Permanent Markers: Race, Ancestry, and the Body after the Genome

By Sarah Abel

Over the past twenty years, DNA ancestry testing has morphed from a niche market into a booming international industry that encourages members of the public to answer difficult questions about their identity by looking to the genome. At a time of intensified interest in issues of race and racism, the burgeoning influence of corporations like AncestryDNA and 23andMe has sparked debates about the commodification of identity, the antiracist potential of genetic science, and the promises and pitfalls of using DNA as a source of "objective" knowledge about the past.

This book&8239;engages these debates by looking at the ways genomic ancestry testing has been used in Brazil and the United States to address the histories and legacies of slavery, from personal genealogical projects to collective racial politics. Reckoning with the struggles of science versus capitalism, "race-blind" versus "race-positive" public policies, and identity fluidity versus embodied experiences of racism, Permanent Markers seeks to explain why societies that have broadly embraced the social construction of race continue to search for, and find, evidence that our bodies are indelibly marked by the past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Dec 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781469665160

Sarah Abel

Sarah Abel is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge's Centre of Latin American Studies.

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Cover: Permanent Markers by Sarah Abel

Permanent Markers

Permanent Markers

Race, Ancestry, and the Body after the Genome

SARAH ABEL

The University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill

This book was published with the assistance of the Lilian R. Furst Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.

© 2021 Sarah Abel

All rights reserved

Set in Charis by Westchester Publishing Services

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Abel, Sarah (Cultural anthropologist), author.

Title: Permanent markers : race, ancestry, and the body after the genome / Sarah Abel.

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press,

[2021]

| Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021046312| ISBN 9781469665146 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469665153 (paperback ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469665160 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Genetic genealogy—United States. | Genetic genealogy—Brazil. | DNA—Analysis—Social aspects. | Genomics—Social aspects. | Human genetics—Social aspects. | Identity (Psychology) | Biotechnology industries—Social aspects. | United States—Race relations—History. | Brazil—Race relations—History.

Classification: LCC CS21.3 .A24 2021 | DDC 929.1072 23/eng/20211—dc14

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021046312

Cover illustration: X-ray of wood texture © Shutterstock.com/captureandcompose; colored DNA sequencing autoradiograph by Michele Studer, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0), courtesy of Wellcome Collection.

Contents

Note on Language

Introduction

The World in Our DNA

1 Geno-Myths

2 The Geneticist’s Dilemma

3 Technologies of the Self

4 Marked Bodies

5 Essential Origins

Epilogue

Historically Modified Organisms

Acknowledgments

Appendix. Interview Methodology

Notes

References

Index

Figures

1.1 Estimate of U.S. racial mixture by W. E. B. Du Bois and students from Atlanta University

2.1 Example of personalized mtDNA ancestry results by African Ancestry

2.2 Contour maps of mtDNA L1b sub-haplogroup

2.3 Would you like to know your percentage of European, African, and Indigenous genetic ancestry?,

3.1 World’s largest genealogy chart,

3.2 Author’s DNA ancestry results by LivingDNA

3.3 Author’s DNA ancestry results by AncestryDNA

3.4 Author’s DNA ancestry results by 23andMe

3.5 Author’s DNA ancestry results by FamilyTreeDNA

Note on Language

Throughout this book, I employ various familiar anthropological terms and concepts that, in the context of the burgeoning world of DNA ancestry testing, are fast acquiring additional meanings and usages. In the interests of clarity, I have tried to reserve the use of inverted commas for new or potentially ambiguous uses of concepts. As I explore throughout the text, the terms race and ethnicity are contested categories that can take on very distinct meanings in different scientific disciplines and cultural contexts. Where they appear without inverted commas, they should usually be interpreted (unless signaled otherwise) as shorthand for the concept of race/ethnicity. Conversely, I use quotation marks to signal when they are used to convey an idea of concrete biological essences (human races, genetic ethnicities, racial mixture). The word color appears in quotation marks when it refers to the Brazilian concept cor (meaning an ensemble of racialized physical traits typically used as a basis for subjective evaluations about a person’s ancestry, social standing, attractiveness, etc.). Throughout the book, citations of Brazilian interviewees and authors appear in my own English translation; in some cases, however, Portuguese words and phrases appear in italics, either to signal that no direct equivalent exists in English or to retain a particular nuance found in the original language. With regard to the various categories (racial, ethnic, genetic) that appear throughout my work, I have generally retained the original labels and nomenclatures used by DNA testing companies, scientists, and other social actors. One exception is my decision to capitalize the racial labels Black and White in the body of the text (original typographies are maintained in citations), to underline that these terms are not merely adjectives denoting skin color but sociopolitical categories with specific histories and local meanings.

