Speaker 1: 0:15

Hi, this is Omid Ashtari and Natasha McElhane. We are talking about ancestry today. Our guest is Maya Jasanoff, who is the Coolidge Professor of History at Harvard University's History Department. Maya's teaching and research extend from the history of the British Empire to global history. She's the author of three prize-winning books. The Dawn Watch examines the dynamics of modern globalization through the life and times of the novelist Joseph Conrad. Her other books are Liberty's Exiles, American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World, and her first book, Edge of Empire, explores British expansion in India and Egypt through the lives of art collectors. She's currently working on a book about the human preoccupation with ancestry.

Speaker 2: 1:00

In addition to classes on imperial history, she teaches a multidisciplinary gen ed course on the topic of ancestry where do we come from and why do we care? In 2015, jasanoff was named a Harvard College Professor for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. From 2019 to 2022, she's a part-time visiting professor at Ahmedabad University in India, where she's been helping launch new curricula in the liberal arts. Jasanoff has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow at the New York Public Library's Cullman Centre for Scholars and Writers, a Kluge Chair at the Library of Congress and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study. And a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, she has participated in several BBC documentaries and her essays and reviews regularly appear in publications including the New York Review of Books, the Guardian, the New Yorker magazine and the New York Times.

Speaker 1: 1:56

We will be talking about the history of ancestry, caste systems in India, herder and the idea of a nation immigrant nations bards as knowledge keepers Race as a factor for resource allocation. Affirmative action university admissions.

Speaker 2: 2:13

Generational privilege and dispossession.

Speaker 1: 2:16

Transatlantic slave trade. Let's go back to our roots.

Speaker 2: 2:23

Hi, this is Omid Ashtari and Natasha McElhone, and with us today is Maya Jasanoff.

Speaker 1: 2:30

Hi Maya, how are you?

Speaker 3: 2:32

Hi there, Good thanks.

Speaker 1: 2:33

Thanks for dialing in remotely.

Speaker 3: 2:36

It's my pleasure.

Speaker 1: 2:37

So today we're going to talk about ancestry and I wanted to start the conversation by exploring the topic a little bit to get everybody on the same page. We see this topic popping up quite a lot. Trump recently made the accusation that Harris was Indian all her life but suddenly turned black. But just because it's convenient right now. He previously started the birther movement, questioning President Obama's credentials as an American citizen. It's part of the conversation every day in the political world, but also in many other relevant areas. We will get back to this particular topic, but let's start by defining the word ancestry and how it is delineated from other things like ethnicity, race, nationality, place, genetics and so on.

Speaker 3: 3:23

So everyone comes from somewhere and I think the shortest and simplest way to define ancestry is it's the place where we come from. Now, the minute we start pressing that, of course, we start to come up with lots of other questions. So we all come from somewhere, but there's a somewhere that's biological, and not everybody necessarily considers their closest family to be their biological relatives. There can be differences between who you think of as your parents or your siblings or your close people and who you're getting your genetic inheritance from. So right away, we want to open that up.

Speaker 3: 3:57

There's the challenge about where do you come from that people like me always face when I'm asked that in the US or anywhere in the world, I'm a person of mixed ethnicity and sometimes people are asking me where I'm from, like what's my hometown or what country do I come from.

Speaker 3: 4:16

But sometimes they'll follow up and they'll say where are you really from? And then I know that they're asking me something essentially about how I look and why I look the way I do. And so then they mean, like you know what ethnicity, national origin, whatever is your mother, layering of all different sorts of meaning there's where you personally place your identity, where you think of home as being there's. You know, aspects that have to do with religion, aspects that do have to do with your phenotype and how do you look, and things to do with your language, that you speak or grew up surrounded by, etc. Is a kind of layering of all the other ways that have accumulated over the centuries and millennia of human history. To explain where we come from and really to understand the history of ancestry is a story that takes us back many, many thousands of years.

Speaker 1: 5:39

I like the notion that you're raising. I'm not a big fan of the word identity, but in defining an identity I think the most important is actually the experiential life that one lives. And so I may be Persian from an ancestry point of view, but I actually feel very European. So the pursuit of that ancestry and looking into the past is not really saying a lot about my current identity. So that pursuit may not necessarily always help us with the way we feel about ourselves and our experiences that we have.

Speaker 3: 6:14

So when I say ancestry has an ancestry, it kind of touches on that point, which is that you know, there's a ancestry, is registered in our lives in all sorts of ways, whether we like it or not. Like you know, there's a lot of people who really enjoy doing genealogical research. Right, you go into, say, the British National Archives or record offices all over the UK and many parts of the US and you see lots of people doing research on themselves. But and that's great, that's very enriching for a lot of people research on themselves and that's great, that's very enriching for a lot of people. But there are many more people, indeed really everyone in the world, for whom ancestry matters, whether or not they want to approach it genealogically.

Speaker 3: 6:52

Why is that? Because it affects the passports we carry, it affects sometimes the rights that we hold within the countries we may live in. It affects our biology in critical ways. Whether you have a disposition for a certain kind of disease or attribute or something is obviously encoded in your genetic inheritance. And it also affects your social standing in many ways. We talk in the US now about generational wealth or, of course, the lack of ability to accumulate wealth and privilege over generations. In the UK, of course you have the class structure and you know there's all kinds of ways in which our family backgrounds can mark sort of our opportunities and points of access in life, and so ancestry matters in all those ways. What you think of as your identity might overlap with some of them, not necessarily all of them, but I think of identity as much more of a sort of personal category and I think of ancestry as much more of a sort of social, political, biological, legal category.

