Linking race and genes: racial conceptualization among genetic ancestry test-takers

ABSTRACT

The genomic revolution is highly relevant to scholarship on racial conceptualization. As genomic research has increasingly focused on small amounts of variation between ancestral groups, it may promote beliefs in racial essentialism. Genetic ancestry tests (GATs) are one of the primary ways the consequences of the genomic revolution are communicated to laypersons, necessitating a better understanding of how test-takers conceptualize race. We analyse 108 in-depth interviews with U.S. and Canadian test-takers to examine how they conceptualize the relationship between race and genes and how they believe GATs influenced their race concepts. We present a typology of racial conceptualization that moves beyond a dichotomy and toward a continuum between social constructivism and genetic essentialism. We also find that test-takers believe GATs reinforce their pre-existing race concepts, regardless of what those were. Our results support an emerging view that people selectively interpret genetic information to confirm rather than transform their race concepts.

KEYWORDS:

• Race concept
• genetic ancestry tests
• genomics
• essentialism
• constructivism

Acknowledgements

The authors sincerely thank Catherine Lee, Ann Morning, and Torsten Voigt for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Our interview guides are provided in the Online Appendix.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by generous grants from the Canada Foundation for Innovation [grant number 23744], the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number 410-2008-0110], and the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia.