Master thesis in History: American Studies Faculty of Humanities
Author: Annemiek Smelting
Student number: 10162801
E-mail address: annemieksmelting@gmail.com Thesis advisor: George H. Blaustein
Second reader: Manon Parry
Date: 30-06-2016
WE ARE ALL TRANS-RACIAL
Acknowledgements
What a journey this has been – I could not have imagined that so much work would go into a Master thesis. I have George Blaustein to blame and to thank for this. George, your
guidance, motivational speeches and endless ideas have been able to keep me enthusiastic and motivated during this writing process, I am very thankful.
This thesis could not have come together without the support of Piet Vriend, who has been able to be my rock while writing an excellent thesis of his own. Last but not least I want to thank my parents for their uplifting words whenever I did not feel like finishing this work because my internship was getting the better of me. You have all helped me to carry and to present this final product.
“I am an Italian-American who doesn’t speak Italian, just as I am a French-American whose French ranges from tremulous to nonexistent, as well as a Russian- American who barely recognizes the sound of Russian
and has never seen a street in Russia. Because of all these complex combinations, moreover, I am an American-American who spent years denying being
American, years inhabiting a country (or perhaps countries) of hyphenation – maybe even a hyphen
nation.”
- Sandra Gilbert “Mysteries of the Hyphen” (1997)
Table of Contents
Introduction p. 1
Chapter I Changing Your Grandfathers p. 8
Chapter II Scientific Identity p. 21
Chapter III Reversing the Middle Passage p. 39
Conclusion p. 50
Introduction
The twenty-first century has witnessed a DNA ancestry craze that has taken America by storm. Dozens of Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) DNA ancestry testing companies have popped up on the Internet, promising their customers fundamental insights into their identities. A single saliva sample will enlighten customers on a family history they never knew they had, and might even connect them to a celebrity cousin. The epic DNA narratives seem to make our existing national and individual identities seem less plausible and attractive, encouraging people to look for new narratives to define them.1 The DTC DNA ancestry companies mediate between the personal and the global past, enlightening their customers on both their individual history and how this unique past is interwoven in a grand historical narrative suitable for a globalized age.2 Instead of being defined by a small community, people are able to connect to a global community full of noteworthy relatives.
The contemporary DTC DNA ancestry vogue is closely related to the melting pot myth, brought to life in the early twentieth century when 24 million people set sail for the American shores. These immigrants faced the question whether they should hold on to their own cultural traits or conform to the prevailing Anglo-Saxon identity. The melting pot myth was able to hold in suspension the contradicting realities of the quest for national unity and the immigration experience. The myth centers around the polemical discussion of the melting pot, of which the first account argued that immigrants had a responsibility to assimilate in order to create a homogeneous society. The immigrants would throw their cultural traits into the crucible, where they would be fused to create the ‘new American.’ The DTC DNA ancestry vogue argues that this melting process has already occurred and seeks to unearth what exactly went into the crucible.
We can see the transition from the melting pot myth into the DTC DNA ancestry vogue in the rhetoric used in presidential speeches. President Theodore Roosevelt was the first to incorporate melting pot rhetoric in his political speeches and used it to argue against the hyphenated American: “We Americans are the children of the crucible. It has been our boast that out of the crucible, the melting pot of life in this free land, all the men and women of all the nations who come hither emerge as Americans and as nothing else (…).”3 Other
1 Philip Gleason, “The Melting Pot: Symbol of Fusion or Confusion?” American Quarterly 16 (1964): 13.
2 Hallam Stevens, “Genetimes and Lifetimes: DNA, New Media, and History,” Memory Studies 8 (2015): 13.
3 H.H. Webster, Americanization and citizenship: lessons in community and national ideals for new Americans
presidents also took a linking in this rhetoric, among whom Woodrow Wilson, John F. Kennedy, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. In his 2008 A More Perfect Union speech, Obama argues that the melting pot process has already occurred, pointing to his own mixed ancestry to prove the validity of this argument:
“I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton's Army during World War II, and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I've gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world's poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slave-owners - an inheritance we passed on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible. It's a story that hasn't made me the most conventional candidate, but it is a story that has seared into my
genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts - that out of many,
we are truly one.”4
More importantly, Obama directly links E Pluribus Unum, the widely known rendering of the melting pot, to the genetic makeup of America. Melting pot imagery is often used by public officials when discussing culture in American society, and specifically to celebrate the heritage of various groups. In the future, these speeches might combine the melting pot and DNA more often, for there is now scientific proof that American society is a product of the melting pot.
This thesis will digest these two myths, seeking to point out in what ways perceptions of heritage and ancestry have changed in the past century. It aims to show that the DTC DNA ancestry vogue strongly resembles the melting pot symbol, and can even be seen as an
extension of this myth. In order to make such claims, I will look at a great variety of sources, ranging from scholarly essays to DTC DNA ancestry websites.
Setting the stage
Heritage and ancestry are a vital part of who we are and seem to compose the framework of our existence. Our ways of relating to the past can be complex, especially in the United States of America. National myths such as the melting pot and the DTC DNA ancestry vogue – but also others, such as the myth of the Promised Land, the myth of the Founding Fathers and the myth of the Self Made Man – provide an idealized representation of the nation, its
membership, its defining features and of its fundamental values and principles. These myths are popular and powerful narratives of American national beginnings and have turned out to
4 Ben Railton, Redefining American identity: from Cabeza de Vaca to Barack Obama, (New York: Palgrave
be anchors and key references in discourses of ‘Americanness.’5 National myths are commonly created by the misrepresentation of historical facts and through the process of ‘shared forgetting, as well as shared remembering.’ The latter suggests the highlighting of certain aspects of the nation while downplaying others less favorable to the cause.6 The elite holds a key position in the creation of these myths. This group has the intellectual and
material resources to promote the myths of collective ancestry and is therefore responsible for the spread of this ideology among ordinary group members.7
Interestingly, both the melting pot myth and the DTC DNA ancestry vogue thrived at times when the number of immigrants entering the United States peaked: between 1901 and 1910 8.8 million immigrants entered the country, and between 1991 and 2000 9.1 million immigrants set foot on American soil. This while the average number per decade between 1849 and 2000 was 4.2 million immigrants.8 Although there is no certainty whether there is a correlation between these national myths and changes in immigration flows, we can state that both the melting pot and DTC DNA ancestry vogue have roots in the immigration history of America. The first chapter will give the reader an updated version of the melting pot
narrative, woven into a short account of the immigration history of the past century. The chapter will signpost several important themes that we will later encounter in the rhetoric of the DTC DNA ancestry companies.
The second chapter dives into the world of the DTC DNA ancestry industry. Since the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003, family lore, genealogy and popular narratives are adjusted to fit the genetic truth and the naturalness of biology unearthed by DNA tests. Scientists working on projects such as the genetic study of ‘human mixing events’ believe traditional historical methods to be outdated and argue that they can only compromise the outcome of the scientific findings: “There’s a great virtue in being objective: you put the data in and get the history out.”9 This new past has the potential to alter what we consider to
5 Heike Paul, The Myths that made America: an introduction to American Studies, (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag,
2014), 11.
