Our Obsession with Ancestry Has Some Twisted Roots
From origin stories to blood-purity statutes, we have long enlisted genealogy to serve our own purposes.
New Yorker By Maya Jasanoff May 2, 2022
Starting in the eighteenth century, genealogical authority increasingly shifted from religious and family figures to government officials who certify births, license marriages, decree divorces, register deaths, and probate wills. Identity documents emerged in tandem with typically spurious theories advanced by practitioners of “race science” and by ethno-nationalists about the ancestral origins of various human populations— one of which persists, shockingly, in the use of “Caucasian” as a synonym for “white.” Legal codes granted and restricted citizenship and civil rights on the basis of ancestry, resulting in the United States’ “one drop” rule, exclusion acts, and immigration quotas tied to “national origins.” A pair of Supreme Court rulings about naturalization played on pseudoscientific associations between ancestry and race. In 1922, the Court determined that the Japanese immigrant Takao Ozawa could not become a U.S. citizen because he was not ancestrally “Caucasian,” and therefore was not white; in 1923, it held that the North Indian immigrant Bhagat Singh Thind—who, according to the race science of the period, was Aryan and thus Caucasian—could not naturalize, either, because he didn’t look “white.”