Permanent Markers

Introduction

The World in Our DNA

The camera focuses in on a young woman with a mass of curly hair. She is facing forward, her eyes downcast, gazing fixedly on something in her lap. Behind her, slightly out of focus, rows of people sit facing the camera, some leaning forward expectantly. The woman blinks, her forehead creases, her lips purse and tremble; she is holding back tears.

The image cuts to a young man already wiping a tear from his eye. He stares transfixed at a piece of paper, his mouth hanging open in awe.

Cut again, and now we see a woman whose face is suddenly transformed from a nonchalant grin to a mask of shock. An envelope lies open on the table in front of her. The scene cuts to a black screen, with the words: Would you dare to question who you really are?

These scenes began to appear on various social networking websites in June 2016. They were the product of a short film made by Danish travel company Momondo and the U.S. genetic testing company AncestryDNA. Titled The DNA Journey, it featured a group of sixty-seven people from around the world and all walks of life receiving the results of their personalized DNA ancestry tests. After discussing their own national or ethnic identity and laying bare their personal prejudices toward other nationalities, the participants were invariably shown laughing and shedding tears as their preconceptions were blown away by the diverse array of origins displayed in their DNA results. An Englishman who expressed a dislike for Germans grinned wryly as he discovered he had 5 percent German ancestry, while a Frenchwoman who was attributed zero percent French ancestry exclaimed that genetic tests should be made compulsory, because if people knew their heritage like that, who would be stupid enough to think of such a thing as a pure race? At its climax, the video showed two of the participants embracing joyfully, to the applause of the others, as they learned they were cousins. Imparting these genetic results, over and over again, were two White, bespectacled scientists whose air of benevolent authority seemed to sum up the power of genetics to reveal deep and awesome truths about human identity.

The film closed with a final uplifting message: You have more in common with the world than you think. An open world begins with an open mind.¹ To drive the point home, viewers were also invited to enter an online competition for the chance to win a DNA test and a free trip to any of the countries listed in their results. Released just three weeks before the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union, the video went viral, accumulating some 28 million views on the travel company’s Facebook page and 5 million on YouTube in its first week and gaining more than 320 million video views globally in the space of a year.² For many viewers, the film represented a ray of hope amid a rising tide of political nationalism and a growing refugee crisis—topics that dominated global headlines that summer. It also epitomized a belief that the spread of genetic knowledge has the potential to eliminate prejudice and transform human relations for the better. But is combating xenophobia and racial oppression really as simple as taking a DNA test?

Self-Discovery through the Genome

This is a book about the relationships between bodies and identities, and the collision between a century of anthropological thought about race with the arrival of consumer genomics. It follows in the wake of a long-standing body of scholarship that has sought to separate out the influence of biology and culture on human identities. According to the orthodoxy established by the UNESCO Statements on Race in the 1950s, religion, nationality, language, and ethnic affiliation are all cultural constructs: fluid, mutable, and overlapping, and by no means determined by, or even fundamentally linked to, a person’s physical features or genetic inheritance.³ While patterns of genetic variation have been found to reflect underlying biological structures—the relics of the migrations of early modern humans into different world regions—fundamentally, all living humans are understood to be members of one extended family.

The catalyst for this scientific consensus was among the darkest chapters in European history: the imprisonment, forced sterilization, and mass murder of groups designated racially impure or asocial by the Nazi and other racial-supremacist regimes during the Second World War. These extreme and lethal attempts to eugenically purify national bodies of their dysgenic components rested on a noxious brand of biological determinism that the UNESCO scientists sought to short-circuit, once and for all. Their objective was ambitious. By separating the biological facts from the social fictions about human difference, they aimed to foster a world free of the scourge of racism. The influence of this international effort has been far-reaching, and today the adage that there is only one race: the human race passes for common sense in many parts of the world.