6 Michael Smith, “The American Melting Pot: A National Myth in Public and Popular Discourse,” National
Identities 14 (2012): 389.
7 Amílcar Antonio Barreto, “Constructing Identities: Ethnic Boundaries and Elite Preferences in Puerto Rico,”
Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 7 (2001): 35.
8 Roger Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants since 1882 (New
York: Hill and Wang, 2005): 5-6.
9 Nicholas Wade, “Tracing Ancestry, Researchers Produce a Genetic Atlas of Human Mixing Events,” The New
York Times, accessed on June 24, 2016,
be authentic, as we look more and more towards DNA to provide certified versions of memory, history and identity.10
This raises fascinating questions about what people find more important: historical evidence or scientific facts. This problem played out in the Jefferson-Hemings controversy. During his lifetime President Thomas Jefferson (1801 – 1908) was accused of having fathered several children of his slave Sally Hemings. This was the beginning of a long-standing
scandal that persisted up until the late twentieth century, when Dr. Eugene Foster et al. attempted to establish the paternity of Eston Hemings through Y chromosome DNA tests. These results showed a match between the Jefferson male line and the Eston Hemings descendant. Despite these results, there are still parties that do not agree with this outcome, arguing that there is insufficient evidence to support the claim that Jefferson is indeed the father of Heming’s children. The DNA tests have been able to open a historical case that had long been closed by historians, and the DNA results have set the bar for future debate on this subject.11
DTC DNA testing does not confine itself to ancestry alone: there are tests available that provide health related information, and tests designed to improve their clients health in indirect ways, such as nutrition. As technology is improving, more and more companies are able to offer all three DNA tests, blurring the distinctions between the varieties of
information.12 Examples are ventures such as SingldOut, an online-dating platform that matches based on the personality traits supposedly determined by DNA. The focus of this thesis will be on DTC DNA ancestry companies, and will only occasionally refer to DTC DNA health companies.
Many details about the DTC DNA ancestry industry remain unclear. There is no data available on how many customers are purchasing DNA samples, the number of products available and what these products entail. These uncertainties are primarily caused by the absence of governmental restrictions: it is difficult to control companies on the crossroads of genetics, law and society.13 Although the FDA and the Government Accountability Office keep a close eye on companies providing DNA health tests, DNA ancestry companies seem to roam free. The philosophical question arises to how much weight individuals should give to
10 Stevens, “Genetimes and Lifetimes,” 11. (Emphasis added)
11 Ibidem, 10.
12 A. Nordgren, E. T. Juengst, “Can Genomics Tell Me Who I Am? Essentialistic Rhetoric in
Direct-to-Consumer DNA Testing,” New Genetics and Society 28 (2009): 158.
13 Jennifer K Wagner, “Interpreting the Implications of DNA Ancestry Tests,” Perspectives in Biology and
genes when forming ethnical, racial and religious identities.14 Because far from providing startling insights that can liberate costumers from the constraints of social labels, genomic testing might simply inscribe those labels into our genes.15
This has not stopped memory from turning into a lucrative business. Ancestry.com is one of the biggest DTC DNA ancestry companies of the United States and has over three million paying subscribers. American based DTC DNA market leaders Ancestry.com,
23andMe and Family Tree DNA all sponsor popular national television series such as African American Lives and Finding Your Roots (FYR) to reach to as many potential customers as possible. The third chapter will look into Finding Your Roots, which has contributed to the high status of genomics as a powerful science, positioning it to legitimize claims about personal identity that phrenologists and psychoanalysts would envy.16 All in all, the combination of biology, ancestry and new media has turned out to be a successful venture, turning memory into a ‘best-seller in consumer society.’17
We will see that in the world of DTC DNA ancestry testing, identity and ancestry are almost always intrinsically connected. The term ‘identity’ can have multiple meanings
depending on the context in which it is used. Sociologist and philosopher Christine Hauskeller has identified two types of identity: logical and psychological identity. Logical identity sees identity as sameness. When saying: “I have inherited the cancer-gene from my mother,” the two genes of mother and child are seen as identical in structure and function. This also points to the second meaning of identity: one gene is identified as an ancestor of the other. This interpretation of identity holds the assumption of biological relatedness, and along with this comes a range of identity-discourses. These discourses are the psychological notions of identity: the individual’s belonging to a family or group.18
The curious case of Rachel Dolezal
A case on the intersection of science, identity and ancestry came to light in June 2015, when self-identified black Rachel Dolezal was ‘outed’ as white. Dolezal had been the president of the Spokane chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) and had represented herself as being black. When the news broke that Dolezal’s
14 Virginia Hughes, “23 and You: Does That Commercial DNA Test You Just Bought Violate Somebody Else’s
Privacy?” Medium, accessed on June 24, 2016, https://medium.com/matter/23-and-you-66e87553d22c.
15 Nordgren and Juengst, “Can Genomics Tell Me Who I Am?” 169.
16 Ibidem, 163.
17 J. Le Goff, History and Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 1.
18 Christine Hauskeller, “Genes, Genomes and Identity. Projections on Matter,” New Genetics and Society 23
father was not of African descent, the entire American community was outraged, discrediting her as a race faker. As a consequence of this incident, Dolezal was relieved her of her paid and unpaid positions in Spokane. In an era where multiculturalism and scientific
developments have paved the way for a more inclusive and accepting society, it is evident that being trans-ethnic remains a problematic reality in America.
After it was exposed that Dolezal had created a new identity for herself, she spoke up about the alleged misrepresentation of her race, stating that she does not feel that she mislead anybody for she has never claimed to be African American, but black. The rhetoric Dolezal uses to defend her choices has been subject of much debate, as it resembles the rhetoric used by transgenders, specifically the language of Caitlyn Jenner (formerly known as Bruce Jenner). Jenner’s public transformation from a man into a woman has been applauded by the American community, crowning Jenner Glamour magazine’s ‘woman of the year.’ Dolezal has claimed that she has always identified herself as black, stating that she drew self-portraits using a brown crayon instead of the peach crayon, and gave herself black curly hair.19
Transgenders likewise argue that they identify with the opposite sex and have experienced cross-identification since childhood.20 The hype that occurred after Dolezal was outed as white unveils a strange paradox: while transgenders change their biology when transitioning into the other sex, Rachel Dolezal has only changed the social construct known as race.
To NBC Nightly News, Dolezal declared that she had not taken a DNA test, but that "there's been no biological proof that Larry and Ruthanne [Dolezal] are my biological parents."21 Her adoptive brother and her father have both challenged her to do a DNA test, turning this science into a lie-detector test. Dolezal’s rejection of the presupposition of biological relatedness reminds us of the same argument made by literary scholar Marc Shell. He argues that whether there is an unequivocal blood or DNA test to detect lineage or parentage and whether true parentage is other than consanguineous remain unsettled questions: “Like the child in Solomon’s judgment, we cannot truly know who our blood parents are -we could all be changelings switched in the cradle- and there is no unshakeable answer to the question of our true parents.”22 Furthermore, this argument can be linked to the
19 Samantha Allen, “Dolezal’s Damaging ‘Transracial’ Game,” The Daily Beast, accessed on June 24, 2016,
http://www. thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/06/16/dolezal-s-damaging-transracial-game.html.