Speaker 2: 8:11

So that is something that you inherit, and then identity is something you maybe choose or identity is how you metabolize your inheritance.

Speaker 2: 8:21

Yeah, this Western preoccupation with trying to find out where we're from, or whether it's 23andMe or Ancestrycom or all those various things. Of course, as you've cited, some of this is for medical to be able to perhaps get ahead of genetically inherited disease, and that's useful At a time when there was so much less migration. Whether ancestry was just something that no one really thought about because the homogeneity would be so much greater that where was the question? And increasingly, as the obsession with finding out about where you come from, or do you have a thread of something that you didn't know?

Speaker 3: 9:02

about.

Speaker 3: 9:02

There's definitely been a surge of interest in this topic lately because of the advent of the direct-to-consumer DNA tests, but a preoccupation with ancestry is as old as human history and in fact the history of humanity is fundamentally a history of migration.

Speaker 3: 9:21

It's now, actually, using genetic tools Population geneticists have been able to chart the deep history of human migration with greater precision than ever before and have been able to disrupt, for one thing, the old narrative that I learned in school, for instance, that Homo sapiens originated in Africa and then kind of walked all over the rest of the world.

Speaker 3: 9:44

We now have a much richer and more complex picture of that and we have a picture of humanity over the last, you know, tens of thousands of years. That just shows that it's one move after another after another of peoples into different places, mixing with each other, creating new peoples, etc. So I would view that as the backdrop of any more modern interest that we have in this topic, and I would also use it to say that arguably one of the reasons that an interest in where we come from and how we should organize ourselves, which is very much what ancestry has been used for historically to create different kinds of hierarchies and social positions mixed, they've moved, they've grown bigger and more complex in different ways, and all sorts of methods have been developed to keep track of who's who, who can marry whom, who can inherit what, who can occupy which kinds of social positions. And this sort of process of the mixing and the sorting is something that's really intrinsic, I would say, to the history of human civilization.

Speaker 2: 11:08

But if our ancestry is less connected to the piece of land that we come from or that we were born in, there has been a shift or a change in that respect.

Speaker 3: 11:20

So back to the history, the ancestry of ancestry. So one of the things that I'm fascinated by as a historian is how different groups of people align with different geographical places and with different structures of power.

Speaker 3: 12:04

And again, if you just look at the big arc of human history, you know, from 3,000 to 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia or whatever, you'll see that this question of how people, place and power line up is, you know, one of the kind of big moving targets, as it were, of all of historical change. So empires right, I mean empires are political entities in which some group of people or figures from one area is asserting power and sovereignty over other groups of people in other areas. And that's it. So happens, empires are the oldest form of governance in human history. So that's just one example.

Speaker 3: 12:25

But to jump forward in time, how the alignment of people, power and place has worked has changed a lot just in the last couple hundred years. And specifically, it has changed with the breaking up of empires and their replacement by nation states, like the UK, like the US, like France, etc. And with the advent of modern nation states where the idea is with those that the people and the place and the power all align perfectly, new senses of like who constitutes this nation have come into being, right? So one of the early theorists of this was a German philosopher called Herder, who's writing in the late 18th, early 19th century. And he says you know, the German people, the folk you know, come from this place and it is their ancestral connection to this land that makes them part of you know, that makes them the German people. And now we should have a German nation whose borders contain the German people. And so that idea that the borders should contain the people and, of course, the governance of what happens within the borders should be picked by those people, is something that really took off in, you know, the period of the French Revolution, the American Revolution, on into the later 19th century, of Germany, italy, etc. And then, of course, in the 20th century, with the breakup of the British Empire, the French Empire, etc. We see all of these nation states all over the world which kind of have these ideas at their heart.

Speaker 3: 14:02

The problem, in my view, is that all of these are a little fictitious, because the history, as I've already said, the history of humanity, is a history of movement.

Speaker 3: 14:12

But this is all a very long answer, natasha, to your point about you know people moving in the world today. It is a fact that in the last 50, 60 years of human history, the amount of global migration has been incredibly high If you look even just at the United States. I mean, the percentage of people in the US whose ancestors came to this country since 1900 is like the vast majority of Americans at this point, and so there's no question that the scale, the range, the pace of migration and mixing has really shot up in some parts of the world in the last, you know, some period like 50 years, and then before that, you know, at the end of the 19th, early 20th century, and all of that has led to kinds of mixing like, say, my own family I'm half Indian and half Ashkenazi Jewish Like this is not a union that would have been particularly common or possible is even the right word. That's the question. Do you think people are just as quote unquote obsessed?

Speaker 1: 15:19

about their. But yeah, I mean, so take India right.

Speaker 3: 15:45

So you know, in India we actually have one of the oldest and most persistent forms of social hierarchy set up around ancestry, and that is the caste system or what's now?

