How DNA and 'recreational genealogy' is making a case for reparations for slavery

More than a decade in the writing, scholar Alondra Nelson’s new book The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations and Reconciliation After the Genome has been published at an appropriate moment. Through DNA, the book examines the construction of race in the contemporary United States and offers new ways to think about it, from the kind of “post-racial” social construction of blackness in Rachel Dolezal to the essentialist, biologically determined (and intellectually inferior) notion of blackness promulgated by Justice Antonin Scalia of the supreme court.

In an interview at Columbia University, where she’s dean of social science, Nelson described DNA as containing a social power as well as a biological one.

“We think it offers a lot of answers on things that ail us,” Nelson said. She wanted to expand the kinds of problems DNA could answer beyond those of individual health or biology to include “social and political problems, which have their historical roots in slavery”.

That may seem like a broad statement, and Nelson understands that some may doubt her. She herself admits that she only...