20 Ibidem.
21 Diane Herbst, “Rachel Dolezal's Brother Ezra Challenges Her to Take DNA Test to Prove She Isn't Her
Parents' Biological Child,” People, accessed on June 24, 2016, http://www.people.com/article/rachel-dolezl-ezra-dolezal-dna-test.
22 Marc Shell, Children of the Earth: Literature, Politics and Nationhood, (New York: Oxford University Press,
Freudian concept ‘Family Romance;’ the fantasy that our parents are merely our adoptive parents and that we are actually related to a highly idealized family.
A captivating argument of Dolezal’s critics is that she claims a history she has not been part of. Of course, Dolezal could take a DTC DNA ancestry test to prove her DNA holds a certain percentage of African ancestry. But do these results give her the right to claim black heritage? In other words, will these results be conclusive? This remains doubtful as Dolezal rightly states that all humans originate from the African continent and that, in addition, plenty of self-identified white Americans have what Henry Louis Gates Jr. coined ‘hidden African Ancestry?’23 This curious case of Rachel Dolezal highlights several important aspects we will encounter in the following chapters.
23 Jenée Desmond-Harris, “How to make sense of Rachel Dolezal, the NAACP official accused of passing for
black,” Vox, accessed on June 24, 2016, http://www.vox.com/2015/6/12/8770273/rachel-dolezal-white-black-naacp.
Chapter I – Changing Your Grandfathers
“My first ancestor, gentlemen, was an Indian- an early Indian. Your ancestors skinned him alive, and I am an orphan. (…) Later ancestors of mine were the Quakers William
Robinson, Marmaduke Stevenson, et. al. Your tribe chased them out of the country for their religion’s sake; promised them death if they came back (…). All those Salem witches were ancestors of mine! Your people made it tropical for them. (…) The first slave brought into New England out of Africa by your progenitors was an ancestor of mine- for I am of a
mixed breed, an infinitely shaded and exquisite Mongrel.”24
In his speech Plymouth Rock and the Pilgrims, Mark Twain mocked the fears of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASP) regarding the arrival of greatly diverse peoples in America. Twain declared that the Pilgrims had taken good care of themselves, but had annihilated everybody else’s ancestors in the process. Twain claims these overpowered ancestors as his own and declares himself to be a product of the mixing of races. His ‘carnival of
incrimination’ may be considered an extreme case of the general attitude with which the Pilgrims and their Plymouth Rock were greeted during the Gilded Age.25
Mark Twain wrote against the growing anxieties of the first settlers, who were struggling with the question how to create national unity when millions of immigrants brought with them a great diversity of cultural heritage. The melting pot symbol was one of the first myths to tackle such issues and offers different ways to perceive ancestry within the context of a cohesive American identity. One of the solutions offered by this symbol is the ability to claim your own ancestors, just as Twain had done in his Plymouth Rock and the Pilgrims speech. The following chapter will give an updated version of the melting pot narrative and will bring forth such themes, which we will later encounter in the DTC DNA ancestry vogue as well.
Claiming your ancestors
Between 1890 and 1920 roughly 23 million immigrants arrived in America, challenging the existing WASP majority that had settled in the United States during the first American century. While the arrival of different immigrant populations transformed American national identity, it did not fundamentally challenge white hegemony because the European ethnics from Eastern and Southern Europe were soon able to blend into the white majority. Historian Matthew Frye Jacobson’s account of America’s racial odyssey suggests that the Irish, the
24 Mark Twain, Plymouth Rock and the Pilgrims: address at the first annual dinner, N.E. society, Philadelphia,
December 22, 1881, from Mark Twain's Speeches (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1910): 17-24.
25 John D. Seelye, Memory’s Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock, (North Carolina: The University of North
Jews the Italians, the Slavs and the Greeks have all succeeded in America because the privilege of whiteness was extended to them in time. They became, in sociologist Nathan Glazer’s words, “if not Anglo-Saxon, at least Caucasian and certainly white.”26 Although these ‘new’ immigrants were able to become part of the white majority, they were both geographically and culturally removed from the Anglo-Saxon community.27
On the West Coast several hundreds of thousands of immigrants from China, Japan, Korea and later the Philippines entered the United States. These groups could not be absorbed by the Anglo-Saxon majority and their arrival provoked fears over “coolie” (locally sourced unskilled) labor, providing a more profound challenge to the national imaginary with regard to citizenship. Politicians responded to the growing public fears by limiting immigration based on race and national origin so to keep these potentially disruptive groups out of the country.28 During this period the U.S. census officially recognized three races: white, black and Asian. Of course, this racial classification did not represent true identities, especially not for people of mixed ancestry and for those whose appearance did not meet stereotypical racial expectations.29
Israel Zangwill’s Melting-Pot play offered a soothing answer to the conflicting realities of the immigration experience and the quest for national unity, with which both the WASPs and the immigrants were struggling.30 We have seen that the play argued that
immigrants had a responsibility to assimilate in order to create a homogeneous society. They would throw their cultural traits into the crucible, where they would be fused to create the ‘new American.’ This transcendent vision allowed for flexible definitions and redefinitions, and offered a middle ground between ethnic believers, radical culture critics and American opponents of immigration.31 The Melting-Pot appeared in several big American cities and it is said that even the thousands of people who had not seen the production knew of its
existence.32 One of the melting pot enthousiasts was author and Nobel Peace Prize winner
26 Nathan Glazer, “White Noise,” review of Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the
Alchemy of Race, by Matthew Frye Jacobson, New Republic, October 12, 1998: 44.
27 Stephen Steinberg, “The Melting Pot and the Color Line,” in Reinventing the Melting Pot: the New
Immigrants and What it Means to be American, ed. Tamar Jacoby (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 235.
28 Jolie A. Sheffer, The Romance of Race: Incest, Miscegenation, and Multiculturalism in the United States,
1880-1930 (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2013), 11.
29 Charles Hirschman, “Richard Alba and Reynolds Farley, The Meaning and Measurement of Race in the U.S.
Census: Glimpses into the Future,” Demography 37 (2000), 381.
30 Smith, “The American Melting Pot,” 390.
31 Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 74.
