talk a little bit later and this will be the comprised most of the rest of my conversation, it's also moving around in these interesting black political culture, black projects of political culture. And this is the last slide, the slide here is the front page of a reparations, slavery reparations case that started in the US courts in 2002 that I'll say a little bit more about. So I think increasingly that if we want to understand ancestry testing and its roles that it plays an identity, we need to understand this sort of the full field in which it does its work. We need to understand particularly if we're thinking about African Americans who historically and in the contemporary are both more vulnerable to the sort of bad elements of medical research and the history of genetic research and eugenics and these sorts of things and also have probably potentially more to gain by the benefits of these new technologies, who are communities who are both disproportionately incarcerated and disproportionately exonerated using sometimes DNA technology who stand to benefit from health disparities research and who potentially stand to benefit from finally receiving reparations for the unpaid labor of our ancestors. So part of how I came to as I was doing my research lots of the people I interviewed because I was interested in black genealogists and preponderance of them used at least for one of the tests they did, Rick Kittle's African ancestry service. So a lot of my work over the last ten years has been popping up at lectures that Rick gives like this, like sort of being in the back of the audience and sort of following him around and also tracing his test and his consumers. So one of the things that the consumers would say to me when root seekers would say to me when they would say how did you hear about this testing, it became the case increasingly that people would talk to me about social and political projects. So people would say, I think increasingly now they might say they saw one of Skip Gates' shows for example, but six or seven years ago they would say, well I heard that Kittle's was doing this work with Dr. Blakey at the African burial ground and that some of this research came out of that research project. Or I heard that friend of mine who's an activist in reparations politics told me that these tests popped up in this reparations class action suit and so then I went to look in to doing my ancestry testing so that one of, for African Americans, there's a kind of political avenue or threshold into thinking about these tests as well. So I'm just going to give you two examples of how I've been tracing this social life of DNA beyond the ways that we think of identity and genetics together. And I have to just go through this fairly quickly. So in 2002, a Brooklyn based activist named Deidre Farmer Pailman starts a class action suit. She files a class action suit against Fleet Boston and other multinational corporations that were known or suggested to have ties to the transatlantic slave trade and still existed today. And to continue on this generation's old pursuit in black communities to get reparations for slavery that go from the 40 acres and a couple that were promised to freed people after the end of the Civil War to more recent attempts by Representative John Conyers who almost every year introduces a bill for reparations and to the House of Representatives that doesn't really go anywhere. So that's her with one of her attorneys. Notably, one of the attorneys on her team was an attorney who was able to get reparations for the Holocaust from Swiss banks. So she was using that kind of legal strategy to think about reparations so moving quickly ahead. So the court, there's a couple of dismissals. January 2004 dismissal basically says to Pailman Farmer Pailman and the seven other people who are part of this class action suit that they don't have standing. They're not the injured parties. They can't show that they are the specific people who have specific ancestors that were either insured by Lloyds of London or were brought to, made to travel across the United States on CSX trains and these sorts of things. So in response to this so the judge, Norgall, the appellate court judge says that they can't just merely allege that they have some genealogical relationship and this is in the appellate finding. So Farmer Pailman and the other plaintiffs in the class go to Dr. Kittles and he provides them with ancestry genetic ancestry tests from his company and they enter this as evidence and as far as I can tell it's the first time that genetic ancestry testing has been introduced as evidence in a civil tort case not like a paternity case or something like that but a civil tort case. So in the end and there's a 2005 dismissal that swiftly comes less than a year later that says that DNA testing alone is insufficient to provide a decisive link to a homeland. So on the one hand the case has kind of been installed since then because they don't have another strategy or they haven't tried to bring forward another strategy. But what's interesting I think for our conversation today is the ways in which these ancestry tests travel far beyond our personal or individual or even narcissistic concerns with individual or even family ancestry or family identification and link to these larger kind of world historical political problems or political unresolved political issues around the history of racial slavery. So another quick example so moving on these tests also have come to play an important new role in pan-African or trans-African politics in the US this is from some field work I did actually I popped up in Rick's life again at an event in Atlanta about four years ago that was held by the Leon Sullivan Foundation so this is Leon Sullivan who was a Philadelphia based civil rights era a little bit older than Dr. King and the like and he was a leader but part of the work that he imagined himself doing he's holding a passport here was always trying to link African Americans and continental Africans typically elites African elites African American elites so this is a quote at the bottom from he writes two autobiographies or two memoirs so he said that and he has a kind of prophetic calling he says to make a to make a link to build a bridge between people of African heritage in the Americas and in the continent of Africa so you'll see here I don't have a pointer but you'll see