Speaker 3: 15:56

called the caste system. I want to, you know, just flag it to say that that word is a relative neologism and what caste means and has meant through history has changed and morphed a lot. But you know, there's evidence going back to the Vedic period, of which is like 1500 to 1000 BC, of people being divided into strata that are imbued at birth and that you can't change. And over the next hundreds and thousands of years of Indian history there's further social separation, if you will, into groups that are based on occupation and location in various ways. And those stratifications have had a huge effect on the making of South Asian society in general, so much so that even though caste is, you know, stereotypically associated with Hinduism and that is, it's kind of, if you will, it's sort of scriptural, you know foundations lie in that tradition.

Speaker 3: 17:03

You find caste among South Asians, of all religions really, and it's just a pervasive feature of social structure in the subcontinent. So how people think about it on a day-to-day basis, if you said to them, do you think about your ancestry? They might have a different answer to that question than if you asked someone in the US. But if you say, you know, does, does your social status matter to you, then I'm sure the answer would be yes, right, so, yeah, so. So it's partly about the words, but again, I mean, I like to point to that as a great example of how every society has some way of organizing itself, and more often than not that way of organization has something to do with the family into which you're born.

Speaker 2: 17:53

I just hope this isn't a non sequitur, but I just had to bring up Ruth Prowler-Javla, who you interviewed, I think, for the Yorker um some, obviously before she died some time ago, but for any listener that hasn't heard of her, she was part of the trio of the Merchant Ivory production team who made many, many wonderful movies Howard's End, heat and Dust um. I even did one which I'm not going to talk about, obnoxious and Shakespeare Waller and was, I think, their first one which was set in India. In fact, they asked her James Ivory and and Ismael Merchant asked her to write it, and she was a short story writer, I think at the time, or a novelist, and had been asked to adapt and write this and she didn't feel equipped to do so. But, what was interesting, a lot of people assumed that she was Indian because of her last name. But in fact she was married to an Indian and I think she was German, german-jewish and ended up living in the States.

Speaker 2: 18:49

And you have this beautiful I'm going to quote you because it's just such beautiful writing. You said in response to, I think, something that Salman Rushdie had said about her displacement the fact that she lived in these places and had written about these places as if she was almost from them. You said no intellect can be truly rootless. It always takes hold in the soil of influence and experience. But it's useless to expect writers to be pine trees lined up neatly in a forest. Writers to be pine trees lined up neatly in a forest, when many are more like banyans, whose dangling aerial roots can make them into a forest of one.

Speaker 3: 19:34

I think that's what we should all aspire to. Yeah, she is an example of somebody who, I think, found in the United States capacity to be international or unlocatable. That has appealed to many people about the United States. We might here want to make a kind of big distinction, I guess, between societies that in the modern era are overwhelmingly composed of immigrants and those that aren't, and so by that I mean the subtler colonial nations of you know, say, the United States or Canada or Australia.

Speaker 3: 20:09

You know, the population history of the Americas, for example, just looks really, really different from the population history of Eurasia and most of Africa.

Speaker 3: 20:20

The tools available for looking into one's genealogy today, which include these vast digitized databases of records like Ancestrycom, and also include the DNA tests, have been really revelatory to people who are the products of some of these really long range migrations, are the products of some of these really long range migrations.

Speaker 3: 20:48

I remember I was in school in the UK for half of my sixth grade year because my parents were on sabbatical and they were professors and they were in Oxford and we had this exercise in school which said you know, now we're going to do a unit on family history and here are some ways that you can go figure out about your family and you can go to the church and you can look at the parish record and you can find this stuff out. And I, even at the age of like 10 or 11 or whatever I was, I was like this is ridiculous. I mean, who can do that? Like you know, I have no ability to do that kind of thing Right, and in the United States, like you, would never give an exercise like that, because you would just know that that was not possible.

Speaker 1: 21:27

The town they were in school in, let alone, you know, with a membership in a church, let alone with, you know, records of their family background in that parish register, just again, because the amount of migration, mixing etc is so high, yeah you're raising an interesting point there, and that is that obviously genealogy before DNA testing was the pursuit of people who were living in countries that had good record keeping and also potentially it wasn't a governmental record keeping exercise but a family record keeping exercise that was there and that seems more the pursuit of privileged people. So it's quite interesting that this DNA genealogy pursuit now is a very democratizing force. It'd be interesting to explore the shift here, and prior to the DNA test, was it indeed a folly of the privileged or is it something that was more democratized?

Speaker 3: 22:37

So privilege, yes, but I would want to focus on that a little bit. So you know there's the things that we're used to that are digitized. Records are by definition. Let's say, 1800, you've got family Bibles in many Christian households and where people are able to write in the front. This happens in the United States. There's like a family register page that's placed in the front, which is in recognition of the fact that many people would record key births and marriages and deaths in the front of the family Bible. So you'll have things like that being produced already in the 19th century, which are highly democratic, right in the sense that if you can read and write and you have a Bible, you can keep track of this. But in earlier eras where literacy was less widespread, obviously that's right away some sort of distinction. So you'll often find records being kept by religious authorities who you know are literate, on behalf of people who maybe are not. And that's where you get, say, the parish register Moving away Also don't you have registers kept by an imperial power?

Speaker 2: 23:58

I mean, I know in Ireland so much was an oral tradition, and what you can find about various family trees and events too, is in the British Library. It's written by English people.

Speaker 1: 24:13

It's not actually available in Ireland?

Speaker 2: 24:15

yeah.

Speaker 3: 24:16

Well, so that's what I was going to turn to is that, you know, oral tradition is a huge part of the historical record and, embedded within that, the genealogical record, because a lot of history is kind of formulated around dynastic lineage, for example.

