“Turns Out My Paternal Grandmother has 16% Native Blood”: Racialized DNA, Race Destabilization, and Digital Race-(re)making on Social Media

This study explores an online phenomenon that we conceptualize as “digital race (re)-making.” In the context of genetic ancestry test discourses, we found digital race (re)-making a sequential four-stage race-making process where users (a) authenticate their previously identified racial identity, (b) destabilize the previous race by incorporating DNA test results, (c) negotiate potential conflict between their previous racial identity and the DNA-inferred race, and (d) utilize social media to affirm and contest their negotiation. Employing multi-round discourse analysis on 466 self-disclosing narratives on the subreddit r/23andMe, we explore the semiotics, strategies, and signifiers that users deployed to discursively disrupt their previously identified racial identity and to create and compose their newly constructed racial identity under the premise of genetic race. By surfacing such a new online racial formation process, we argue that digital platforms actively shape the ways race is re-constructed, re-contested, and re-configured. We also discuss how such a process repudiates the classical identity formation model and how it extends racial socialization theory to the digital enclaves, and how such self-discovery comes with emotional cost.