Jane Addams, who stated that the title of the play “could be easily translated into a proper heading for sociological lectures or sermons.”33
The Melting-Pot play frames the immigrant’s existing heritage embedded in the Old World as a largely negative phenomenon. For example, when the protagonist of the play speaks of his old heritage he refers to it as “hate, vengeance and blood.” Zangwill used the opposition between hardness and softness to illustrate that immigrants were to move away from identities that kept them anchored in the Old World. Metallurgical and alchemical implications of the crucible are used to illustrate this contradiction, with the goal of melting away the hardness of old identities in the crucible:
“Celt and Latin, Slav and Teuton, Greek and Syrian, black and yellow -[Vera] Jew and Gentile- Yes, East and West, and North and South, (…) how the great Alchemist melts and fuses them with his purging flame! Here shall they all unite to build the Republic of Man and the Kingdom of God.”34
This indicates that American ideals are not transmitted by descent, but have to be embraced afresh, meaning that descent is secular and temporal, while consent is sacred and eternal.35 Again we encounter the idea that people can distance themselves from their existing ancestry and have the ability to choose new ancestors. Furthermore, Zangwill speaks of a “Republic of man and a Kingdom of God.” Later on we will see that Harvard Professor of African
American Studies Henry Louis Gates Jr. will also call on a divine intervention when coming up with the idea for his television series African American Lives, in which eight prominent African Americans uncover their heritage through genealogical research and DNA tests. If God had been the alchemist who has mixed American society, does that make DTC DNA ancestry testing a tool to trace the workings of God?
Closely linked to the melting pot symbol is the Pocahontas theme of Indianized and female allegories of America. This foundational myth likewise implies that Americans are able to choose their own ancestors. A great example is the poem “Our Mother Pocahontas,” by Vachel Lindsay:
“John Rolfe is not our ancestor We rise from out the soul of her Held in native wonderland
While the sun’s rays kissed her hand In the springtime,
33 Jane Addams, Bitter Fruits of Religious Ignorance, Literary Digest, XXXVIII (1909): 691.
34 Israel Zangwill, The Melting-Pot. A Drama in Four Acts (New York: The Macmillan company, 1909), 198-99.
In Virginia,
Our mother, Pocahontas.”36
Both the melting pot and the Pocahontas theme weaken static descent-orientation: the Pocahontas theme gives the chosen people of white America a new fictional line of noble Indian ancestry, and the melting pot provides people with a new, shared American heritage to replace the old national heritage brought across the Atlantic Ocean.37
Around 1915 philosopher Horace Kallen and critic and essayist Randolph Bourne rallied against melting pot imagery, as they believed its intentions were to conform
immigrants to the dominant Anglo-Saxon standard. In his 1915 essay “Democracy versus the Melting-Pot,” Kallen argued that the concept of melting away different nationalities and ethnicities went against the democratic ideals and core political principles of America.38 He stated: “Men may change their clothes, their politics, their wives, their religions, their philosophies, to a greater or lesser extent they cannot change their grandfathers.”39 He
asserted that respecting ancestors and pride of race were “primary and ultimate standards” and regarded ethnicity to be the core of the individual.40 Concerning the nationality of immigrants Kallen wrote:
“Behind him in time and tremendously in him in quality, are his ancestors; around him in space are his relatives and kin, carrying in common with him in the inherited organic set
from a remoter common ancestry. In all these he lives and moves and has his being. They
constitute his, literally, natio, the inwardness of his nativity.”41
This account indicates that our ancestors constitute the self, and Kallen even hints that traces of these ancestors can be found in our genetic makeup.
Kallen suggested a federation of nationalities, where cultural diversity would be celebrated and where people were bound by the English language and a common political and economic life.42 In the final paragraphs of the article Kallen described a harmonious musical fusion, in which the instruments personified the different ethnicities of the American peoples. In 1916 Bourne opted for a more cosmopolitan “Trans-national America,” advocating a unique American culture and national identity to which every group would contribute. Although this may sound similar to the concept of the melting pot, Bourne also argued that
36 Vachel Lindsay, Selected Poems, Ed. Mark Harris (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 116.
37 Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, 79.
38 Smith, “The American Melting Pot,” 392.
39 Horace Meyer Kallen, Culture and Democracy in the United States, (New Jersey: Transaction Publishers,
1970), 122-123.
40 Smith, “The American Melting Pot,” 392.
41 Horace Meyer Kallen, “Democracy versus the Melting Pot,” The Nation, February 18, 1915, 194. (Emphasis
added)
group distinctiveness and identification with countries from the Old World should be
maintained in American society.43 Bourne went against the idea that indigenousness defined all peoples arriving in America and argued that these immigrants were not mere arrivals from the same family, but people who brought with them their own national and racial characters.
Bourne believed it was the hyphenate who had kept American culture from turning into aggressive nationalism, but considered a nation of hyphenated Americans to be equally dangerous. In his view, people tied to Europe could maintain political allegiance to their mother country, and rivalry between different hyphenated groups could be a potential disruptive force. Bourne believed the answer to these problems could be found in Zionism, which he considered to be a benevolent self-conscious nationalism that longed for a spiritual homeland without “chauvinistic and dynastic aims.”44
Bourne was not the first to call on Zionism to ensure national cohesion in America. Zangwill, known as the founder of the Jewish Territorial Organization (JTO), had envisioned a political Zionism that would eradicate all barriers and distinctions between people through love and mercy. He believed he could achieve this goal in America, due to its liberal
immigration policy. This political Zionism would create a human brotherhood that would not tolerate rivalries between nationalities. Kallen adopted Zionism in 1903 and perceived it to be a secular mode to preserve Jewish identity, for he believed the Jewish religious tradition to be incompatible with twentieth century America.
Although the language of these three men seems to differ substantially, both the rhetoric of Kallen and Bourne have been linked to the Melting Pot play. Werner Sollors recognized that the musical fusion imagery presented by Kallen resembles much of the rhetoric of the Melting-Pot protagonist, and Bourne’s description of cosmopolitan dual citizenship used alchemical and metallurgical imagery similar to the Melting Pot play.45
In 1916 Henry Ford imposed the Anglo-Saxon interpretation of the melting pot symbol on his employees. He believed Anglo-Saxonism to be strong enough to absorb all immigrant qualities and create a uniform American. Immigrants working in his Ford Motor Company represented over 53 nationalities and spoke more than a hundred languages. Ford sought to ‘Americanize’ his employees by establishing the Ford English School, where his workers were taught English and were given practical lessons based on daily life and
43 Smith, “The American Melting Pot,” 392-293.
44 Bruce Clayton, Forgotten Prophet: The Life of Randolph Bourne (Missouri: University of Missouri Press,
1998), 198.
routines.46 Upon completion of the curriculum, the students were to participate in the ‘Pageant of the Ford Melting Pot ceremony.’ During this ritual workers would act out the abandonment of distinct ethnic origins for a uniform ‘Americanness.’47 This rebirth was to demonstrate the loyalty of the immigrant workers during World War I. It is clear that the Ford English School regarded heritage as a negative phenomenon and that there was no place in society for a hyphenated American. Ford’s anti-universalist showing came to be associated with the melting pot symbol and is one of the reasons why the melting pot became offensive to immigrants and universalist intellectuals.48
During the 1920s Congress drastically reduced immigration flows from Europe and barred Asians from entering the country. The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act completed these restrictions and implemented the national origins system.49 This system established quota’s based on the natural origins of Americans who were in the country in 1980. The act further entailed that no alien ineligible to become a citizen could be admitted to the United States as an immigrant, and only those defined as white or of African origin could obtain American citizenship. Furthermore, the Supreme Court had ruled that neither Japanese nor those emanating from the Indian subcontinent could become an American.50
Claims have been made by historians such as Leonard Dinnerstein and David Reimes that the racially biased Immigration Act of 1924 was passed with the help of the intelligence testing community of the period.Psychologist Lewis Terman et al. had tested 1.700.000 army men, mostly originating from Eastern and Southern Europe, and reported that these soldiers had mentalities ranging downward from a thirteen to fourteen year old child to the level of a ten year old kid.51 This scientific racism supposedly influenced implementation of the act, but, in any case, this eugenics inspired division made Northern Europeans officially ‘Caucasians.’ After the act was implemented, and arguably before, race and immigration became
inextricably linked.
