WE ARE ALL TRANS-RACIAL Direct-to-Consumer DNA Ancestry Testing in Light of the Melting Pot Symbol Master thesis in History: American Studies Faculty of Humanities Author: Annemiek Smelting Student number: 10162801 E-mail address: [email protected] Thesis advisor: George H. Blaustein Second reader: Manon Parry Date: 30-06-2016 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. ii “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) ii 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 Bibliography p. 53 iii 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 (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 1919), 26. (emphasis added) 1 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 Macmillen, 2011) 156 - 157. (emphasis added) 2 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.