Genetic ancestry testing, whiteness and the limits of anti-racism

Abstract

This article explores how a branch of genomic science that embraces and advocates anti-racism, public participation, consultation and inclusion unintentionally supports everyday discourses of race and racism. It focuses on the reproduction of racism and exposes the limits of anti-racist discourses that are embedded in public engagements with the science and technology of genetic ancestry testing. I deploy a case study which is centred on the analysis of commentaries posted on the internet which were written in response to a newspaper article that criticised the science of genetic ancestry testing. This article was published in The Daily Telegraph, a broadsheet ‘quality’ newspaper in the UK. I analyse the ways in which ideas and images of British indigeneity and shared human descent that support white Western racial hierarchies, power and privileges emerge in the posts that responded to the newspaper article.