In 1929 a regulation introduced the standard text for the oath of allegiance, still taken by one million prospective U.S. citizens today. This oath of citizenship clearly shows that
46 “Transcript Henry Ford,” American Experience, accessed on June 24, 2016,
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/transcript/henryford-transcript/.
47 Sarah Wilson, Melting-pot Modernism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 15 and “Transcript Henry
Ford.”
48 Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, 91.
49David M. Reimers, “Post-World War II Immigration to the United States: America's Latest Newcomers,” The
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 454 (1981), 1.
50 Kevin Yuill, “In the Shadow of the 1924 Immigration Act: FDR, Immigration and Race,” Immigrants &
Minorities: Historical Studies in Ethnicity, Migration and Diaspora 32 (2014), 185.
51 Carol Silverberg, “IQ Testing and Tracking: The History of Scientific Racism in the American Public Schools:
during the beginning of the twentieth century maintaining a hyphenated identity was seen as undesirable, as candidates are to renounce allegiance to their former countries:
"I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same (…).”52
However, the United States Government stopped denouncing hyphenated Americans when soldiers were needed to liberate Europe from Nazi Germany. By appealing to former
ethnicities of its inhabitants, the American Government tried to evoke patriotic sentiments to inspire people to enlist.
The 1960s and the 1970s marked the beginning of an increasing multi-cultural society. During this period America abolished the national immigration quotas and acknowledged equal treatment of all nations and all races.53 A white ethnic revival swept the nation, in which ethnic pride and a newfound appreciation for genealogy were central. What started as a roots phenomenon turned into a true roots craze with books such as Roots and period news agencies like Time magazine providing their readership with instructions for genealogical research. The white ethnic revival was a huge commercial success, with companies selling ethnic
merchandise such as kitsch shamrock keychains and “discover your homeland” touring
packages across Europe. Matthew Jacobson’s account of the white ethnic revival suggests that it relocated the normative whiteness what might be called Plymouth Rock whiteness to Ellis Island whiteness.54
The white ethnic revival and emphasis on multiculturalism have evolved rapidly from the 1980s onwards, directed against what the intellectual historian David Hollinger has described as the “narrowness of the prevailing culture of the United States.” Hollinger makes a case for a “postethnic America” which moves beyond multiculturalism. This postethnic perspective recognizes diversity but also offers the adhesive of a national culture that enables diverse Americans to act on problems of common concern.55 Hollinger argues that because we have recognized the importance of group membership, we live in an age of affiliations
52 “Naturalization Oath of Allegiance to the United States of America,” US citizenship and Immigration services,
accessed on June 24, 2016, https://www.uscis.gov/us-citizenship/naturalization-test/naturalization-oath-allegiance-united-states-america.
53 Nathan Glazer, “Assimilation today: is one identity enough?” in Reinventing the Melting Pot: the New
Immigrants and What it Means to be American, ed. Tamar Jacoby (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 66.
54 Matthew Frye Jacobson, Roots too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America, (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2006), 4-7.
55 Review of Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism, by David A. Hollinger, Kirkus Reviews, July 5,
rather than identities. He sees the concept of identity as something that can hide that the achievement of identity is a social process. Moreover, identity implies a fixity and givenness, while the word affiliation suggests a greater measure of flexibility consistent with a postethnic eagerness to promote communities of consent: “individuals should be allowed to affiliate or disaffiliate with their own communities of descent to an extent that they choose, while affiliating with whatever non-descent communities are available and appealing to them.”56
Hollinger’s postethnic perspective derives from his distinction between Kallen’s conceptions of pluralism and Bourne’s cosmopolitanism. Hollinger describes the former as an American society consisting of permanent static groups based on ancestry, while the latter is a dynamic intermixture which transforms old stock and immigrants alike. His postethnic
perspective holds a rooted cosmopolitanism, which respects ethnicity but insists upon voluntary and reversible affiliations. Hollinger believes that the major obstacle for this postethnic America is the assignment of persons to involuntary communities of descent.57
The melting pot symbol has become one of the foundational myths of America because people have not been able to reach consensus about the definition of this symbol. Although the image has been used on contradictory grounds, a new American identity was envisioned, either created through an assimilation process or through the maintenance of cultural diversity. Even critics of the melting pot imagined some kind of transcendent creation of a new American self-hood.
Blackanese, Filatino and Chicanese
The year 2000 marked the first occasion where Americans were allowed to tick more than one racial box on the U.S. census questionnaire, which roughly seven million Americans chose to do. Only ten years later, this number went up by 32 percent, making it one of the fastest growing categories.58 These additional options on the U.S. census have been welcomed by people frustrated by the limitations of the racial categories established by German scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in the late eighteenth century. Blumenbach had divided the human race into five varieties: red, yellow, brown, black and white. Author Lise Funderburg’s account of America’s racial intermixture suggests that the current multiple-race option on the
56 David Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism, (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 116.
57 Rudolph J. Vecoli, “Review: From Pennsylvania Dutch to California Ethnic: The Odyssey of David
Hollinger,” review of Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism by David Hollinger, Reviews in American
History 24 (1996), 521.
58 Lise Funderburg, “The changing face of America,” National Geographic, accessed on June 24, 2016,
U.S. census is still rooted in that taxonomy. However, Funderburg believes that these changes are a step towards fixing this categorization system that is both erroneous (because geneticists have shown that race is a biological construct and not scientific reality) and essential (since living with race and racism is). She further argues that the Census Bureau is aware that its racial categories are flawed because they distance themselves from any intention “to define race biologically, anthropologically, or genetically.” Then again, racial categories are always flawed because race is merely a social construct.
In our presumably more accepting world we see that people have become more flexible with how they call themselves. Funderburg has seen that on playgrounds and college campuses, you can find terms as Blackanese, Filatino, Chicanese, and Korgentinian.59
Furthermore, we see that attitudes towards interracial marriage have become more positive than ever and the 2012 census showed that white births were no longer the majority in the U.S. Over the course of twelve months Asians, blacks, Hispanics and mixed races made up 50.4 percent of all births.60 But America is not yet a pluralist nation: the Census Bureau has predicted that only in 2060 non-Hispanic whites will no longer be the majority. Moreover, on average, whites have double the income and six times the wealth of blacks and Hispanics, with young black men twice as likely as whites to being unemployed.61
The Hyphen as a Bond of Union
This chapter has signposted several topics we will later encounter in the DTC DNA ancestry industry. The following section will highlight these themes and link them to the DTC DNA ancestry industry, of which a more elaborate explanation will be given in the next chapter.
