The Geneticization of Race and Diversity in Everyday Life

Chapter 9 uses data drawn from focus groups and interviews with “ordinary” members of the public (in practice, mainly university students). This chapter assesses the extent to which people’s understanding of ancestry, race, health, and diversity in the nation is being transformed by the public presence of a genomic idiom in which to talk about these things. The conclusion is not only that people assimilate new data about genetic ancestry to existing ideas about genetics, which have long formed part of the basic conceptual toolkit of many people in Latin America, but also that they tend to see the data as confirming things they already knew or thought.