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If the Massachusetts senator, Elizabeth Warren, hoped that the release of the results of a DNA test would solve the problem of her claim on the Cherokee heritage, she would have quickly mistaken. In a video highlighting her family legacy, which she published Monday, Stanford University's geneticist, Carlos Bustamante, tells the camera that "the facts suggest that you absolutely have a Native American ancestor in your pedigree." "; in later tweets, Warren has explained that she published the results of the test in response to "racism" caused by President Donald Trump's repeated mockery of this part of her past.
In the days that followed, this publication revived the debate not only about the reliability of commercial DNA testing, but also its significance for race and wealth issues.
In the case of Warren, the Cherokee Nation responded that "a DNA test is useless for determining tribal citizenship" and that the use of such a test to claim a link "is inappropriate and erroneous" (Warren herself acknowledged that the results did not say anything about tribal citizenship). But the problem of trying to use a DNA test to pretend all racial identity goes well beyond this example. In fact, the tumult around Warren's case is part of a long American history of trying, unsuccessfully, to use science or pseudoscience to categorize people.
At the heart of the debate is the question of science as a social institution based on social norms – and not on a separate and apolitical enterprise based on objective observation.
The geneticist R. C. Lewontin, in his classic book Biology as ideology: the doctrine of DNA traces the link between the history of DNA and the rise of Western secularism in the 19th century. Lewontin argues that science is a social institution that, despite its claims of objectivity, "reflects and reinforces the prevailing values and views of society in every era of its history." During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the science of the time was holistic. of nature that reflected religious notions of how the world worked. Later, science evolved to reflect a new idea that to understand the whole thing, it was necessary to analyze individual fragments (such as atoms, molecules, cells and genes). "Our genes and the DNA molecules that compose them are the modern form of grace," writes Lewontin.
In this new way of thinking, which Lewontin calls "the ideology of biological determinism," these biological components tell people who they are and what their place in society is.
The mid-19th century, as I describe in my book That the blood stays pure, saw the emergence of the American School of Anthropology, which used theories of scientific racism to support the pro-slavery ideology and doctrine of Manifest Destiny – with its destruction of Amerindian communities – on the basis that WEB Du Bois later called "the coarser physical difference between hair, skin and bone". Scientific discoveries validated the societal notions of human difference in which Europeans held a more important place in humanity, with the Indians below and the Africans at the lowest.
But of the many issues raised by this idea, there was one of racial categorization based on science. If you thought that some breeds were better than others, it was very important to know who belonged to that category. The followers of this theory, whose conclusions appeared to be scientists, they used ideas from ancient European notions of religion-based blood and purity to answer their questions about the identity of whites, blacks, and natives.
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By the end of the 19th century, the ideology of biological determinism had entered American law, where blood politics reigned. People of African descent were defined by the law of hypodecence, which meant that a drop of black "blood" made it black, despite any other ancestry. At the same time, a competing concept called Blood Quantum, requiring much more than a drop, defines Native American identity. The gap between the racial definitions was captured by the author Karen Blu in her book Lumbee's problem: the constitution of a Native American people. "It may only take a drop of black blood to make a person a black, but it takes a lot of Indian blood to make it a" real "Indian," she said.
The definition of race by society – and the social ramifications of these categories – did not correspond directly to biology. Nevertheless, such ideas were on the rise.
In 1904, Charles Darwin's cousin Francis Galton delivered a lecture on the science of eugenics at the Sociological Society in London, a theory he began to develop in the 1880s and which, according to his terms, "Deals with all the influences that enhance the innate qualities of a race. "Galton 's ideas helped to spread what was to become one of the most insidious pseudoscientific falsehoods of the twentieth century: the idea that some races are biologically better than others and that human beings can be bred for improvement. He thus paved the way for a pernicious racial campaign that contributed to everything from tighter anti-mischief laws to the rise of involuntary sterilization to the philosophy of Hitler and the Third Reich.
But thinkers on the other side were already opposed to these ideas. In 1942, while Americans were crossing the Atlantic to fight in the Second World War, the anthropologist Ashley Montagu, a pupil of Franz Boas who opposed eugenics and scientific racism of the previous century, published his influential book. The most dangerous myth of the man: the sophism of the race which opposed biological determinism on the basis that the concept of race had no genetic basis. The individual physical appearance, the individual intelligence and "the ability of the group to which the individual belongs to achieve a high civilization" could not be scientifically determined.
His work has been the side that has stood the test of time. In 1998, the American Anthropological Association issued a statement on race that refuted the ideology of biological determinism and the concept of race as a scientific fact. In other words, race is politics and not biology. Yet, old myths have a hard time. Even today, many people rely on racial definitions of who is black and who is Indian, which can easily be traced back to the old ideas of the rule of the single drop and the amount of blood. .
At the same time, the question of race as a social construct considered to be settled by a large part of the scientific community has driven genetic science at full speed.
At the end of the twentieth century, as James Shreeve explains in his 2006 book National Geographic article "Reading the secrets of blood", two separate genomic projects were launched. The most popular project was the Human Genome Project, an international scientific collaboration aimed at providing the whole model of a human being by sequencing the approximately 25,000 genes in the human cell nucleus called DNA. In the summer of 2000, when scientists Francis Collins and Craig Venter went to the international press conference with President Bill Clinton to present the first project of mapping and sequencing of human DNA, the One aspect of the presentation that caught the attention of the media was the unequivocal statement that racial classifications had no biological meaning.
Advances in genetic science have also allowed home DNA testing to grow as a business, offering people a chance to see what their blood might tell them. But with this possibility, the danger of falling back into a story that many hoped to have been left behind. For example, the special PBS 2006 Afro-American lives, Henry Louis Gates, a Harvard researcher, used DNA tests to trace the supposed lineage of the eight guests in their native African countries as well as to calculate their percentage of Native American heritage. Gates was criticized for the weight he gave to DNA results, but the doors were already open: many Americans were convinced that DNA testing could provide perfect and complete evidence of the ancestral lineage.
But in fact, as scholar Kim TallBear, author of Native American DNA: tribal affiliation and false promise of genetic science, said many times: "People think that there is a DNA test proving that you are Indian. There is not one.
The use of DNA strengthens the old notions of distinct biological races and gives credence to the archaic ideas of racial purity, which white supremacists are now appropriating. That Senator Warren is turning to DNA to prove his argument is not surprising. For more than a century, Americans and others have accepted the idea that race is a blood in the search for these answers. But what people have found instead, time and time again, are more questions.
Today, science is as sacred as religion. Its so-called authoritative validity has for the most part remained unchallenged. But just as the era of science has resulted in what Lewontin has called "reasonable skepticism" of the basic claims of the institution of the Church, we must also question the radical claims of the doctrine of science if we really want to know who we are.
Historians explain how the past informs the present
Arica L. Coleman is a specialist in American history and the author of That blood stays pure: African-Americans, Native Americans and the problem of race and identity in Virginia and a former chair of the Committee on the Status of African American, Latin American, Asian American and Native American Historians (ALANA) and ALANA Histories at the Organization of American Historians.
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