We have seen that perceptions of ancestry have changed drastically over the past century. While a hyphenated American was perceived to be a threat up until the second World War, the hyphen has now come to be the definition of a true American:
“I am an Italian-American who doesn’t speak Italian, just as I am a French-American whose French ranges from tremulous to nonexistent, as well as a Russian- American who barely recognizes the sound of Russian and has never seen a street in Russia. Because of all these complex combinations, moreover, I am an American-American who spent years denying being American, years inhabiting a country (or perhaps
59 Funderburg, “The changing face of America.”
60 “U.S. Census Timeline,” Infoplease.com, accessed on June 24, 2016,
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0905361.html.
countries) of hyphenation – maybe even a hyphen nation.”62
It seems as if this hyphen is what distinguishes America from the rest of the world: it is the only place where melting of nationalities and cultures has occurred and from which an enriched hyphenate has emerged. Although we have seen that the white ethnic craze has its roots in the 1960s, the twenty-first century marks the first time that the entire American community is able to participate in the roots craze. By taking a DTC DNA ancestry test, Americans are able to add the desired hyphen to their existing identity – and more. These websites offer to make childhood dreams come true: being related to Queen Elizabeth is no longer a fantasy, but can become a reality simply by sending in some saliva. In their own right, both the melting pot and the DTC DNA ancestry vogue reconcile the two essential components of nationalism in light of the American immigration experience: diversity and the need for national unity.63
All contributions to the diverse melting pot symbol envision a unique kind of
brotherhood amongst Americans. Zangwill believed that an American brotherhood would be created if all immigrants would embrace the American ideals afresh: he considered descent secular and temporal, and consent to be sacred and eternal. Kallen’s pluralism attaches greater importance to ancestry and suggests a federation of nationalities, where cultural diversity and various nationalities would be celebrated rather than frowned upon:
“A society’s existence is strengthened, its life enriched, in the degree that its members may pass unhindered from it to any other, making free exchange of the thought and things of each, in the degree that the members are hyphenated, and the hyphen is a bond of union, a bridge from each to each and all to all.”64
Bourne’s cosmopolitanism was more dynamic and was meant to transform the WASPs and the immigrants alike. He advocated a new unique American community and national identity to which every group would contribute. And of course Ford, interpreting the melting pot as an assimilation device, thought a new American community was in the making. In Hollinger’s case, American would bond through the making of new affiliations. This sense of a human brotherhood is central to the DTC DNA industry, as they use science that suggests that every human on this earth is no further removed than a 100th cousin, and we all share 99.9% of our
62 Sandra Gilbert, “Mysteries of the Hyphen: Poetry, Pasta and Identity Politics.” Beyond the Godfather: Italian
American writers on the Real Italian American experience. Eds. Kenneth Giongoli and Jay Parini. (Hannover:
UP of New England, 1997), 52.
63 Smith, “The American Melting Pot,” 388.
64 Milton Ridvas Konvitz, The Legacy of Horace M. Kallen, (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press,
DNA. Ironically, they use this science while conveying to their customers that a DNA test provides you with a unique set of ancestors.
This notion of a human brotherhood is closely linked to the idea that the American is able to choose its own grandfathers. Only Kallen, literally arguing that one cannot change grandfathers, chooses descent over consent. However, many of Kallen’s ideas are consistent with the rhetoric of the DTC DNA ancestry industry. Both agree that respecting ancestors and pride of race are of key importance, and that your ancestors constitute the self. The DTC DNA ancestry vogue has enforced the idea of claiming your own ancestry and created a new ethnic craze, enabling every American to add a hyphen to their existing identity. Claiming your own ancestors implies that the existing narrative identity is easily replaced in order to fit the American ideal. We will see that the rhetoric of DNA ancestry companies implies that the narrative identity should be dismissed if this science proves it to be incorrect or incomplete.
Although the Melting Pot play seems to dispose of the individual identity by arguing that a uniform American would emerge from the mixing of all nationalities and ethnicities, subsequent additions to the narrative do emphasize the importance of an individual identity in American society. Both Kallen and Bourne believed ethnicity to be of great importance to the self. The unalterable nature of ethnicity is prominent in Kallen’s sketch of an American symphony: each instrument is an ethnic group and contributes to the American symphony of civilization. In his turn, Bourne longed for a continuation of group distinctiveness and identification with the mother country. The DTC DNA ancestry industry likewise links ethnicity to identity, and argues that only once you know what ethnicities you consist of, you can truly know yourself. For example, Full Genomes’ homepage reads:
“Full Genomes is dedicated to bringing you the best sequencing experience possible, by combining next generation sequencing technology with an easy to use, feature-rich web experience—to allow you to explore yourself—your history, your ancestry, your genealogy.”
The goal of these companies is to connect their customers to a genetic community, consisting of people with the same variation in their DNA. Kallen, Bourne and DTC DNA ancestry companies all argue that there is no uniform American ethnicity or identity, as they believe diversity defines what it means to be an American.
The two narratives have been able to appeal to the American public due to two generic traits characteristic to most national myths. The first trait is simplicity: melting pot imagery is used to represent a highly complex process of immigration and ethnic relations that
symbolism does not correspond with the complexity of the phenomenon it describes.65 The DTC DNA ancestry industry similarly uses simplicity by dumbing down the highly complex biological background of DNA testing in order to make strong identity claims.66 The narrative does not seem to take in account the tensions surrounding ethnicity in American society as they urge people to uncover and celebrate their heritage. In the third chapter we will see that television series Finding Your Roots does acknowledge differences in structural assimilation between ethnic, racial and religious minorities, but that it oversimplifies statements about society just like the melting pot symbol has done.