part of the logo here for the Leon Sullivan summit which are these pan-African conversations is they're kind of just two land masses in the world right there's the United States in Africa and a bridge between the two so there's all sorts of critical things we can say about that but I think it's very symbolic of the work that they think that they're trying to do so typically this kind of politics that goes back to you know the when Africans were first bought brought to the U.S. right this kind of politics and a kind of affiliation and a record feeling of kinship with Africa our African heritage was accomplished through politics through religion through just a shared sense of heritage but in this 2008 summit they the delegates to the summit passed a resolution that says that they want to encourage African Americans to get genetic ancestry testing and then based on the nation states or the ethnic groups to which they're matched to do targeted sort of philanthropy and socio and economic development projects on the continent of Africa right so the bridge the link the dream that Sullivan has is manifest after his death in his organization through a kind of genetic linkage right the bridge becomes a devil helix stair linking Africa and the diaspora and you can see here that African ancestry is the partner in this work so part of what they hope to what they're trying to partly manifest in this work is and it's happening also in some African embassies and I don't know if Carlos is Dr. Bustamante is here but he was talking about the state of Gabon who Rick's company I think has worked with that embassy as well interested in sort of drawing these linkages partly for just very commercial interest right to increase the traffic of African American tourists who to travel to these places but there's also a continuation of a larger political legacy and a larger political struggle around returning people of the diaspora to their African home the home that we lost that we know don't know as much as we should about our homes there this work has been what we might think about as a kind of new DNA citizenship or kind of new pan Africanism based on genetic ancestry testing so if we think about the Leon Sullivan image that I showed you where there are people like WB Du Bois it had been sort of figures in black arts and letters who had had both titular and sort of the various ties to African countries we can think about Du Bois and Ghana but more recently Africa the DNA tie can this is Isaiah Washington can allow a closer link so Sierra Leone Isaiah Washington was also a customer of African ancestry and was traced on his maternal lineage to the mitochondrial DNA to Sierra Leone and I think it's always been the case that prominent people could sort of be more cosmopolitan with regards to their citizenship and their mobility but I think we need to understand that the DNA had some role in some bearing and Isaiah Washington being as far as I know the first person to get joint dual citizenship based on genetic ancestry testing and so this is taken in Atlanta in about 2008 and Isaiah pulled out his passport and showed it to me so he carries it in his breast pocket there's no reason why someone would need a Sierra Leone passport in Atlanta but you know I think for him it's kind of like carrying you know his freedom papers right the sort of sense that he has another place that he's from and you know Isaiah obviously has had a very complicated public relations legacy over the last few years so part of what this accomplishes for him is also to redirect attention and kind of assuage some of the accusations of homophobia that he's had to face so just to wrap up I just want to suggest to you that the relationship between genetics and identity is more complicated in that even when we're thinking about just individual identity that the ways that people render their identity drawing on genetic ancestry test results are far more complicated and have to do what other people think about the results the accountability to people and their families other test results other companies they might have used and what they know through maybe conventional testing sources within the case of African Americans I think it has everything to do as well with the ways in which our communities are still trying to come to terms with and find answers for some of the our questions around ancestry and the slave trade and so that the social life of DNA and the way that DNA kind of circulates in these various fields from forensics which is you know complicated and shows the problems for some African Americans to genetic ancestry testing is one way of thinking about this so lastly just again the reparation slide this is the bottom slide is from a genealogy convention with a genetic genealogist and colonial costume talking to a young African American genealogist Jamie Wilson from the University of Massachusetts who's involved in the Roots for Real project which I don't know if it's still really running but it was a project that for a time tested without a fee African Americans and tried to find their roots to Africa and this last project is from some of my field work in South Carolina and I think it's a poignant kind of instantiation of the politics around identity that's happening after genetic ancestry testing so I don't have a pointer here but the three peoples whose hands were meeting in the middle there was Isaiah Washington who was at a ceremony that was meant to commemorate people who Carolina lowlands people who had come from the African continent and who had lost their lives either in the journey or who had become who were enslaved in the Carolinas and this is on the banks of the Ashley River so Isaiah Washington is here representing a category of people he calls DNA Sierra Leoneans the woman and the purple sweater is from the polite family which is an African American family that's been able to trace their history through slave manifest directly from the Carolinas to Sierra Leone that's that actual link that doesn't need rice cultivation that's a paper trail from the US to Africa and the third gentleman in the purple is a gentleman named Amadou Masali who is a Sierra Leonean immigrant who lives in Dallas, Texas and who had come to the bank of the Ashley River on that afternoon to sort of officiate the sort of coming home of the souls of the ancestors both to the shore of the Carolinas on that day. Thank you.