Yet in the decades since the 1950s, scientists have significantly expanded their technical capacities to study life on a molecular scale. As the ability to monitor and map human genetic material has flourished, the symbolic power attributed to genetics as a source of profound knowledge about human origins has grown and grown. The sequencing of the human genome in the early 2000s marked a watershed. At that time, scientists from the Human Genome Project (HGP) made the pronouncement that in genetic terms, all human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9 percent the same⁴—once more emphasizing the fundamental disjunction between biological and social conceptions of difference. But the two decades that followed the decoding of the human genome have seen a proliferation of research into the proportion of the genome that encodes humankind’s genetic diversity.⁵ In academic circles, this has injected new life into debates over the capacity of genomics to revolutionize our understanding of human diversity versus its potential to geneticize existing concepts of race, ethnicity, and kinship. Among the general public, this potential has taken concrete form in the personal genomics industry.

For many people, taking a DNA ancestry test offers the first inroad to a new kind of self-discovery. Since their emergence in the early 2000s, direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic ancestry-testing companies have encouraged clients to treat their genome as a source of profound and intimate self-knowledge, presenting DNA as an umbilical cord, linking the individual to the deep history of our species.⁶ Originally dismissed by critics as faddish and pseudo-scientific, the DNA ancestry-testing market has since grown into a global multimillion-dollar industry that caters to customers’ desires to discover their unique ethnic mix and genetic health predispositions and reconnect with lost relatives through the most basic aspect of their biology: their DNA. At the time of writing, it is estimated that more than 30 million commercial DNA ancestry-testing kits have been processed by companies worldwide.⁷

In public discourse, DNA ancestry tests are ascribed a dual function: the ability to challenge chauvinistic conceptions of identity and ethnic or racial prejudices while making visible the biological connections between us to demonstrate, truly, that we are all related. The online reactions of viewers of the Momondo video, written in several languages on the company’s Facebook page in June 2016, reflected some of these ideas. While the video made no mention of race or racism, instead revolving around national identities and prejudices, the concept of race dominated in the comments. For instance, a British man wrote: Race is an idea, a social construct based on appearance, tradition and prejudice—it has almost no scientific meaning at all.… Our differences are utterly superficial, while a Brazilian woman stated, If everyone knew their genetic inheritance, the number of Aryan idiots would fall right down.

Yet other interpretations abound. A man from the United States commented on the video, seeing it as offering proof of the biological bases of human races: "Race was not a social construct or created by men, but it was created.… Pursuit of resources, geography, and climate naturally selected the five groups or races from which all of us descend.… But I did chuckle a bit when the English fellow was surprised that he was

[5]

percent German. The modern English are of course descended from the Germanic tribe called the Angles. Some viewers with a background in genetics applauded the film’s message but disagreed with its portrayal of the relationship between genetic inheritance and identity: A DNA test can’t tell us that we’re ‘X% Portuguese or Chinese.’ What it can tell is that ‘X% of the Portuguese (or Chinese or whatever) have this or that haplotype in common with you.’ Some scoffed at the emotions presented in the video, pointing out that the participants had to be actors. Commentators from France, where commercial DNA ancestry testing is prohibited, were largely skeptical of the whole affair. One wrote, Without any explanation this is meaningless.… How are they giving nationalities as percentages? What genes are they looking at? while another exclaimed, Someone reassure me, tell me I’m not the only one who is profoundly shocked by the idea of giving your DNA to an American company who will determine the percentage of Jewish race in your genes and keep the sample indefinitely to do whatever they like with?"⁸

As these comments show, the tantalizing thought that our DNA holds the key to our identity inevitably gives way to a series of more troubling questions. Is it racist for companies to provide estimates of their customers’ Jewish—or for that matter, sub-Saharan African or Native American—genomic ancestry? Can a DNA test really tell us we are 5 percent German, and if so what does that mean? Are DNA ancestry tests the final proof of the inexistence of biological races, or precisely the opposite? Such questions are habitually raised in connection with genomic ancestry testing, and in turn they echo broader debates about the impact of genomics on scientific and lay understandings of the relationships between bodies and identities. At the heart of this dilemma lies the long shadow cast by the worst excesses of scientific racism, weighed against the strategic reinvigoration of racial and ethnic categories in recent decades as a means of combating the structural inequalities caused by racism.

