Duana Fulwilley explores race in genetics applied to the workforce, in her review, “The Contemporary Synthesis.” She brings the dangers of wrongly charging innocent suspects to a crime they did not commit due to faulty ancestry testing.

In 2004, Mark Shriver, a physical anthropologist, population geneticist, and AIMs expert was working to market a product with a company called DNAPrint Genomics, to allow scientists to figure out an individual’s facial morphology based on their DNA. This project eventually became marketed by Parabon Snapshot in 2014, and continues to be marketed today. The idea, was Fulwilley puts it, was to create a “digital mugshot” — and the danger of this methodology is using AIMs to generate this digital rendering. AIMs have been proven to be shockingly inaccurate in categorizing race, mainly because of Michael Yudell’s observation that race in biologically basically not exist, expect as a social construct that inhibits progression.

When Shriver was confronted about the inaccuracy of his project, and how later, after his project was completed, the National Institute of Justice funded a study for him to look into molecular photofitting in black populations, he gave an underwhelming answer. He expressed that using black populations for a deeper study was due to the genetic diversity of individuals with African ancestry, because humans lived in Africa longer than any other continent in the world. When he was then asked about racial profiling of black people in the United States, he responded, “If people don’t commit crimes, then they should not have to worry about being under police surveillance” — which is showing a lack of education about what racial profiling is. Racial profiling happens because of systemic racism, and it’s not a “don’t commit crimes” solve; it’s a “there is something wrong with the community’s notions of race and how they treat different racial groups.” That’s a much bigger topic.

Now, Shriver’s intention was good; in fact, he later said, “hopefully this will actually make black people safer.” But intention alone won’t get results, and the use of primarily African DNA in forensics aids racial profiling and bias in the criminal justice system. It also makes it impossible for employees in the criminal justice system to act impartially, because all humans have implicit bias that we’ve developed over our lives, and in dealings with race, everyone has a personal say. When the system was built off of a fundamentally judgmental concept, race, it becomes impossible to remain an impartial third party, which defeats the purpose of the justice system. So there is something about the methodology of forensic genetic testing that needs to change — I would suggest broadening the racial sample group, because while African DNA may be the most diverse, using a broader group of individuals cannot harm the study and it may alleviate some racial implications which should not exist — but they do, because race in science is first a social construct. There is a specific example of race and genetics applied to forensics that I will write about in the next post — in the meantime, thanks for reading, everyone!