Digital Commons Network^™

Backdoor To Essentialism? Genetic Ancestry Testing And The Social Deconstruction Of Whiteness, Whitney Hunt

Wayne State University Dissertations

Towards the turn of the 21st century, spawned in part by the Human Genome Project, ideas about race and ethnicity shifted away from the essentialist belief that humans can be grouped into discrete, biologically relevant racial groups. More recently however, genetic ancestry testing (GAT) has exploded in popularity, as individuals seek to identify their ancestry and/or health profiles through genetic testing. Genetic testing commercials implicitly promote the essentialist belief that racial and ethnic identities are embedded in genes by portraying images of people altering travel plans, checking a different racial category on a survey, or trading in bagpipes for lederhosen, …