The second trait characteristic to most national myths is ambiguity. The melting pot narrative cannot be precise and comprehensive because it is a multi-dimensional phenomenon with multiple outcomes. Sociologist Milton M. Gordon explains: “The symbol is one which singularly lends itself to expression in vague rhetoric, which, however noble it aims, gives minimal clues as to the exact implications of the term for the manifold spheres of societal organization and behavior.”67 The melting pot is applicable to a number of different positions regarding immigration matters, from Anglo-conformity to more liberal policies of unrestricted immigration and laissez-faire integration policies. The consequence is that the symbol has been adopted for both justification of immigration restrictions in the 1920s, as well as its reversal in the 1960s. Another vague aspect of the melting pot was the supposed outcome of the symbol: was it supposed to transform both the old stock and the immigrants alike or was it Anglo-conformist view in which the immigrant were to dissolve in existing society?68
Ambiguity is likewise central in the DTC DNA ancestry narrative. There has been much debate on how to interpret the results of DTC DNA tests and it is similarly a multi-dimensional phenomenon with multiple outcomes. The DNA ancestry industry lies at the crossroads of genetics, law and society, which raises much discussion on the implications of these DNA tests on American society. The narrative is malleable to a number of views on the future of ‘race,’ ranging from predicting a new discriminatory era to expecting a beneficial outcome for society.69
Both narratives combine the unique immigration experience of the U.S. with the nationalist ideal of homogeneity. They stress the belief that the immigrant should play an active role in obtaining the American identity: the melting pot narrative conveys that
65 Konvitz, The Legacy of Horace M. Kallen, 398.
66 Nordgren and Juengst. “Can Genomics Tell Me Who I Am?,” 163.
67 M. M. Gordon, Assimilation in American life: The role of race, religion, and national origins, (New York,
NY: Oxford University Press, 1964), 124.
68 Smith, “The American Melting Pot,” 399.
immigrants have to play an active role in their own assimilation process, and the DTC DNA ancestry companies argue that the American identity can only be fully understood once people look into their ancestry. Both narratives imply that immigrants and their culture contribute to what it means to be an American.
We have seen that claims have been made that the 1924 immigration restrictions were the result of scientific racism. In the following years, scientific discoveries have contributed to the multicultural self-image of America by turning racial categories upside down and
demonstrating that race as a scientific concept holds no water. The irony is that scientists such as Francis Galton and James Watson, who respectively introduced the world to genetics and DNA, both voiced racist comments based on scientific grounds. In 1883 Galton coined the term eugenics: the set of beliefs and practices aimed at improving the genetic quality of the human population. Almost a century later in 1953, Watson and his colleague Francis Crick discovered the double helix structure of DNA. In 2007, Watson told the Sunday Times that while people may like to think that all races are born with equal intelligence, those “who have to deal with black employees find this not true.”70 This is the danger of DTC DNA ancestry testing: the outcome of the tests can be interpreted in both ways. It proves that we are more alike and more intertwined than we could have ever imagined, but it also shows that different ethnicities have different markers in their DNA.
70 Adam Rutherford, “He may have unraveled DNA, but James Watson deserves to be shunned,” The Guardian,
accessed on June 24, 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/01/dna-james-watson-scientist-selling-nobel-prize-medal.
Chapter II – Scientific Identity
Are we able to truly know are ancestors? And more importantly, is our ancestry monetizable? The DTC DNA ancestry vogue taking the nation by storm sure leads to believe so. While the white ethnic revival in the 1960s and 1970s was limited to people whose genealogical records showed ancestors of various ethnicities, the DNA ancestry vogue has enabled the entire American population to participate in the new heritage craze. These DNA ancestry tests guarantee to unveil your genetically mixed heritage, even when genealogical records show no sign of these unique attributes to your identity. The beauty of the DNA ancestry industry is that it offers the appealing notion that our identity is not a matter of existential choice but rather one of empirical discovery.71 This means our identity is a product of nature and that it is therefore only a matter of uncovering the hidden facts in our genes to come to our true ‘self.’ This genetic essentialism suggests that our genomes define our behavior, condition and personal identity in the same way our soul has done prior to technological innovations.72 Because the newfound DNA identity is framed as a biological discovery, ancestry companies imply that the results of their tests are the equivalent of scientific facts. The majority of the customers accept this belief, as stories show that test results have the power to change existing narrative identities.73 Even Henry Louis Gates Jr. wondered “Am I still black?” after discovering that he has European ancestors on both his maternal and paternal side. Such outbursts lead to the belief that fundamental changes have occurred, while in fact nothing has actually changed. All in all, the test results indicate that people turn away from their own existing narrative community created around common location, religion or language and accept new global communities formed through the outcomes of DNA tests.74
In a 2014 press release Ancestry.com enlightens consumers on the workings of AncestryDNA, a new genetic testing service offered by the company. This tool enables African Americans to identify their ethnicity beyond just a continent. During the Middle Passage and upon arrival in America, former inhabitants of the African continent were
stripped of their individual heritage and were simply coined ‘Africans,’ or better yet, ‘slaves.’ The DTC DNA ancestry industry offers African-Americans a unique opportunity to reverse migration to see from which lands their ancestors have sprung. Ancestry.com’s press release reads: “New discoveries around culture, identity and family history reveals African
71 Nordgren and Juengst. “Can Genomics Tell Me Who I Am?,” 162.
72 Ibidem, 157.
73 Stevens, “Genetimes and Lifetimes,” 11.
Americans are their own ‘melting pot’ with an average of three or more African regions as part of their family history.”75 It is implied that this science can uncover the regions where African ancestors have come from and how ancestors from these regions have intermixed during the melting pot process.
We see that unlike most earlier statements of the melting pot, the DTC DNA ancestry industry assumes that the melting process of the new American is not something projected into an American future; rather, it has already occurred. The melting-pot has created a multi-ethnic society through intermarriage and assimilation and we are now witnessing a trend to uncover what went into the crucible. I must note that there are some contributions to the melting pot narrative that also believed that the melting process had already occurred. An example is Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘Smelting Pot.’ In 1845, Emerson responded to the descent-orientated Know-Nothings by imagining an utopian product of a culturally and racially mixed society.76 And of course Mark Twain, who declared himself to be a product of the melting pot by proclaiming to be an “exquisite mongrel.”
Ancestry.com’s statement further argues that different ethnic groups are melting pots in their own right. Examples of such sub-melting pots have been given by Abraham Cahan and Alain Locke. The first described the Lower East Side of New York in 1896 as an all-Jewish melting pot: “a seething human sea fed by streams, streamlets and rills of immigration flowing from all the Yiddish-speaking centers of Europe.”77 Locke applied the rhetoric of the ‘new man’ to the ‘New Negro’ deriving from the alchemical laboratory in Harlem where African Americans were reborn: “what began in terms of segregation becomes more and more, as its elements mix and react, the laboratory of great race-welding.”78 Contrary to the overarching American melting pot, these subgroups could challenge national cohesion.
Science behind Direct-to-Consumer DNA ancestry testing
The science behind genetic genealogy is extremely complex, but a basic understanding of our 23 chromosome pairs is essential to comprehend the rhetoric of the DTC DNA ancestry companies. Almost everyone has 23 pairs of chromosomes, consisting of 22 autosomal chromosome pairs and one sex-linked chromosome pair. Both males and females have
75 “AncestryDNA Advances Exploration of African American Ethnic Origins by Coupling Genetic Science with
Historical Records,” Ancestry.com, accessed on June 24, 2016, http://corporate.ancestry.com/press/press- releases/2014/2/AncestryDNA-Advances-Exploration-of-African-American-Ethnic-Origins-by-Coupling-Genetic-Science-with-Historical-Records/.
76 Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, 95.
