A White man in Washington State tries to use the results of his DNA ancestry test to claim access to minority set-aside contracts. A conservative federal Circuit Court judge in Texas invokes the work of an anti-racist evolutionary biologist to argue that since race is not genetic then racial categories are arbitrary and cannot be used as legitimate legal classifications for affirmative action programs. A Democratic state attorney general employs correlations between race and the frequency of certain genetic variations affecting drug response to build a fraud case against a major pharmaceutical corporation. In these cases, and others, genetic knowledge is increasingly being weaponized to make legal and political claims to racial identity in ways that have profound implications for race and the law. Understandings of race in relation to genetics are far from settled. This presentation explores how actors from both the political left and the political right have resorted to weaponizing racialized DNA to achieve their goals. This indicates that articulating race as a social construct in itself is no guarantee of a racially progressive agenda; and employing genetic data to pursue what seem to be racially progressive goals is no guarantee against reinforcing the dangerous idea that the human races are genetically distinct entities.