To find a way through these debates, this book presents the first comparative study of how DNA ancestry data and technologies have been mobilized in connection with the histories and legacies of transatlantic slavery in the United States and Brazil and the local responses and international reverberations these initiatives have provoked. One advantage of this comparative approach is that it allows me to show that genomic data are necessarily read in the light of various cultural and political discourses about race, ancestry, and identity, meaning that they can never be regarded as universal or unambiguous in their scope and meaning. In both countries, we encounter strong desires to incorporate DNA ancestry data into personal identities as a way to abolish, blur, or reimagine the contours of ethnoracial categories. These efforts, however, are always in tension with local embodied experiences of race and racism—hinting that these are resilient, structural phenomena that cannot simply be undone by a strong dose of genetic logic. My analysis of how DNA ancestry data are constructed in academic and commercial labs, meanwhile, calls into question whether these enterprises are really engaged in producing alternatives to conventional forms of race- and ethnicity-based thinking as much as finding ways to reproduce conventional conceptions of ancestry through genetics. A more fundamental question I pose is whether transforming our identities is necessary or desirable for combating racism and deconstructing modes of race-thinking. In this respect, the final chapters of this book examine the potential of DNA ancestry tests as a tool for recuperating ancestral identities obscured by historical trauma. Overall, rather than offering emancipation from outdated racial myths, I propose that DNA ancestry tests act as a constant reminder of the ways that we continue to be marked, as individuals and societies, by the oppositional identities produced by slavery and colonialism.

Science and the (Re)making of Race

Since its genesis in the early 2000s, the DNA ancestry-testing market has been criticized by geneticists and social scientists alike, in large part because of how companies encourage clients to use their genetic data to inform and shape their personal identities, a tendency that is seen by many as violating the consensus of the nature/culture divide. Yet, while some geneticists attempt to draw a distinction between their own scientific work and the commercial activities of DNA ancestry-testing companies, the scrutiny of social scientists has also brought up uncomfortable questions about how race is dealt with in mainstream contemporary genomic research.

The theories and data produced by modern population genetics were significant for the reconfiguration of race as a biological concept in the wake of the Second World War.⁹ The field’s pioneers proposed a new definition of races as genetically open systems that overlapped and changed over time, rather than being fixed and discrete types. In particular, the use of invisible factors such as blood type alleles to map out human diversity—rather than morphological features (skull shape, skin color, and so on) that could easily feed back into old stereotypes of racial difference—was seen as an important source of the field’s credibility and objectivity.¹⁰ Yet, like other anthropological disciplines, population geneticists disagreed about the utility of race as a term for describing patterns of human genetic variation. The problem often arose when attempting to apply the ideal genetic definition of race to the study of actual, heterogeneous populations that have at different times been referred to as races.¹¹ For instance, Theodosius Dobzhansky, one of the field’s founders and an advocate for maintaining race as a classificatory device, noted that in practice the genetic differentiation among human races was generally so poorly delimited that their very number is estimated from two to about one hundred.¹² In a well-known 1972 study, U.S. bioinformatician Richard Lewontin claimed to have settled the debate by calculating that around 85 percent of all human genetic variation could be accounted for by differences between individuals, irrespective of racial or ethnic classification. Lewontin concluded, Human racial classification is of no social value and is positively destructive of social and human relations. Since such racial classification is now seen to be of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance, either, no justification can be offered for its continuance.¹³

The transition to the (relative) dominance of a no-race stance on human diversity within genetics by the late twentieth century was not simply the result of emerging empirical findings; it began as a broad ideological shift spearheaded by academics who, concerned by the racist political agendas their research was being used to support, began to question the assumption that human groups were biologically destined to be unequal and sought other ways of studying and conceptualizing human biological diversity.¹⁴ Nonetheless, ever since the postwar period, voices from within the discipline have cautioned against this stance becoming a dogma in its own right, which they feel could detract from the study of substantive genetic differences between populations.¹⁵