Speaker 3: 24:39

You see that in many historical traditions that basically you know, I'm thinking here, say, of West Africa, where there's the community of griot, who are like praise singers and also known as jellies, and they will be the keepers of a kind of oral historical tradition which combine elements of the history of, say, a place or a people with the dynastic lineage of a monarchy around which this more collective history is sort of kept. In Ireland, of course, you have these bardic productions which store within them incredible lineages of the hundreds of different kings that were scattered around Ireland before English conquest. You have, say, the sagas in Iceland. You have in the Pacific, you have oral traditions like the Fakapapa, held by Maori knowledge keepers who recite again these lineages that are passed from, typically from men to other men and will capture dozens of generations of genealogy. So back to this thing about privilege.

Speaker 3: 25:48

So where does this come in? Well, first of all, not all genealogies, of course, are kept, you know, in any of these traditions. It does tend to be the genealogies of high status individuals. Second, who knows them and has access to them? Well, often it's a kind of group of people, like designated bards, who kind of keep this knowledge for the community. And then, third, how do we know about this stuff today? Well, in some cases, of course, the oral traditions continue, traditions continue, but in many other cases, the oral traditions were then written at some point, often by colonial authorities in these different locations, who would capture it and store it and, you know, put it into archives in exactly the way you're describing Natasha for Ireland in.

Speaker 2: 26:38

Britain. Anyway, we won't go off piece. But then we get back to whose history is it? If it's a reported history and not something that has been recorded by the people who actually live in the place, but the people who are trying to control or gerrymander the place, right?

Speaker 3: 26:54

Yeah, although I might, I guess maybe I'm a little bit less cynical about it in one respect which is that you know there's so much snobbery in broadly Western culture for the written over the oral, and you know you read 19th century histories, for example, and they're just full of contempt for societies in which there weren't sort of stable written records about things and where you see, for example, the boundaries between what to a European imperialist would look like real fudging between mythology and history in what purport to be historical records.

Speaker 3: 27:33

Right, they get very worked up about you know what they think of as mythic accounts of kings descended from gods and so on, and they don't take seriously the information that they're being given by non-European informants, which is to say that there's no. How would I put it? When you are living in a society with rich oral traditions, your forms of knowledge are in the 18th, 19th, 20th centuries, are held to be inferior by the Europeans, for example, americans, whoever they are, who are coming in and trying to write all those things down. And so on the one hand, yeah, you could say that writing these things down is a form of control. It can be wrapped up with different kinds of ethnocentrism and contempt and all of that, but on the other hand, I would also just say that writing it down has allowed for a type of passage into scholarly study and kind of circulation and readership and all that that maybe wouldn't have existed.

Speaker 1: 28:49

The flip side of this actually reminds me of a movie. Have you seen Killers of the Flower Moon?

Speaker 3: 28:55

I haven't seen it, but I read the book.

Speaker 1: 28:57

Okay, oh, you read the book, okay, so you know. You know what it's about. So, just for the listeners who haven't seen it, it's essentially a film about a Native American tribe and their ownership of the land and them getting payouts based on their ancestry and about white men that therefore want to get married to, specifically, the women of this tribe, to control them and to get the money from the state. So that's a negative version of this ancestry being exploited in some shape or form.

Speaker 3: 29:26

And it's record keeping. You know, I really think that writing we could probably talk a lot about just the role of writing in general and what does it do and what does it not do. And you know, there's this incredible thing that happens in the United States that you're touching on with the case of the Indian nations in Oklahoma, where you know, basically to be recorded in writing in European and American law. Law in many countries is the way that you get the way you get recognition, right, like you know, think about the advent of, say, the birth certificate. Right, this is a thing which comes into being and what, like you know, really becomes systematized in the 19th century. And the birth certificate is itself now, in the United States, for example, the one document you kind of need to start generating everything else, right, your driver's license, your social security, whatever it is. But what is the birth certificate? It's a way of the state keeping track of who you are, who your parents are, which is the critical thing, right, classifying you in different ways, and it's the thing that makes you a legal person, and without that you're like you might exist, but you're not like a legal person. You can't go in and claim pension benefits or get a passport or something like that. Okay, so this is a long way of saying. Being written down and recorded is, in the legal arrangements of the world today, the entry ticket, as it were, to being a person, and so scrolling back to the 19th century.

Speaker 3: 31:08

In the wake of the horrific Indian removals that happened in the US, where the Cherokee, the Creek and others were driven out of their homelands in the southeastern United States into Oklahoma, where they now reside, they were given land and then they were deliberately, quote unquote, settled on this land into plots that were meant to make them sort of live according to the standards of the white European, you know, nuclear family living in its farmhouse, having its 20 acres or whatever it was.

Speaker 3: 31:48

And as that process happened, they were recorded. They were given land grants, so they were recorded on these registers, which are called the Dawes Rolls, and their names are there and, like you know who are they, what land are they on, et cetera. And those documents in turn became the ticket to entry, as it were, to recognition in the tribal nations of the Cherokee today, so if you want to be enrolled in the tribe apologies to anyone listening who might know even in greater detail how this process works than I do, but if you want to be enrolled in the tribe, one way to do it is to show your dissent from a person written in the Dawes rules. So it's this really interesting recursive process. Right where you know certain kinds of record keeping beget other kinds of record keeping that can then have sort of backwash effects on the non in this case non-white population, non-european population, for whom you know the white government kept the records, kept the records.

