The late 2010s saw a significant rise in the sale and popularity of genetic ancestry tests. Genetic ancestry tests have become a part of how many understand the relationship between race, ethnicity, and genetics. Existing scholarship on the marketing of genetic ancestry tests has addressed how this marketing has appealed to individual consumers and how it has conflated and redefined the concepts of genetics, identity, race, and ethnicity. There has not been as much attention on how genetic ancestry testing advertisements have also tried to market these tests by invoking the idea that they can contribute to a better world. Through a textual analysis of two genetic ancestry testing advertisement campaigns—Momondo’s and AncestryDNA’s “The DNA Journey” and MyHeritage DNA’s and Prince Ea’s “Humanity”/“The Poetry of DNA,”—I argue that these advertising campains present genetic ancestry tests as tools that can end social division by using our DNA to offer an alternative story about our ancestry, one that reveals unexpected genetic connections between racial, ethnic, and national groups. Through these advertisements, genetic ancestry testing companies position their tests as providing a societal good and intervene in discourses about the root causes of social division. The narratives in these advertisements rely on a set of assumptions, including the idea that knowledge of our genetics is enough to bring an end to social divisions; and that some groups can be defined genetically, which could reinforce essentialist ideas and draw attention away from the true root causes of social division.
Rene O. Ayala (Thu,) studied this question.