77 Abraham Cahan, Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1896), 13.
autosomal chromosomes and each pair includes one copy inherited from each parent. The sex-linked chromosome is different: men inherit a Y chromosome from their father and an X chromosome from their mother. Women, in contrast, receive an X chromosome from both their mother and father.79 Only the Y chromosome is passed almost identically from father to son, son to grandson, and so on. When genetic change occurs in a Y chromosome, it can be passed down to male descendants through time, serving as a consistent marker of their paternal lineage.80 While the Y chromosome is chaste, the X chromosome of the mother and father physically cross during the formation of egg and sperm.
Ancestry tests see the genome as a set of markers. Each marker consists of a specific pattern of As, Cs, Gs and Ts and can be found at a specific location on the genome (e.g. TAACGGA). These letters represent the chemical code of DNA. These tests assume that the ancestors of all living humans once shared a set of markers. At some point in history an individual experienced a mutation in this specific pattern (e.g. TAACGGA = TATCGCA: an A is mutated into a T). This individual would pass on this mutation to his descendants,
producing a slightly modified version of the marker. These descendants might also experience mutations of their specific pattern, leading to changes in other markers of the genome. If the group of descendants is isolated from rest of the human population, e.g. through migration, the modified markers become group characteristics. It is possible that others outside of this group experience the same mutations in their DNA, but statistically speaking, a specific mutation of the marker is more likely to appear in one group rather than in the human population as a whole. The more markers you test and compare to human migration and evolution theories, the more precise the outcome will be.81
Most of the DTC DNA ancestry companies offer one or more of the following three tests: autosomal marker tests, mitochondrial DNA tests (also known as mtDNA) and Y chromosome tests. Autosomal tests focus on the 22 non-sex-chromosome pairs inherited from both parents. These DNA tests measure the likelihood of matches against biogeographic regions of the world. Within autosomal testing, we can identify two different tests: the first type uses the framework of racial and ethnic divisions and turns to ancient world migrations to calculate ‘genetic percentages’ of racial or ethnic admixture.82 These tests use categories that roughly respond to the commonly perceived ‘races’: East Asian, European, Native
79 Hughes, “23andYou.”
80 Ibidem.
81 Stevens, “Genetimes and Lifetimes,” 4.
82 Anders Nordgren, “The Rhetoric Appeal to Identity on Websites of Companies Offering Non-Health-Related
American and Sub –Saharan African. The second type calculates the likelihood of matches against objectively identified contemporary populations. These tests identify the ethnic groups and populations where the person’s DNA profile is most common, for every distinct ethnic group has one mutation in its genome that sets it apart from other groups.83 While some companies portray their DNA test results as conclusive, other companies point out that very few people are ‘pure-race:’ many people have multiple mutations in their DNA and can be connected to many groups.84
The remaining two tests are sex-linked and only follow one line of descent. The mtDNA test traces the matrilineal line of a person’s ancestry. This mitochondrial DNA is passed down almost unchanged from mother to child. Y chromosome tests follow the paternal line of someone’s ancestry. We have seen that the Y chromosome does not occur in female DNA, which means that these tests are only available to men. Individuals are categorized into haplogroups by these sex-linked DNA tests, which are populations defined by certain single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs): locations where one nucleotide has mutated to a different one. These mutations have occurred at specific points in human history and these tests are based on the knowledge of ancient world migrations and evolutionary theory.85
A Human Brotherhood
Since the completion of the Human Genome Project in the early 2000s, dozens of DTC DNA ancestry companies have been popping up online.86 Most of these companies are American based and offer consumers with roots elsewhere a useful tool to follow their origins across the Atlantic Ocean. Bioethicist Anders Nordgren has ascribed the rapid growth of DTC DNA companies in America to the leading position of the U.S. in the field of genetic research and its strong tradition of private business.87 These companies are Silicon Valley’s sweethearts, a place often hailed with terms such as ‘the Epicenter of the information Age’ and the
‘Birthplace of the Digital Age.’88
However, the current American trend to connect to ancestral roots is not solely a contemporary phenomenon. Alexis de Tocqueville had identified the same phenomenon in 1835: “Almost every American wishes to claim some connection by birth to the first founders
83 Nordgren, “The Rhetoric Appeal,” 479.
84 “The Ancestral Origins™ DNA test,” DNA Force, accessed on June 24, 2016,
http://www.dnaforce.ca/test/ancestral-origins.html.
85 Nordgren, “The Rhetoric Appeal,” 478.
86 Ibidem, 484.
87 Nordgren, “The Rhetoric Appeal,” 484.
88 Jessica Livingston, ‘Silicon Valley,’ in Class in America: Q-Z, Ed. Robert E. Weir (Connecticut: Greenwood
of the colonies and America is awash, as far as I can see, with offshoots of great English families.”89 One of Tocqueville’s generalizations about America in light of Europe is that America was a land without clear ancestral roots or socioeconomic distinction. American society had to build an industry that offered an artificial version of aristocratic roots left behind in Europe. In this sense, America would be a land of ‘invented traditions:’ traditions which appear or claim to be old, but are quite recent in origin and sometimes invented.90 The question which arises is whether the DTC DNA ancestry vogue is writing the true history of America or if it is simply inventing a new tradition.
Although impossible to generalize sentiments regarding ancestry and heritage in other parts of the world, it seems as if many countries who have not faced a break in their ancestral past are less eager to find their heritage through DNA. An example is Japan, where the Supreme Court has recently ruled that DNA test results cannot revoke paternal status of a child’s father. The ruling entailed that DNA tests are not sufficient to overturn familial paternal relations, even if the test results show no signs of blood relation to the assumed father. This means that children are legally recognized to be the offspring of their mother’s husbands, instead of their
biological fathers.91 Not every country values tradition as much as Japan, but this case shows that scientific findings do not necessarily trump traditional narrative identities like they do in America. As Hollinger has argued: “mixed race people are a powerful symbol for an
opportunity long said to distinguish American society from most societies in Europe and Asia: the making of new affiliations.”92 We do see that there is a market for DTC DNA ancestry testing in Europe and other continents, as the biggest American DTC DNA ancestry companies have expanded their business overseas.
In order to have a sufficient research sample, I consulted the following seventeen DTC DNA ancestry websites: African Ancestry (2015), Ancestry.com (2015), Determigene (2015), DNA Ancestry Project (2015), DNA Consultants (2015), Family Tree DNA (2015), DNA Tribes (2015), Home DNA Direct (2015), NIMBLE Diagnostics (2015), The Genographic Project (2015), 23andMe (2015), African DNA (2015), Ancestry by DNA (2015), Full Genomes (2015), TribeCode (2015), DNA Solutions (2015) and Easy-DNA (2015) (see
89 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (London, Penguin Books, 2003). 660.
90 Eric Hobsbawm and Terence O Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (London: Cambridge University Press.
1983), 1.
91 “Supreme Court rules DNA test results cannot revoke paternal status of child's father,” Japan Today, accessed
on June 24, 2016, http://www.japantoday.com/category/national/view/supreme-court-rules-dna-test-results-cannot-revoke-paternal-status-of-childs-father.