Speaker 1: 32:52

Yeah, it's ironic in some sense, yeah yeah, do you think that, say, the colonizer and the colonized or the oppressor and the oppressed, is thinking differently about this concept of ancestry, and how so?

Speaker 3: 33:06

you mean, is the the person who's collecting the data?

Speaker 3: 33:09

so yes, exactly, thinking about it differently yeah, well, sure, I mean, I think that there there's two sets of things. One of them is for what purposes are they collecting it? And they're collecting it for, you know, everything from surveillance to keeping track of who might be of age to serve in a military, to things to do with the distribution of resources and welfare, but none of those are necessarily reasons why people would keep track of their own ancestry, right? And then second, and I think hugely significant, is that when you had overwhelmingly Europeans going into non-European parts of the world in the 18th, 19th, 20th century, 17th as well, to govern non-European peoples, the categories that they tried to fit people into for their record-keeping purposes were not necessarily, you know, coterminous with the categories that people saw themselves in.

Speaker 3: 34:08

So, back to caste because we were talking about that earlier which is a term, incidentally, which comes into English via Portuguese, the Portuguese are using it in the way the Spanish also did, out of a context coming from the Inquisition in Europe, where they're interested in thinking about the differences between Christians, Jews and Muslims. They go to the Americas where they encounter indigenous Indians and they also initiate the transatlantic slave trade, and then they go to in, or, simultaneously, they go to india and they have this word casta that's come from europe via the atlantic back into india. Anyway, that's a long story for that word. But what happens when you get, say, the first census takers for the census of india, british census takers at the end of the 19th century is that they are trying now to classify all of the people that they see. And they take this concept of caste and they try to decide like, okay, here's this caste of you know these people who are shoemakers in Bengal, and there's these people who are shopkeepers in Gujarat and there's these people who are, you know, Muslim theater performers or you know whatever.

Speaker 3: 35:19

And they start enumerating all of these categories and in the process they may misunderstand the parameters of those categories or they may give them a type of coherence that they didn't have before and they start writing up you know, all of these lists or schedules of casts and if you belong to this or this or this or this, you know you may get this set of privileges, If you belong to those, you may get that set of privileges, etc.

Speaker 3: 35:47

And all of this has a big, long afterlife in post-colonial India. And now in India you have these different groups, the scheduled and unscheduled of the British you know, are now classified in slightly different ways. But there's so-called backward castes and you know various other groups and in a system now in India which is resembles that of affirmative action, there are different so-called reservations in, you know, government jobs or university places or something like that for members of some of these communities, some of them historically disenfranchised. But classification is a big feature of modern states, colonial or otherwise, and how a government classifies people is not necessarily the same as how a person would classify themselves.

Speaker 2: 36:37

And just on the subject of affirmative action, how much do you think this focus on ancestry, particularly in America, in the political arena anyway? How much do you think that it's changed? Let's say you work at Harvard, a university campus. How representative is that now of society at large or what these students are going to experience out in the world once they leave that campus?

Speaker 1: 37:04

and and. To tack on to that, this whole notion of dei clearly also has a lot to do with ancestry, in a way, and is correlated with what natasha was saying.

Speaker 3: 37:13

Yeah, so affirmative action has a long history in the united states. I'm not an expert in it, but I'll. But I'll just note that we have had a number of important Supreme Court decisions about this, notably one from last year where maybe it was two years ago now, but it's come into effect with relevance to the newly admitted students of many universities this year which does not allow race to be factored into college admissions. Which does not allow race to be factored into college admissions. So a generation or more. How new is that? That's just a year is it Just recently?

Speaker 1: 37:48

Yeah, it's just now.

Speaker 3: 37:50

So, for example, many universities have published their demographics of their entering freshman class and have shown, for example, mit, that the number of Black and Hispanic Latino students has dropped pretty significantly in the wake of this decision. So you know what you're seeing. There is a moving set of legal interpretations and decisions that structure the extent to which people are allowed, as it were, to take race into consideration in allocating resources. I would step back from all that to say that what's really at stake here is a question of how you deal with generational dispossession and generational privilege, and Every society has it, and societies, governments, electorates, all need to ask themselves or some of them choose to ask themselves how much they want to let that stand and how far are they willing to use the capacities of the state, for example, in order to remedy, say, historic injustice, or historic, I should say lack of privilege. Let's just say lack of privilege, right? So there are different ways to do this.

Speaker 3: 39:25

Take the UK. You know, in the Labour government, after World War Two, they decided to put a big tax on estates. Why? Because you're going to not allow people who have accumulated vast amounts of wealth just to pass it on in a society where there are lots of way less wealthy people and you need to fund things that are going to support them right, so you can, as it were, socially manage your polity in all kinds of ways. Now in the United States we have this not just the United States, obviously, many countries but we have this particular correlation around the legacies of slavery and historic lack of privilege. And so you know, obviously for the enslaved African Americans who were liberated, freed, emancipated I should say emancipated in the were liberated, freed, emancipated I should say emancipated in the 1860s. They had zero capacity before that to accumulate any kind of wealth and so on, and then for generations after that there were all kinds of blocks put in the way of social advancement.

Speaker 2: 40:26

But is some of it the fact that those people have been imported? They've been forcibly made to enter into the United States, unlike every other?