Evidence presented by recent social studies of science, not to mention a proliferation of articles authored by geneticists, demonstrate that there is currently no single consensus within the discipline about the suitability of applying the concept of race in genomic research.¹⁶ The issue is complex. Some have argued that the ability of model-based clustering algorithms to habitually sort DNA samples, taken from populations around the world, into roughly continental groups offers support for the validity of race as a taxonomic category in genetics.¹⁷ Critics point out that the form and distribution of these clusters depends both on the programming of the statistical software (e.g., how many clusters the program is asked to produce from the data) and the sampling method used. For instance, sampling a small number of geographically isolated populations is likely to yield racelike clusters, whereas sampling populations on a geographic gradient is more likely to produce overlapping clines.¹⁸ Some interpret this as a question of terminology. For instance, certain scientists (particularly those of an older generation) may retain some version of the classic population genetics definition of races as "biological sub-groups within the single species, Homo sapiens, in which the similar heredity which the whole species has in common far outweighs the relative and minor ways in which the sub-groups differ."¹⁹ Others may agree that such broad genetic classifications can be made, but disagree with calling them races, preferring instead to use less evocative terms like population, which could refer to a genetic cluster of any magnitude, with or without a particular regional origin, and allows for the fact that significant levels of genetic mixture and variation exist both within and between conventional racial groups.²⁰ Finally, some geneticists have argued the continued importance of paying attention to race when selecting which populations to sample and study. The most nuanced arguments have come from members of historically marginalized groups, who point to a troubling Eurocentric bias in genetic and genomic research globally.²¹ For instance, an important criticism of the HGP was that its findings (including the statement about the overwhelming genetic similarity of humankind) were based on a sampling of mainly Euro-descendant individuals from Utah, France, and Venezuela, whose genomes were presented as an average blueprint for all humans.²² Without claiming that geneticists should attempt to validate the biological existence of races, these critics argued that conducting genetic research in a population-blind manner could end up perpetuating the exclusion of ethnic and racial minorities from important fields like biomedical studies, preventing these populations from benefiting fully from the outcomes of genomic research.²³

Although geneticists today have differing perspectives on the use of race within their own studies (variously, as a taxonomic category, a lens of analysis, or an object of study), most are at pains to defend the antiracist credentials of their field and to establish that human genetic variation can be studied without legitimizing racist agendas or reinvigorating biological-essentialist conceptions of race. The habitual warnings of social scientists have put geneticists on the defensive, and interdisciplinary discussions on the subject can feel more like a turf war over who is qualified or responsible enough to talk about race.

This was a theme that cropped up repeatedly during my fieldwork. During an interview with a biological anthropologist in the United States, I asked whether he and his team dealt with the concept of race in their research. He shot back at me, I don’t use the term race. Do you? To some geneticists, social scientists appear obsessed with race, or else in denial that there exist substantive biological differences among humans that are worthy of study. As the prominent Harvard geneticist David Reich wrote in a much-circulated op-ed for the New York Times in 2018: I am worried that well-meaning people who deny the possibility of substantial biological differences among human populations are digging themselves into an indefensible position, one that will not survive the onslaught of science. I am also worried that whatever discoveries are made—and we truly have no idea yet what they will be—will be cited as ‘scientific proof’ that racist prejudices and agendas have been correct all along, and that those well-meaning people will not understand the science well enough to push back against these claims.²⁴

My entry to these debates was through my PhD research, which I developed as part of an international research project, EUROTAST, funded by the European Union, which examined the histories and legacies of the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans from various disciplinary perspectives, drawing in particular on new techniques in modern and ancient genomics.²⁵ As a social scientist, my contribution within this network was to reflect on current debates surrounding the uses of DNA ancestry testing to reconstruct African ethnic identities effaced by slavery and the broader impacts this phenomenon was having on the definition of racial and ethnic identities in Brazil and the United States. As I go on to describe further below, the extent to which African identities and kinship ties were destroyed or maintained through slavery in different parts of the Americas has been a topic of long-standing anthropological and sociological debate. Far from being a purely intellectual matter, studies in this area have been used to both challenge and uphold racist political discourses about the cultural particularities and social exceptionalism of African-descendant populations.²⁶ More recently, on the other hand, debates have revolved around the relevance of genetic ancestry for initiatives aimed at restorative justice and negotiating reparations for slavery—or, conversely, their propensity to geneticize conceptions of race and ethnicity and reinvigorate forms of biological racism.²⁷

Before embarking on this research, I was trained in a social-constructionist tradition that treated the ample evidence for the social origins of race as proof of its biological irrelevance—the social and the biological being regarded as mutually exclusive ontological spheres. Yet, like others who have engaged critically with genetic population research into American societies, I found this stance difficult to square with the conventional use of racelike genetic categories to describe the biogeographical ancestry of the region and the ability of genetic studies to reflect the racial and gendered dynamics of colonialism, slavery, and their aftermaths (e.g., the implementation of eugenic policies such as segregation, selective immigration, and racial Whitening), whose traces are still imprinted collectively in the genomes of contemporary American and Caribbean populations.²⁸ This notion that biological and social forms of knowledge are intrinsically separate was likewise hard to reconcile with the increasingly mundane way that members of the public are using genomic ancestry data to feed back into their understandings of their family origins or ethnic makeup without leading scholars to the untenable conclusion that these people (numbering in the tens of millions around the world) are simply getting identity wrong by mixing up genetic data with social relations.