Speaker 3: 40:36

immigrant who, at some level, made a choice. I mean to me the huge. Yeah, totally so. You have this sedimented injustice that begins in slavery and continues way after slavery. That means that the capacity of descendants of enslaved African Americans and generally of black Americans to live in certain neighborhoods, to buy houses, to have access to college and so on was just massively limited.

Speaker 2: 41:10

And it means that for the United States, the question of how you deal with generational privilege and generational lack of privilege is unusually strongly correlated to the question of racial justice and do you think sorry to interrupt, but do you think that makes the states ahead of the rest of the world in wrestling with these issues? And this just goes back to your original question in a sense, that this is being played out in this political arena, this provocation makes me think. I don't know, I can't figure it out. I'm like, are they way ahead in asking these questions and examining it, or is there something that's just not moved and isn't moving and feels intractable in some way?

Speaker 3: 41:55

So I guess I would resist a little bit the language of sort of a head behind as such. I would just say that again, like I think if we look around the world we see a lot of countries in which there's wrestling around the basic question right, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3: 42:09

And so. But in the US, I definitely think that the role of race in that discussion is incredibly high. Brazil too, from my understanding of it. I'm not an expert on it, but basically, many countries in the Americas are dealing with the multi ethnic and multiracial populations that were created under conditions, in part, of slavery. And so you know, Cuba, Brazil, the United States, they're all you know, facing, you know they all have populations, many, many other countries too, that have huge numbers of descendants of formerly enslaved Africans. I should add, by the way, just a little footnote it's not as though only the Americas deals with the legacy of the Atlantic slave trade. Obviously, West Africa does too, but anyway what I was going to say. So in the US, these things are intellectually entwined, as is this question of native dispossession, right so? But in terms of like, where are we at in our conversation here?

Speaker 3: 43:05

I think that what is going on, has been going on for the last while in the United States, is that the relationship of race, specifically to economic disadvantage specifically, has been challenged in certain ways. So you asked earlier, Natasha, like if you go around Harvard, is it representative of the rest of the country? Well, I would say what's representative? We're in a country where there's 50 states and tons of rural people and urban people and people of different ethnicities and people of different wealth levels and so on, and no place is going to be a perfect microcosm of that. What we have as an institution and as a country, prioritized in recent years, is a certain kind of ethnic or racial diversity. So, before this Supreme Court decision, a place like Harvard would have had a percentage of Black students, a percentage of Latino students that reasonably closely resembled that in the country.

Speaker 2: 44:15

As a whole and because that was a correlate of their lack of privilege.

Speaker 3: 44:20

Well, because it was considered to be important for the university to create a student body that had this diversity, and they were allowed, as part of the admissions process, to take into account an applicant's race as a factor in deciding whether or not to give them admission. And now they're not allowed to do that, and so they're not able to.

Speaker 2: 44:44

Where does that leave the situation then?

Speaker 3: 44:46

Well, the thing I wanted to add here is okay, so we decided that it was really important to have. I wanted to add here is okay, so we decided that it was really important to have racial diversity. I think it's very important to have racial diversity, but you also then had other kinds of diversity, like how much are people who are the first generation in their family to go to college represented? How much are people who go to public school ie state school rather than a private school with a high tuition being represented? How much are people from states not on the coasts being represented? How much do we want to have international students? You know, all of these questions, right, are there.

Speaker 3: 45:29

And so what's happened in the United States, I think, politically, is that this question of you know, whether we want to think about inequality in terms of race or whether we want to think about it in terms of wealth, has been sometimes quite instrumentally separated for political reasons, reasons. Trump is somebody who's wanted to separate that but it's also been muddled, I think, in some very important ways, because what we've seen in this country is that diversification of the elite has worked out okay. I mean, you look at Barack and Michelle Obama, right, who themselves will say we are products of affirmative action. Like we went to the best schools, we were able to succeed. We're still, you know, the victims of racism and terrible attacks, but we've been able to get where we are because this country has made certain decisions and you know they exemplify that and I think it's fantastic.

Speaker 3: 46:24

However, you know you also have huge numbers of people now who are in a country where inequality is rising. Overall life expectancy for white Americans, white men in particular, has been actually dropping. The gulfs between your expectations as a person growing up in, say, a rural part of this country versus, you know, in a suburb of a wealthy city, you know, has increased and the barriers to entry, to getting into college at all, seem to have increased, both in terms of the selectivity of the college but also in terms of the cost of the college. That has made it really out of control.

Speaker 3: 47:03

So all of which is just to say that you know we in my opinion we're in the middle of a period in which the exact relationship of ancestry and privilege and access is actually being sort of shaken up a little bit, and there are people who will argue I'm sympathetic to this, though not an expert who will say look, any policy in America that is good for the poor is good for black Americans and you know, who are disproportionately among the poor. Any policy in America that is good for the poor is disproportionately good for recent, many recent immigrants not all by any means. You know. Any policy that is good for the poor is good for creating equality in America.

Speaker 1: 47:52

And that's the kind of position, bernie.

Speaker 3: 47:54

Sanders will be, you know, is the notion of being colorblind.

Speaker 1: 47:58

Basically, in the policies that you make, rather focus on socioeconomic background and thereby you're getting everybody along that is basically unequal in terms of economic means. I want to take us away from this towards the 30 million people that at this point have taken genetic tests and talk a little bit about this. How accurate are these? How do you think this is affecting people's thinking about their ancestry? If we go far back, 300,000 years, we're all brothers and sisters genetically speaking, so in a way, this is an arbitrary pursuit, but what are your thoughts on this? Can this lead to, say, society growing together a little bit more, because we're all from everywhere and the realization of that is great, or is this going to be in a Create more separateness, exactly.

Speaker 1: 48:48

Going back to eugenics, kind of idea like actually create a dystopia in some shape or form.

Speaker 3: 48:53

Yeah. So I mean, look, I think it's magic. I mean that we can figure this out and we can spin in a tube and we got this stuff back is totally amazing and, as you said earlier, like it's incredibly democratizing, because people who haven't had access to written records, you know, suddenly they get a sense of insight. I think that's wonderful. I think it's a mistake to imagine, however, that the way that people interpret the results of these tests is somehow, you know, independent of all of the cultural, political, economic and legal baggage that goes with ideas about ancestry.

Speaker 3: 49:32

So suppose you take a test and it says you know you come from such and such region in this percentage. Well, what are your associations with that region? How are they formed? What's the mental image you create of a person from that region? What hair color do they have, what skin color do they have, et cetera. You know, all of that exists totally outside the DNA test. The DNA test is just giving you runs of your snips, as they call them. You know, and it's not telling you anything about. You know your skin color, or something like that, but we people plug that stuff in, right? The other thing I would say about it is that, uh, the tests are only as good as the data sets that they're connected to.

Speaker 1: 50:18

Yeah, on that point actually sorry, it came to my mind. I was a early adopter of 23andme and in the beginning they had no information about me. I actually took the test and they didn't have any other iranians or, you know, people from the middle east really and over time that has changed drastically. Also, my composition has changed over time and that has something to do with the sample, as you say, which I found.

Speaker 3: 50:39

Yeah, so you're a perfect example of this. I mean, you know the percentage of people in the databases who are of essentially white European ancestry is dramatically higher than others, and there are people who are working hard to correct that there. You know there's a lot of politics around the whole question. But you know, if, if they say you know you are such and such percentage, such and such group of people, you know it's, it's dependent on how, how representative that set of samples of that group of people is.

Speaker 3: 51:08

And as a geneticist friend of mine puts it, you know what the test is really good at telling you is where in the world you are most likely to have sixth cousins today. More right, more than it's good at telling you like this is the place that your ancestor lived, right. So so I think you know we need to just have some caveats around it that way. And then the final thing I would say is that, as one can readily deduce just by doing the powers of two that all of us have, you know, going back in our family trees, you know at some point you just do not carry genetic material from all of your ancestors. And so you know every record of ancestry is selective, whether it's a family tree, whether it's a birth certificate, whether it's your DNA, and the amount of resolution that we can get on, for example, geography or ethnicity of a forebear, more than I forget the number now, but let's say 10 generations ago is just not that great.

Speaker 1: 52:14

Yeah, just for the listeners. If you think about how this works, last generation, mom and dad, the generation before, two grandparents on each side, so all of a sudden it's four. So it's always to the power of two how this genetics evolves. And if you go 10 generations back or say crazy number 35, for everyone, there's gonna be more people on planet Earth if they were not related than that existed at the time. So actually we're very related even at that stage, if you do the math, which I think is quite interesting.

Speaker 3: 52:42

Yeah, exactly, and so you know. One thing that the tests are good at picking up on is the extent to which there's been intermarriage within communities.

Speaker 3: 52:53

So for example, people wonder why being Ashkenazi Jewish, for example, is a strong genetic marker, which it is. You can absolutely tell if somebody is Ashkenazi Jewish or not. Why? Because the intermarriage among Ashkenazi Jews is unbelievably high, going back for thousands of years. Same thing for some Indian communities, by the way, back to caste. Geneticists have been able to show that from about, you know, the beginning of the first millennium, there are pretty strong signals in certain communities that there's endogamous, you know intermarriage going on within those communities that have kept them, you know, pretty genetically distinct for a long period of time.

Speaker 1: 53:32

Right, but your perception is that this is a net positive for us.

Speaker 3: 53:37

Yeah, I mean, look, I think I think that I always think more information is good. So I mean, first of all, there's that it's giving us information, it's giving us more information about human history and human variety. I think it's great for people who are searching for some sense of ancestry and don't have other means of accessing it, and I think that. But well, so those two things. But I don't think that there's any reason to think that just because we have this information, or more of it, we're suddenly going to become more tolerant. I mean, some people might, some people might not. There's evidence done by some sociologists that they've looked at people who've done these tests and they found results they don't like and guess what? They find ways to explain around it.

Speaker 2: 54:26

In terms of feeling liberated from your genealogy or your ancestry. I know certain friends of mine when we've had that conversation around being asked as you started the conversation, saying that people will press you. They might say which town are you from, where were you raised, or no, no, no, but where are you really from? That sort of infamous question. I think it's changed, even in a generation. But you correct me, I don't't know, because I'm not the recipient of this question, but my friends who have been and are and continue to be my younger friends, say they love it. They love saying um, oh, I'm from costa rica or iran.

Speaker 2: 55:05

I grew up in germany, but I live here in the uk and have an american accent and other other, and so it just makes me think that there must be some kind of progress in that people of my age feel much, much more assaulted by that question, as if there's an implication that they don't belong right, there's that provocation.