Nonetheless, social constructionism offers numerous useful tools and insights for studying the relationships between genomic science and systems of racial thought. In particular, by approaching race not as something that exists a priori in the world (i.e., human races) but as a set of beliefs about human difference that have developed, adapted, and diversified over time and in different places in response to specific sociopolitical circumstances, social-constructionist approaches allow us to trace the various forms and impacts of racial thinking without making prescriptive assumptions about what race is or is not, what it should or should not do. By insisting on the subjective, contextual, and relational ways in which we produce knowledge about the world, these approaches equip us to understand how a set of DNA ancestry results, for instance, could be used to deconstruct racial ideologies in one context and reinforce them in another.

In this book I approach race as the product of a set of interrelated worldviews that have multiple meanings and effects, spanning the sociocultural to the biologic. Modern concepts of race emerged from Europe’s colonial experiences in the Americas and other parts of the world. In their desire for cheap labor to exploit the natural resources of the New World, European powers proclaimed their natural dominance over Indigenous Americans and Africans, whom they regarded as lesser forms of humanity, with varying potential for civilization.²⁹ In colonial societies, autochthonous European notions about lineage and heredity (expressed through the biocultural metaphor of blood) combined with new ideas about ancestry and geographical origin to define the legal status and socioeconomic possibilities of colonial subjects.³⁰ This emergent racial logic governed who could be enslaved and who was automatically free; who labored to produce wealth and who profited from this labor; who could marry whom and what legal and social status their children could inherit. In time, these racial schemas came to shape entire societies, to the point that Eurocentric philosophers and scientists began to claim, from the eighteenth century onward, that the unequal relations of domination and oppression among races—observable the world over—were part of the natural order of things. During the nineteenth and early twentieth century, a great amount of work went into fashioning race as a global and standardized scientific concept. Far from proving the coherency of race as a biological concept, these efforts attest to the constant work needed to fix and stabilize a fundamentally fluid and flawed idea.³¹

Race was constructed historically, but it is not simply a figment of the imagination. It is, as Amade M’charek suggests, a fiction: not in the sense of something to be opposed against fact, but rather in the sense of "something both made and made up."³² Racism (which is both the source and the product of these fictions) structures worlds, conditioning the way that individuals inhabit and move through societies, their education and work possibilities, their health outcomes, kinship and social networks, their conditions of life and death.³³ Moreover, the effects of racism are not only—or always—perceived psychologically; they may also register biologically. For instance, social epidemiologists have linked the manifestation of certain diseases and the incidence of premature mortality, among other indicators, to structural, institutional, and interpersonal forms of racism, describing these health outcomes as the embodied effects of racisms.³⁴ These structured, material distinctions have the circular effect of reinforcing the tangibility of racial differences, both for individuals and the clinicians who treat them, something that has led in recent decades to renewed claims that race constitutes a valid biological as well as social category.³⁵ A counter proposal, first put forward by anthropologists Carol C. Mukhopadhyay and Yolanda T. Moses in the late 1990s, argues that race should not be separated out into its social and biological effects, but rather understood through a biocultural lens that

"situate[s]

human biodiversity within a sociocultural framework, in effect reuniting culture and biology by embedding biology in society and culture."³⁶ An advantage of biocultural approaches is that they take seriously the materiality and embodied experiences of race by treating them not as innate but as the biological imprint of sociopolitical ideologies and structures of domination. In other words, they regard the material effects of racism as stemming from a history of biology being shaped and managed by social systems, rather than the other way around.³⁷

This conception of race as biology-managed-by-culture is also helpful for analyzing the results of genetic anthropological studies into contemporary American populations. For instance, Y-chromosome (Y-DNA) and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) analyses conducted among Black and mixed American and Caribbean populations have revealed a preponderance of European Y-DNA haplotypes (passed down from father to son), on the one hand, and African and Native American mtDNA haplotypes (passed down from mother to child), on the other.³⁸ This phenomenon, known as sex-biased mating, reflects the sexual power dynamics of plantation societies: in particular, the privileged access of White male colonists to enslaved and indentured women, as well as the concerted efforts to prohibit sexual relations between White women and Black or Indigenous men in order to maintain the racial purity and social dominance of White families. In some cases, these genetic portraits can also