Speaker 3: 55:25

I mean so much depends on what you intuit. If the person asking you the question right.

Speaker 3: 55:29

Like. I'll give you an example. Because of my mixed background, I have sort of, you know, medium brown skin and black hair, and when I'm in the United States a lot of people think, by just looking at me, that I might be Latina. And I get addressed in Spanish frequently, particularly in places where there's a high Latino population, and I don't speak Spanish really. I mean, I can understand some but I do not speak good Spanish. And there's a part of me that when I'm addressed in Spanish, sort of thinks wait, how do you? How come you're assuming I speak this language? That I don't assume that I don't, that I don't speak, but I've come to see more often than not it's a, it's a form of affinity creation rather than separation.

Speaker 2: 56:17

Right that the place is another way.

Speaker 3: 56:19

Oh, yeah, yeah exactly, Exactly, and so you know, I feel embarrassed that I don't speak better Spanish but, I, don't have a problem being addressed in Spanish, you know, and so.

Speaker 3: 56:32

So that's. That's an example of you know where I think that the you know you're, you're taken to be various things. Whoever you are, you're approached in different ways whoever you are, and some of those ways are exclusionary and some of those ways are inclusionary, and there are many people for whom the majority of ways they're experienced is exclusionary, and that is the thing we really need to work on in a huge way as a society, but I would say as societies. But I would say that on an individual basis. For me, whenever I feel that a person is asking me about me because they are curious, out of date to me, I tend to respond to this differently from if it's a situation where I feel like I'm suddenly being othered or treated in a way that you know just doesn't seem great, I should add.

Speaker 3: 57:43

By the way, I mean, you know, just being a woman you know like is automatically like a huge marker for how people react to you in the world, and you know, in terms of feelings of access or inclusion, or exclusion, I mean right away, that's a pretty big one. Well, we have that. How about you Me?

Speaker 1: 58:03

Yeah, to be honest, when I grew up in Germany, people asked me where I'm from and as a child, you know, I moved there. When I was two, I thought I was from there. And people ask me where I'm from and as a child, you know, I moved there. When I was two. I thought I was from there. And people ask me where I'm from in the place where I think where I'm from made me feel like I'm definitely not from there. And I would go back to iran in the summers and people would pick up on my accent and they would say you're not from here. So I never actually felt I was from anywhere because of that question of where you're from and then my other question is does that matter?

Speaker 2: 58:35

going back to your original point about us being nomadic, and this misperception. I mean, it blows my mind that people moved in the way that they did with so few resources and no access to transport, or even you know how they carried fire in in mushrooms. I can't remember. You know these extraordinary innovations that we just were so determined to wonder and to move around. I suppose we doesn't matter. I I wonder if it's a social construct.

Speaker 1: 59:02

I guess that's what I was it doesn't matter to me anyway, as I have to hear your thoughts on this as well.

Speaker 3: 59:07

You know it's a you know. I mean it seems like we have similar experiences. I mean I think that you know it's a you know. I mean it seems like we have similar experiences.

Speaker 3: 59:16

I mean I think that you know, I don't know what it's like to fit in completely, you know, I guess I would.

Speaker 3: 59:19

I mean I'd also say that whether or not one fits in is, you know, to some extent subjective, and there are lots of people who may look different from me, you know, who don't, I mean who may, who may look like they fit more readily than I do in certain settings and who don't feel that way.

Speaker 3: 59:34

So I want to just acknowledge that. But you know, I do think that the growing cosmopolitanism of major cities around the world, for example, whatever country it is, the increasing ability of people to move around and interact and meet people from other countries, from them, and all of that, you know, there's no doubt that it's made it an easier position to occupy that of the kind of unlocatable type. I do want to emphasize the role of class of this, though, which is that it's one thing for me to move around, for instance, it would be another thing for a person who's a migrant worker who thing for me to move around, for instance. It would be another thing for a person who's a migrant worker. It looks like me to move around, right, and I have an American passport which immediately gives me access to the world. I have wealth, you know I mean.

Speaker 3: 1:00:22

So I think that those markers are actually hugely important and I think back to this thing about, say, affirmative action in the United States.

Speaker 3: 1:00:31

Like I'm, also a product of a culture in which upward mobility was made possible for people of different ethnic backgrounds through the medium of universities, and my parents went to elite universities and met each other and generated me and my brother. We went to elite universities and here I am at an elite university and you know it's full of people who are one way or another like me and we all have, whatever our racial background, more in common than any of us has with somebody who might be entirely phenotypically white but who's living in a part of the country or it comes from a family background. I wish they haven't had that kind of access. So anyway, I don't know. I would like for us to be able to think about questions of justice and injustice and what sort of society we want to live in in ways that don't get boxed in by presuppositions about identity, but at the same time, I would like for us to live in a society in which how you look is not and who your parents are is not the key to where you get.

Speaker 1: 1:01:44

Amen. I think that's a great place to wrap this up. It was such a pleasure to talk to you, Maya.

Speaker 2: 1:01:52

Thank you for having me. Thank you so much for your time. I know it's the first day of your semester, so we feel honored.

Speaker 3: 1:02:00

It's a great way to start things off.

Speaker 1: 1:02:03

Yeah, thanks for letting us study with you. Take care, bye you.